I’ve written at length about the disconnect between our national self-conception as a “nation of immigrants” and the relatively small percentage of foreign born Americans. Now I see that demographer Michael Teitelbaum dubs this dissonance “ambivalent romanticism.” He writes:
Even national icons such as the Statue of Liberty have been recast as symbols of immigration. The statue was conceived by the French Republicans at the end of the Franco-Prussian War as a symbol of solidarity between the then-threatened French Republican tradition and that of the other great republic of the day. Only later–after the main immigration processing center was by the vagaries of geography built on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, a few hundred meters from Bedloe’s Island, on which the statue has been erected: after a paean to immigration by the poet Emma Lazarus (“Give me your tired, your poor…”) was placed on its pedestal; and after the promotion of world War I bonds had invoked its image in appeals to immigrants–did the immigration imagery of the statue become dominant.
It’s certainly a flattering mythology, leaning entirely on the poverty of immigrants and the magnanimity of Americans. The pro-bond propaganda sought to evoke gratitude from immigrants and self-righteousness from their hosts; immigration is depicted as a cross to be bourn rather than a simple fact of the world. Pro-immigration advocates will forever manipulate this kind of romanticism under the assumption that doing so is helpful to their cause, but I find it hard to believe that casting young, productive workers as “wretched refuse” will turn the nativist tide.