The NEW New Colossus

The New Colossus is the famous Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

These powerful words speak to a historic American character, a welcome based on confidence, a love of liberty, and a knowledge that the fate of America rested on its faith in the potential of the common man, its rejection of the historical hatreds and freedom from the excesses of arbitrary aristocratic power that so troubled Europe.

These days, not so much.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland: Iceland's government has asked the U.S. ambassador to explain the treatment of an Icelandic tourist who says she was held in shackles before being deported from the United States.

The woman, Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl, 33, was arrested Sunday when she arrived at JFK airport in New York because she had overstayed a U.S. visa more than 10 years earlier.

Lillendahl, 33, had planned to shop and sightsee with friends, but endured instead what she has claimed was the most humiliating experience of her life.

She contended she was interrogated at JFK airport for two days, during which she was not allowed to call relatives. She said she was denied food and drink for part of the time, and was photographed and fingerprinted.

On Monday, Lillendahl claimed, her hands and feet were chained and she was moved to a prison in New Jersey, where she was kept in a cell, interrogated further and denied access to a phone.

She was deported Tuesday, she told reporters and wrote on her Internet blog.

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Ingibjorg Solrun Gisladottir told U.S. Ambassador Carol van Voorst that the treatment of Lillendahl was unacceptable.

"In a case such as this, there can be no reason to use shackles" Gisladottir said.

The woman was flying first class, so she wasn't really poor or tempest-tost. And she did have a home, in Iceland, to which she had returned in 1995 (after overstaying her visa for 3 weeks, which, back then was fairly common and not a big deal (particularly for citizens of the oldest democracy in the world and founding NATO member.)

So maybe she doesn't exactly fit the classic Statue of Liberty description. Still, she was here to spend a lot of money with her girlfriends on holiday shopping, which, I think, must count as a modern American description of 'yearning to breathe free', and if she wasn't yearning when she arrived, she certainly was after a few hours in a holding cell in New Jersey. And, as you can read in the translation of her blog post, she was certainly yearning while armed men were marching her in shackles through the airport.

The saddest part of this story is that it isn't very unusual nowadays, except perhaps for her being an articulate, blonde from a Nordic country. There is a lot of talk on the campaign trail about "securing our borders", and since 9/11 there has been a wholesale, but not very public, change in the way we officially treat foreigners. Rather than welcoming the freedom-loving people of the world, we have decided to punish those who were born elsewhere for having the temerity to want to come here, even just to drop some cash into our struggling economy. The valid need to guard against terrorism has been used as an excuse for horrible, nonsensical bureaucratic behaviors. It is foolish, cruel and more than that, it is un-American.

The lamp lifted beside the golden door now illuminates a big sign saying "Beware, all ye who would enter here."