“SEND ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR AND HUDDLED MASSES, YEARNING TO BREATHE FREE, THE WRETCHED REFUSE OF YOUR TEEMING SHORE.  SEND THESE, THE HOMELESS, TEMPEST- TOSSED TO ME, I LIFT MY LAMP BESIDE THE GOLDEN DOOR.”
   From “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

 
   The year before Miss Lazarus wrote her dedication to the Statue of Liberty (1883), The Congress of the United States passed “The Chinese Exclusion Act,” forbidding for ten years the immigration of any person of Asian extraction to the USA or its territories.

   This was a direct result of a decades-long successful influx of Asian laborers sought during the Great Gold Rush and the building of the many railroads spanning the continent.

   It is the first U.S. law prohibiting a person of any specific race from immigrating to the U.S. The law was extended for each decade thereafter and made permanent in 1904. 

   It was repealed in 1943, at a time when China was an ally of the United States in World War II.

   It is yet obscure, but a new, Weird Exclusion Act is being instituted by the current Federal administration. If an asylum seeker passes through Guatemala, Salvador or Honduras on their way to the U.S. border with the intention of seeking asylum here, they are to be intercepted and imprisoned in whichever of the above countries they are in when intercepted.

   The plan is to keep them from applying for asylum. We, the taxpayers of the USA, are going to pay for this travesty.

   If you have a question about this crazy quilt of edicts, don’t bother to call anyone in Homeland Security. I feel sure that they have no idea of how to deal with an untold number of people, certainly many thousands, who are going to fill these concentration camps.

-Phil Richardson, Storyteller and Observer of the Human Condition