#1,064: Of Sonnets, Citizenship and Salad Bowls: Becoming an American is No Piece of Cake

                       “Lady Liberty”

For a country whose very greatness has long been owed to its many, many immigrants, it is incomprehensible - not to mention a bit oxymoronic - just how long America has been beset by deep-seated xenophobia. German Lutherans, Irish Catholics, Chinese, Eastern European Jews, Hispanics, Somalis; they’ve, all been, at one time or another, caught  in the political/cultural crosshairs.  Never has there been a country built by such a vast array of people from “the four corners of the earth” as it used to be put.  But it hasn’t been easy or without prejudice.  With each fresh wave entering upon our shores (or walking across our borders or landing at our airports), new conspiracies and what we might call “carcinogenic misconceptions” have come into play.  And yet,  despite the many social, cultural and economic disabilities which have awaited these newcomers, America continues to this day to be - mostly - “The land of the free and the home of the brave,” as somewhat ironically envisioned by the aristocratic Southern slave owning/attorney/reluctant patriot, Francis Scott Key,  whose best known poem, Defense of Fort McHenry, eventually provided the lyrics for our National Anthem.  

Without question, the greatest symbol of America vis-a-vis our long - though frequently tainted - history of welcoming immigrants from all nations, is the Statue of Liberty, AKA Lady Liberty. A gift to America from the people of the French Republic, it was meant to celebrate the enduring friendship between the two nations, commemorate the centennial of American independence (1876), and honor the shared ideals of liberty and democracy, particularly following the abolition of slavery. According to the original agreement, France would pay for the creation, construction and transportation of the 151 foot tall (46 meters) bronze statue; the people of the United States would cover the cost for its base. (n.b.: with its base, Lady Liberty’s total height was/is 395 feet [93 meters]).

                            Emma  Lazarus 

The classic Petrarchan sonnet at the statue’s base, The New Colossus, was written by the 33-year-old Emma Lazarus, the fourth of seven children, born in New York City to a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family of Portuguese descent. Lazarus (1849-1887), the daughter of a highly successful sugar merchant, received a first-class education and early on, decided to become a writer. Her father, Moses, was one of her biggest supporters and he decided to publish her first book of poems (called Poems and Translations: Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Sixteen for “private circulation.” Shortly after its publication, Lazarus decided to send a copy of this, her first book, to the famous writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson quickly became her mentor and when she published her next book of poetry in 1871, she dedicated the main poem, “To My Friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson.” This book, entitled Admetus and Other Poems, received critical acclaim.  Widely traveled and highly engaged in civic committees dealing with anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the treatment of Jews in Europe, Lazarus wrote "The New Colossus" for a fundraising effort to secure the pedestal upon which to mount the Statue of Liberty. The poem was not physically attached to the Statue of Liberty until 1903, over a dozen years after Lazarus's death in 1887.

During the twentieth century, however, people embraced Lazarus's words and the meanings they suggested for the Statue of Liberty and the United States.  Within its 14 lines, she expressed the open-handed, warm-hearted attitude she believed would always make America singular among the nations; a land desiring nothing more than  to  

Send me, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, and to
send these, the homeless, Tempest-tossed to me.    

Lazarus’ words represent the hope and the spirit of both the America of 1883 and that of the future.  Emma was what might be termed a “professional idealist”; one who saw the good in that long road ahead which would provide a constant stream of new, ambitious, hard-working Americans.  What she did not see (or perhaps refused to contemplate) was just how mangled and rutted that road would be.  Take as but one atrocious example, the Johnson Act of 1924 (also called "The Johnson-Reed” or “National Origins” Act).  In that fateful year (1924), President Calvin Coolidge signed the act which limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia.  This act effectively cut immigration from Eastern Europe to next to nothing; in 1890, there weren’t nearly as many people emigrating from places like Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, etc. as in 1900.  Without having to say so, the bill was aimed against Jewish immigrants. Publicly, supporters of the bill (which wasn’t changed until 1952), claimed that its chief intent was "to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.”  

Although the word “homogeneity” is rarely - if ever - used in discussing immigration today, it is still a lurking shadow. Just this past Wednesday, the State Department announced that it would “pause immigrant visa processing from 75 countries whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates.” The countries affected include Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Among other measures taken to slash legal immigration in 2025, the Trump administration imposed travel restrictions or entry bans on people from 39 countries. Plot all of these countries on a map—newly targeted and old—and you will see that most of Africa, large swaths of Asia, and much of the Muslim world are now unwelcome. Western Europe is unscathed.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose  (that’s  French for “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”)

Today, there is so much rationalizing about keeping “them” out of America because they are mostly “escapees from prisons and insane asylums” (factually untrue); “get free health insurance and free public education” (first one false, second one true); “don’t pay taxes” (WRONG); and “won’t learn English.”  This last one is particularly perplexing.  I know from being married to an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher that the government-funded program (both state and federal) under whose aegis she taught for many, many years, was totally defunded by the very people who now hold a lack of English literacy against her students. 

My wife, Annie, is an immigrant.  She and her mom and dad (who was a Holocaust survivor from  a small town in Poland) moved to the United States from Argentina in 1969, immediately went to work,  paid taxes, learned English, went to class several times a week, studied hard, passed their U.S. History and Civics Test, and became proud citizens.  It was no piece of cake . . . ah, but the pride of becoming an American citizen was - and still is - palpable.  (Ironically, yesterday was the 45th anniversary of Annie’s raising her hand and becoming a citizen).  On my side of the family, things were quite different: our parents, grandparents (save 1) and great-grandparents were all native-born Americans living in both the midwest (Minnesota and Missouri) and South (Maryland and Virginia).  There were no tests to take; being citizens was their birthright.

It’s actually quite difficult to become a naturalized American citizen.  In order to get just a taste of what it takes, I would like to suggest that you go to look over  and try taking  the American citizenship test required of all those seeking citizenship.  It has 128 questions.  Please go to the site, bone up and take the test.  And if you are of a mind, please let me know how you did. 

It never ceases to amaze me how little many “real Americans” know about American history, our system of government, or our founding documents. Many of these unlettered folk make it perfectly clear that the solution to any and all of America’s problems is deportation . . . of “illegals,” of those who are “merely” residents, and even, in some cases, of those who are citizens.  What they wish, more than anything is that America go back to being a “melting pot.”  Ah! There’s a term with an interesting history and a meaning rarely understood.

Originally, The Melting Pot was a play by the Anglo-Jewish playwright/novelist Israel Zangwill . . . often called the “Jewish Charles Dickens.” He was known for his poems, short stories, novels, plays, and the first “closed-room” murder mystery, The Big Bow Mystery. The Melting Post, ostensibly a love story between a Jew and a Gentile, was really propaganda for the concept of the United States as a great crucible in which newcomers shed their old-world ways and emerged as ‘shiny, brand-new Americans,’ as one reviewer put it.  Both Zangwill and his play were so well-respected, that at its October 5, 1908 opening-night performance at Washington, D.C’s Capitol Theatre, Zangwill’s escort was none other than President Theodore Roosevelt. The play is still being staged in 2026, nearly 120 years later.

But there is a problem with the very concept of America as a “melting pot.” When different metals are put into a pot then melted down, each metal loses its identity; it becomes a completely new amalgamation. In metallurgy, this is no problem; when it comes to sociology, anthropology or the human sciences, it can carry more than a whiff of eugenics . . . a form of scientific racism.  Simply stated a human “melting pot” creates a new entity wherein the various ingredients (in this case people from diverse cultures, histories, religions and language groups) become something which “civic scientists” think is best.  To listen to many these days, the ideal (or “real”) American is white English-speaking Christian. That is what “The Great Replacement Theory” (a conspiracy theory if ever there was one) is all about.  To my way of thinking, the better goal is the creation of a “salad bowl” - a single entity (a salad) - wherein the various constituent ingredients going into the makeup of that single entity are still easily identifiable . . . the lettuce, the cucumbers, the endive, radishes, tomatoes, nuts, cheeses, etc.  America is best when its citizens and residents maintain a hyphenated identity.

Immigration has long helped make the United States the unique treasure it is.  Many immigrants to our shores have begun their lives here working at jobs few wanted.  With time, strong work ethics, and the desire to get ahead, they moved up the ladder, raising their families, paying their taxes and becoming citizens.  Statistics have shown that - in contradistinction to what narrow-minded bigots claim -  immigrants (whether documented or not) have a lower legal offending rate than U.S. born citizens. They have slightly higher birth rates than U.S.-born citizens which, at a time when the TFR (total fertility rate) is dropping, can be a positive good.  Those who have made the danger of illegal immigration THE issue in political campaigns (think ICE and its many crimes against human beings) are not doing what is best for the American polity, society, economy or morality.       

As a Mexican-American friend of mine - a man who started life as a campesino picking lettuce in the Salinas Valley, got a college education, became a civil engineer and eventually ran for the United States Congress - said to me on more than one occasion: Never, ever forget hijo . . . Columbus didn't discover America; the native Americans discovered Columbus.  That’s what makes this country great!   

PLEASE, PLEASE: DO GIVE THE American citizenship test A LOOK-SEE AND, IF YOU WISH, SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH ME !

Copyright©2026 Kurt Franklin Stone
       
   
 

#1,030: From Melting Pot to Salad Bowl

Although now largely forgotten, in his day, the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) was considered “the Dickens of the Ghetto.” A prodigious author of novels, plays, and essays, the vast majority of Zangwill’s oeuvre of nearly 190 works, is, unbelievably, still in print nearly a century after his death. In addition to penning one of the earliest “locked room mysteries,” 1892’s The Big Bow Mystery  (filmed thrice, the most famous being the 1946 picture The Verdict starring that most unique of all cinematic pairings, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre), he also wrote a series of ghetto novels and short-stories with titles such as Children of the Ghetto, King of the Schnorrers, Dreamers of the Ghetto, Ghetto Comedies and Ghetto Tragedies. Zangwill’s literary brilliance lay in his ability to take a time, a place and a people - Jewish immigrants living and surviving in the ghettoes of Victorian England - and make them universally understandable to a largely non-Jewish reading public. 

Zangwill also penned several plays that eventually made their way to both Broadway and Hollywood. Among the best-known were Merely Mary Ann, Children of the Ghetto, and most notably of all, The Melting Pot, which opened at Broadway’s Comedy Theatre on September 6, 1909 and ran for 136 performances (quite respectable in the early 20th century). As a sign of just how popular and successful a writer he was, on October 5, 1908, the night The Melting Pot opened at the Columbia Theatre in Washington, D.C., he was accompanied by no less a personage than President Theodore Roosevelt, who was heard above the applause at play’s end shouting “THAT’S A GREAT PLAY, MR. ZANGWILL.!” 

                             1916 performance of Zangwill’s play

Those who are widely read, know that Zangwill’s The Melting Pot is, in its own way, an update of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. This time, instead of the feuding families coming from a medieval Italian city, the lovers (David and Vera) are from Russian Jewish and Russian Cossack families. David emigrates to America in the wake of the 1903 Kishinev Massacre (pogrom) in which his entire family is killed. He composes a great symphony called “The Crucible” expressing hope for a world in which all ethnicity has melted away, and falls in love with a beautiful Russian Christian named Vera. The dramatic peak of the play is the moment when David meets Vera's father, who turns out to be the Russian officer responsible for the annihilation of David's family. Vera's father admits his guilt, the symphony is performed to accolades, David and Vera agree to wed, and kiss as the curtain falls.

Towards the end of Act I (the play has 4), Zangwill proclaims through David, the immigrant composer, America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all races of Europe are melting and re-forming! . . . . A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians . . . into the Crucible with you all!  God is making the American.

Zangwill’s political, philosophical and emotional attachment to the melting-pot view of America is best expressed in a brief colloquy between David and Vera in Act IV:

David: [exalted by the spectacle of thousands of immigrants arriving in New York Harbor] There she lies, the great Melting Pot . . . listen! Can’t you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth [He points east] . . . the harbor where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight.  Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow . . .

Vera: [Softly nestling to David] Jew and Gentile.

David: Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross--how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward! Peace, peace, to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant continent--the God of our children give you Peace.

For years, this concept - e.g. the Melting Pot - was, for the most part, at the center of the American ethos; when people reached the “new world,” their history, ethnicity and language entered the melting (or “smelting” as Ralph Waldo Emerson called it) pot and fused into a new creation: the American.  But increasingly, this concept has fallen by the wayside in favor of either the “salad-bowl” or the “pizza pie.”  Why? In order to answer this, one must first understand what the smelting (or melting) process entails: applying tremendous heat and a chemical reducing agent to an ore to extract a desired base metal product.  It is a form of “extractive metallurgy” that is used to obtain many metals such as iron, copper, silver, tin, lead and zinc.  It is impossible to locate any of the original constituent ingredients within a melting or smelting pot; it is an altogether new metal.  

A salad bowl (or pizza pie) is a totally different construct: a singular entity in which virtually all the main ingredients are still easily identifiable.  In a salad, the tomatoes, radishes, olives, cheese crumbles etc. are all distinguishable, just as the mushrooms, onions and pineapple chunks (ugh!) visibly sit atop the cheese(s) and tomato sauce in a pizza pie.  Salads and pizza pies are the essence of diversity . . . a sort of gastronomic E pluribus Unum (“Out of many comes one”) or comestible DEI (Diversity equity and inclusion) . . . although over past year or so, I’ve come to the conclusion that it really stands for “Donald’s Embarrassing Idiocy”).

Inside the lower pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, there is a bronze plaque containing a sonnet (“The New Colossus”) composed by the poet and activist Emma Lazarus. Lazarus (1849-1887) was a member of one of the oldest Jewish families in the United States, her earliest ancestors arriving on these shores in 1654 aboard the St. Catrina, known to history as "The Jewish Mayflower.”  Her Petrachan sonnet, written in 1883, expresses the “melting pot” concept that Israel Zangwill would popularize a quarter century later.  The most oft-quoted of Lazarus’ 14-line poem are its last 5:

"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!"      

For as long as there has been an America, there has been an underpinning of racism, xenophobia, homophobia and various exclusionary practices.  Although not springing from the soil of the nation, it has existed, its targets being - depending on the time and place - natives, Catholics, the Irish, Chinese, Jews, Italians, women and today, Muslims and people of many different colors.  This is not a repudiation of the melting or smelting pot; rather it is the rejection of the salad bowl. In 2024, a minority of the voting public elected a president who pledged to “Make America Great Again” by deporting millions upon millions of people whom he claimed were “murderers,” “drug-dealers,” “terrorists” and “rapists” . . . the “dregs of humanity.”  Or to put it another way, he promised that from hereon in the American salad would “once again” consist of nothing but lettuce . . . read “White Christians.” In the eyes of many, this has long been the American Dream. In the eyes of – hopefully – many more, this has never been the dream.  For everlasting dreams cannot and must not be based on illegal actions . . . such as deporting people without benefit of a hearing or a  trial.

                      “Real Madrid” Tattoo 

Just this past week, Jerce Reyes Barrios, a former professional soccer player from Venezuela, was spirited away by members of ICE in California, where he was awaiting his asylum hearing and flown - along with 200 other, mostly Venezuelan refugees - to the notorious CECOT, El Salvador’s mega-prison for gang members. On what basis did the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determine that Senor Barrios, who came to the U.S.-Mexico border legally through the CBP One app in September 2024 determine that he was a Tren de Argua (TdA) member? By a tattoo of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “Dios” (God), which DHS decided was ink associated with the notorious Venezuelan gang.  According to Senor Barrios’ attorney, "In reality, he chose the tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favorite soccer team, “Real Madrid.” The attorney, Linette Tobin rejected the idea her client was a gang member and said he had fled Venezuela in early 2024 after being detained at an anti-government demonstration by security forces and "taken to a clandestine building where he was tortured.”  He has neither been seen nor heard from in the past week.  All this without benefit of due process . . . another “carrot” . . . or "cucumber” or "mushroom” wrenched from the "salad.”   

                                          Pete Hegseth

(When it comes to tattoos which should get you deported [or at least tossed out of your current position] how about DOD secretary Pete Hegseth’s “Jerusalem Cross” ink, which has a long, long history in Christianity going back to the Crusades, but has lately been co-opted by some far-right groups as a symbol of the fight for Western civilization?  Or his tat with an AK-47 beneath the American flag?  If he was a Muslim, he would likely be shipped off to CICOT in the middle of the night.  But he is a Christian Nationalist and former FOX celebrity, so I guess that makes him fit for sitting atop the DOD
  

Hegseth, who has called for an “American Crusade” against the “internal” and “domestic enemies” of the U.S. and Israel, was nominated to his position by a President and Commander-in-Chief who is publicly itching to deploy that military throughout the United States. Who will save the people of the U.S. from an internal crusade of a military that already has an extremism problem?  Hegseth is a Christian Nationalist who believes that Islam is a natural, historic enemy to the West and has lamented growing numbers of American Muslims.  For Hegseth, his boss and oh so many MAGAites, this is the “Melting Pot” they are working for . . . even if they’ve never heard of Israel Zangwill or Emma Lazarus.

One positive thing we’ve learned over the past week is that public outcries can occasionally cause the MUMP regime to reverse course in rewriting history . . . in removing everything in the “salad bowl” save the utterly bland and tasteless lettuce.  Case in point: a couple of days ago the Pentagon deleted from its website pages highlighting Black veterans such as Jackie Robinson, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo Code Talkers of WWII, Vietnam-era medal of Honor recipient Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers as well as the Japanese American 422nd Combat Regiment.  After a vast public roar against the deletions, the Pentagon restored most of the pages.  Let this be a lesson to us all: speaking in a loud, unified voice, making our thoughts public and feelings well-known can be more powerful than a clenched fist.  

In a few hours, we will be dining on a large Caesar Salad with chunks of baked Salmon . . . a perfect symbol of what America should be.

Copyright©2025 Kurt Franklin Stone

Great Expectations

Today, May 3, 2021, is the 103rd day of the Biden Administration. After what so many Americans have gone through over the past 4 years, it’s a pleasure to live in a country in which the volume is lower, the vocabulary far less noisome and the level of professionalism far more . . . well, professional. And to a great degree, these factors are being reflected in the polls.

According to polling published in Forbes, Biden’s overall approval rating through his first 92 days in office stood at 53.4%. Meanwhile, 40.1% of Americans disapproved of the job he's doing in the White House. After his first three months in office, Biden’s approval rating is higher than Donald Trump's (41.9%) and Bill Clinton's (52.9%) approval ratings were at the same point in their presidencies. However, it's lower than the approval ratings of Barack Obama (60.2%), George W. Bush (56.2%), and Ronald Reagan (67.6%) at the 92-day mark. From the point of view of bills passed during the first 100 days, Biden (11 bills passed into law) lags well behind his immediate predecessor (30), slightly behind Barack Obama (14) and way, way behind Harry Truman (53) and the granddaddy of ‘em all, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had an astounding 76 bills passed in a mere 100 days.

Last week’s address to a joint session of Congress received the overwhelming approval of 82% of those tuning in to the historic speech (mind you, a clear majority of those tuning in were Democrats). Just seeing and hearing the president beginning his speech with the words “Madam Speaker, Madam President,” was enough to bring tears to one’s eyes. It was, indeed, physical symbolism writ larger than any neon sign on the Sunset Strip. And talk about all the proposals brought forward in the name of our infrastructure, the world’s climate, American families, education, economic realignment and jobs, jobs, jobs. Through going from a throaty whisper to a cannon’s roar, President Biden reminded us that he is one hell of a masterful speaker; not in the manner of Barack Obama, the orator’s orator, but rather in the manner of a wise, loving uncle.

This is by no means meant to indicate an overwhelming unanimity of support among American voters. Heck, within 24 hours of his taking the oath of office, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene threw H.Res 57 into the hopper - a bill of impeachment against Joseph R. Biden for “abuse of power by enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” And, to add to the lunacy, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has suggested that Republicans will impeach Vice President Kamala Harris if the GOP takes control of the House of Representatives in 2022, after the South Carolina senator falsely claimed that she had paid bail for Black Lives Matter protesters who later “broke somebody’s head open.”

Despite what one might think, not all Republicans are against Joe Biden or consider his administration to be chock full of atheistic socialists or Zionist conspirators. Then too, not all Democrats are in lock-step with every position, protocol or pronouncement of the new administration. Case in point: there are a goodly number of Democrats - both in and out of elective office - who are less than pleased with Biden’s handling of immigration on our southern border. Members of the party’s progressive wing are less than satisfied with Biden’s approach to this issue, and believe he has broken some of the promises he made back during the campaign. Originally, Biden promised that as POTUS, he would raise the annual number of refugees permitted into the country up as high as 125,000. In a statement on World Refugee Day last summer, Mr. Biden, then a candidate for president, made his support explicit.

During the campaign he said, “I will increase the number of refugees we welcome into this country, setting an annual global refugee target of 125,000,” promising to “further raise it over time commensurate with our responsibility.”

After winning the White House, his transition team set about making good on that pledge, debating the pros and cons in a series of meetings in December, 2020. With only six months left in the fiscal year (which ends October 31, 2021), Mr. Biden’s advisers have recommended he could go beyond his campaign pledge. However, as of today, he is stuck at 15,000 refugees . . . the same number as Donald Trump in the last fiscal year of his administration.

In one of his first speeches on the issue, President Biden said “It’s going to take time to rebuild what has been so badly damaged, but that’s precisely what we’re going to do.” He did not mention the number 62,500 (which is a figure repeatedly mentioned once he was inaugurated), but did double down on his promise of 125,000 starting in October, adding, “I’m directing the State Department to consult with Congress about making a down payment on that commitment as soon as possible.”

One should understand that there is a vast difference between asylees and refugees. The former wind up at our Southern border, doing everything in their power to gain admittance. Regrettably, they are stopped at the border and remain in Mexico, awaiting a hearing and praying that they are not sent back to the countries from which they are fleeing. Refugees, on the other hand, get through most of their paperwork in their native countries, express what their fears are about remaining in the lands of their birth, and then await the legal decisions which will grant them entry. Regrettably, there has been little progress for these folks; largely, they remain in the countries of their birth.

Despite all the promises and serious work among leaders within the administration, the number of refugees who may be admitted in the remaining months of this fiscal year remain virtually unchanged from those of the latter Trump Administration. This has raised the ire and hackles of the most progressive members of the Democratic caucus as well as the most conservative of Trump supporters . . . as if they truly cared. They both accuse Biden of going back on his word . . . not a comfortable position to be in.

President Biden’s change of plan has brought about changes around the world as well. Resettlement agencies had already booked flights for hundreds of refugees. Such immigrants must be identified as refugees by the United Nations or other organizations and clear several rounds of vetting that can take, on average, two years, according to the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization. Roughly 33,000 refugees have received such approval, and about 115,000 are in the pipeline to be resettled. This is, to put it simply, gut-wrenchingly difficult for those seeking entry as refugees.

There is still a lot of work to be done within the Biden Administration. The expectations are high, the administration is humane, and politics is - as ever - a treacherous zero-sum game.

But this by no means indicates that humanitarianism has no friends.

The Great Expectations of Fall, 2020, will find both allies and solutions before the beginning of the new fiscal year.

Welcome to our refugees . . . you have a family awaiting your arrival.-

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone