How Lady Liberty became a beacon for immigrants

CBS News

06-07-2025

At the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., stands a 46-inch-tall model of an American icon – the Statue of Liberty – whose origin story may surprise you. "When this idea began, it was really about liberty; it wasn't about immigration," said Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution,
That's right: Lady Liberty had nothing to do with immigration when she was first proposed in 1865. "The United States had ended slavery," said Bunch. "That's why, if you look, she's standing on the chains and shackles."
A model of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi's statue "Liberty," at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Lucia RM Martino/Smithsonian American Art Museum
But it would take more than two decades for the idea to be realized. While the statue itself would be paid for by the people of France, the Americans would be responsible for its prodigious base. "Almost anything you do involving culture or art, you gotta raise money for," said Bunch.
And so, this model came to our shores in 1883, three years before her full-sized sister, to drum up support. She stood in the Capitol Rotunda, to no avail. Congress declined to foot the bill. "Many people in the United States thought, you know, what is this? Is this a New York City thing? And why should we care about it if it's just New York City?" said Bunch.
One supporter, 34-year-old poet Emma Lazarus, concerned about the plight of Russian Jews seeking asylum in America, penned a sonnet called "The New Colossus" for a fundraising auction. In it, she imagined Lady Liberty as a "mother of exiles" welcoming the "huddled masses" through the "golden door" to America.
"That's a great poem," said Bunch. "It's important, but it really became, more than anything else, the best way to understand the possibilities of immigration in America."
At the time, the poem got little notice. At the statue's dedication in 1886, not a single speaker mentioned immigration.
A parade of ships marks the inauguration of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, Oct. 28, 1886.
Library of Congress
But Lazarus' poem turned out to be a prophecy. In 1892, within sight of the statue, America's first-ever immigration facility opened at Ellis Island.
By the 1920s, more than 12 million immigrants from Europe had come through Ellis Island. "There are stories of people pulling into this harbor, seeing that symbol, and just dropping to their knees and weeping," said author and journalist Jia Lynn Yang.
And very few people were turned away, even if they lacked documents. "If you can get to the border, you're in," said Yang.
But, she notes, not all Americans were prepared to welcome them: "You have to remember, the country is still relatively small at this time. So, it's pretty shocking to the American people to have millions of people showing up from Italy, Eastern Europe, different religions, they're Catholic, they're Jewish, different foods, different languages."
And while it might strain credulity today to imagine people back then thinking that Italians couldn't assimilate, Yang said, "People were writing columns and long essays saying these people don't belong here."
And so, in 1924 President Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act, which created a system of ethnic quotas that essentially banned immigration from countries outside of Western and Northern Europe. It was the first major immigration restriction since 1882's Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred the entry of Chinese laborers.
But the 1924 law didn't apply to countries on this side of the Atlantic. Yang said, "The thinking was, these are our neighbors. We need to make it feel like they're welcome to come and go."
So while there were no "illegal" immigrants from Mexico during this period, for more than 40 years – through a global depression, a world war, and the Holocaust – the door was virtually shut to everyone else. By the 1950s, the number of immigrants was getting smaller and smaller. "Talk to somebody in, like, 1955, they're like, Yeah, immigrants, that's old news," said Yang.
And that would've been the case forever and ever, except that for 40 years, a group of lawmakers and activists felt that the law was discriminatory, and they wanted to change it. Among them: Brooklyn Congressman Manny Celler. He voted against the 1924 quotas as a first-year representative, and for decades fought to make America more welcoming to immigrants.
Then, in 1958, a Massachusetts senator with his sights on the White House published a pamphlet calling for a change to the nation's laws. John F. Kennedy's "A Nation of Immigrants" would introduce the now-ubiquitous phrase. Yang said, "The book is trying to establish almost a new American history that says these people who came, you know, decades ago, you may have forgotten them; this is what makes America American. It's the fact that we are a nation of immigrants" – a sentiment new to a lot of Americans' ears.
After Kennedy's assassination, at the height of the civil rights movement, the reformers (including Manny Celler, who was still serving in Congress) seized the moment, and on October 3, 1965, at (where else?) the Statue of Liberty, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended the ethnic quota system. "Those who do come will come because of what they are, and not because of the land from which they sprung," he said.
But even the law's most ardent backers didn't anticipate just how many people would end up coming from all over the world. Since 1965, when that law went into effect, the share of foreign-born people living in America has slowly crept up to about 14 percent of the U.S. population – roughly the same as it was back in 1924 when the ethnic quotas were imposed.
Yang says that today, if you meet someone and their family is from Africa, the Middle East or Asia, it's likely because of the paper that Johnson signed in 1965. "This law really transformed the whole country," she said.
In a twist, the 1965 law limited immigration from Mexico and the rest of the Americas, setting the stage for the illegal immigration crisis at the Southern border. But it also allowed Jia-Lynn Yang's own parents to come to the U.S. after escaping the civil war in China, a fact she hadn't realized until writing a book about this chapter of the immigration story.
She said, "When I looked into this history, I really understood how contingent my family's presence is here. I took it completely for granted, right? I grew up steeped in Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus poem, nation of immigrants – of course we were allowed to come here. It's a nation of immigrants."
Yang said her parents felt deeply lucky to have come to America. "And I have two children now," she said. "Our family's entire story changed because we were allowed to come here. And now everything after me in the family tree is an American story."
Surmising the posture and demeanor of Lady Liberty, Secretary Bunch said, "She's not a warrior. But she is powerful."
And that power remains undiminished, says Bunch, who believes it is the immigrants themselves who gave the Statue of Liberty its meaning. "They imbued it with this notion that this is a symbol of the possibility of America," he said. "That's why I call it a statue of promise."
FROM THE ARCHIVES: Charles Kuralt on the Statue of Liberty (Video)
The reopening of Ellis Island to the public during America's bicentennial year prompted CBS News' Charles Kuralt to offer his thoughts on the sight of Lady Liberty as viewed by generations of immigrants, and on the diversity of a nation that welcomed those from every land seeking a safe haven and opportunity. For these new Americans, Kuralt said, "They carried our greatness in their baggage." (Originally broadcast May 28, 1976.)
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Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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