Emma Lazarus The New Colossus

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Immigration Rough Draft
The United States is a land of immigrants. This can be traced back all the way to the day the first explorers set foot on this land. 400 years later, and people continue to arrive the same way that the Englishmen did. Not only to find new opportunities, but to find freedom of religion and persecution. Immigration has and will play an important role in the future of this country, and by looking at the context behind Emma Lazarus', "The New Colossus", the US 150 years ago, and the US today will help understand the pain, struggle, and relief an immigrant feels when they step foot in the Land of the Free.
Going back and looking at the history of America years ago, one might find a society quite similar to what is present …show more content…
Born on July 22, 1849 in New York, Emma Lazarus was a descendent of a Sephardic Jewish Portuguese family that immigrated to the US around the same time of the American Revolution. She was known to be poetically skilled from a young age, and due to the fact that she had a wealthy family, she was able to practice and perfect her skills. She studied Greek and Latin, as well as German, Italian, and French modern literature. She then went on to use her skills to translate popular German poems and even write some of her own. As time went on she started to experience the arrival of exiled refugees into the US, which sparked her interest on the subject. “The New Colossus” was a poem that was asked of her to auction for a fundraiser of the Statue of Liberty. At first she didn’t want to do it, but then she saw it as a chance to express her feelings and the conditions that refugee immigrants had to go through. This was 1883, which was around the same time that the Great Depression was coming to an end and the rise of immigration had begun. The poem is very powerful as it describes not only Emma’s love for refugee immigrants but also she used it to portray the Statue of Liberty as a beacon of welcome for immigrants. This gave a whole new meaning to the word “Liberty” as before it was used to show the United States’ freedom from Britain, but after Emma’s “The New Colossus," it was seen as freedom to come to the US and start a new life without religious or ethic persecution. Emma Lazarus became ill in 1884 and after traveling around the world, she returned to New York and on November 17, 1887 she passed away. “The New Colossus” gained its popularity shortly after her death when an advocate of the New York arts found it from the auction in 1883 for the Statue of Liberty. She kept it and decided to have the last five digits engraved in the Statue of Liberty. By 1945 the poem became so
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