This was the promise of America: the golden door.

As Emma Lazarus wrote, America was meant to be a golden door to the world — a refuge for the huddled masses, the wretched, the abused and refused, the persecuted and the broken, the overlooked and the shattered, those burdened by shame imposed on them by empire, cruelty, or human imperfection.

This was the promise of America: the golden door.

That promise was not born of innocence, but of repentance — repentance for stolen land, for massacred Native peoples, for the enslavement of human beings whose labor built wealth they were never allowed to claim. The open door was meant as an answer to those original sins.

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As repentance, we chose to stand as a nation where shackles — like the broken chains at the feet of the Statue of Liberty — were never to be reforged.

If we now decide to close that door, we make a different choice. We revoke repentance. We deny our original sins, pretending either that they never happened or that time alone has absolved us — despite having never fully repaired the harm done by our own hands.

— John Lee Gaston White