FWD.us Remixes the Statue of Liberty Greeting 160
theodp writes "In the days leading up to the Senate's passage of the landmark immigration bill, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new ad from FWD.us, his pro-immigration reform PAC. The ad, 'Emma', contains an altered version of Emma Lazarus' famous 1883 poem 'The New Colossus' ('Give me your tired, your poor...'), which is engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. 'In doing so,' notes the Latin Times, 'it [the ad] departs radically from the meaning of Lazarus' original — which exalted the Statue of Liberty as a "mother of exiles" and redeemer of the world's rootless poor — to accommodate the PAC's call for more high-skilled workers from abroad be allowed to work and live legally in the United States.' Instead of the original's call for 'the wretched refuse of your teeming shore' and 'the homeless, tempest-tossed', the FWD.us remix asks for 'the influencers and the dreamers...talent that is searching for purpose...those dedicated to the doing'. Here's a YouTube Doubler of readings of both versions — pick your fave, kids!"
Fuckerberg (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously fuck that guy. I'm sure that if it wasn't him, some other unscrupulous douche would be in his place doing basically the same shit but he's the one here and now so fuck him and his abuse of the powerless.
The corporate version (Score:5, Insightful)
"Keep your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Send me your young, your rich,
Your highly skilled, willing to work 18 hour days.
They will soon be returned to you as wretched refuse,
on your teeming shore."
Re:The poem was already a perversion of the idea.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea was that the USA would be a shining city on a hill, an example for other nations.
It wasn't supposed to be a beacon for immigrants.
"Hey, you can do this too"... not "Hey, come over here cause you can't get your shit together over there"...
Whose idea?
Why did the people who wrote our constitution include a clause granting citizenship to those who are born here? Had *they* already perverted the idea?
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot. Somehow we've run off the rails since then.
Re:An Important Inaccuracy (Score:5, Insightful)
"Guest workers" is such a euphemism, we should use something more accurate:
out-sourcing trainees
skill exporters
wage reducers
foreign vulnerables
Don't get me wrong, I welcome actual immigrants. I don't even have a problem with individuals who come here for temporary jobs of any sort. I just think that a system where the top 10 h1b employers - accounting for half of all h1b visa holders are outsourcers [motherjones.com] is in any way good for americans citizens or immigrants. If anything it discourages the next generation from even considering the idea of going to school to learn how to be an engineer which just makes things even worse for us down the road.
Re:The poem was already a perversion of the idea.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you Native American? If not, you're a hypocrite.
Do you seriously think the Native Americans don't regret the way they left their borders open to anyone who turned up?
If they could go back in time and build a wall to keep Europeans out, I suspect most would eagerly have done so.
Re:The poem was already a perversion of the idea.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Society has changed, but human nature has not changed in our entire history. When those documents were written, they were written with those things in mind.
You might as well argue we shouldn't ground our engineering in physics because the position of the planets has changed.
Re:The poem was already a perversion of the idea.. (Score:2, Insightful)
They were the Enlightenment ideas. Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Thomas Jefferson.
The United States of America was the first nation in history to be founded on ideas.
Every other country that ever existed was based on ethnicity. Even today we see people trying to break away to form ethnic homelands.
What Idea? The idea that the people allow a government, rather than the government allowing the people. The idea that a government was a social contract among free people in a state of nature. Personal sovereignty. Enumerated powers assigned to the government to secure life, liberty, and property.
Every other form of governance starts with some all-powerful people bequeathing to the subjects their privileges. Fucking Guevara wasn't a "revolutionary". There's nothing revolutionary about a government telling you what you can have, what you can do with what you have, or what you can get. It pretty much sums up most of the world's lives before the enlightenment.
The melting pot idea was introduced by people who had something to gain. It is perpetuated today by people who have something to gain. Companies who want cheap labor and politicians looking for a dependent population come to mind. Of course schools teach hooray-for-the-melting-pot. You are talking about the democrat party and unions. They teach constitution-as-a-living-document for the same reason: the document that constitutes what the government is can be molded to advance their leftist proclivities.
Re:The poem was already a perversion of the idea.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Every other country that ever existed was based on ethnicity. ... The melting pot idea was introduced by people who had something to gain.
First you praise the US for not being based on ethnicity, and then you criticize the melting pot. Talk about a confused argument.
Re:An Important Inaccuracy (Score:4, Insightful)
"Give us your (somewhat) skilled workers willing to work for a sub-standard wage.
The thing is, it doesn't even have to be a sub-standard wage.
They can pay the market wage, but the market wage is significantly suppressed by the influx of X00,000 new workers every year.
FUCK.US (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that he is the one who should get fucked. If he was on fire i wouldn't piss on him to put him out.
Re:The corporate version (Score:5, Insightful)
The original version says, "all those people that you rejected, we can see that, even though on the outside they like worthless, they have good in them. Send them to us and we will help bring out their greatness."
Zuckerberg is saying, "Hey send us all your good people, who everyone knows is good. We want them."
The generosity of the first is easily matched by the selfishness of the second.
Re:The added lines (Score:4, Insightful)
The lefties thought that if everyone had a college education it would make us all richer.
Don't blame the lefties for that one. I remember reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page during the 1970s, and their solution for all the problems of poverty was that anybody in this country could get a college degree if he worked hard enough, and a college degree was the ticket out of poverty. No need for the federal government to order desegregation, they said. If the negroes want good jobs, all they have to do is go to college. (Like Condi Rice, playing Chopin for success.)
The idea that education solves all problems is a popular one and appealed to liberals and conservatives alike.
To people on the left (not liberals), education was desirable but education alone wouldn't solve the fundamental problem of an unequal, unjust society.
Once again good intentions prove no substitute for understanding what the heck is going on.
You're right about that one.
Re:Borg Immigration (Score:4, Insightful)
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot.
Yes - I've always found it amusing that the US is so proud of being a "melting pot". This suggests that all cultural distinctiveness will be lost and you have to become just like everyone else - it's the Borg approach to immigration. Not sure why you would want to be so proud of that but, having once been a US resident, I'll grant that it is an accurate metaphor.
Although the metaphor isn't perfect, part of the idea of the melting pot is that you take the best parts from every culture. As for the cultural distinctiveness, the original cultures remain in whatever land they came from - where they still fight with their neighbors over those differences.
If you're born here, you're not losing your culture - you're living the culture you were born to. If you came here, well, why did you come if you didn't think the culture had a lot to offer? If you want to come here and embrace American culture while keeping a few of your own things that you honestly think are better, great! But if you want to come here and make is just like the place that was so much worse that you wanted to leave, then WTF?
Re:The added lines (Score:4, Insightful)