ANALYSIS: TRUE. Michael Barone: Stephen Miller is right: Lazarus’ immigration poem is not US law.

Acosta kept reading and reciting the Emma Lazarus poem written before the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886 but not inscribed at its base until 1903: “Give us your tired, your poor,” etc. His plain implication was that the United States had an open immigration policy back in the years before World War I.

That implication is flatly false. The early republic did not have a federal immigration policy, but as immigration started rising well after the end of the 1792-1815 world war between Britain and France, the state governments did inspect immigrants alighting from sailing and then steam ships, with a view to excluding those with communicable diseases or unable to support themselves economically and thus likely to become “a public charge.” For more information on this, see Vincent Cannato’s 2010 book American Passage: The History of Ellis Island.

In the 1880s the federal government took over the task of screening immigrants, building the Ellis Island inspection station which opened in 1892 within easy sight of the Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island processed millions between 1892 and 1914, when the outbreak of World War I pretty much cut off overseas immigration, and again from 1919 to 1924, when a sharply restrictive immigration act was passed, barring virtually all immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.

The Ellis Island regime was not, however, the kind of open immigration system Jim Acosta and an increasing number of liberals and Democrats seem to favor. For one thing, the most tired and poor seldom made it to the United States, because they lacked the money or the heartiness to afford or weather even steerage passage on a trans-Atlantic steamship. More importantly, the government excluded those deemed (at their Ellis Island inspection or elsewhere) suffering from communicable diseases, those deemed to be insane or “loathsome” and those “likely to become a public charge.” (Here’s a sample of exclusions for such reasons.)

Thus paupers were not allowed, or elderly people with no assets or relatives; there was even a political test, for “anarchists,” which is not so surprising considering that in the 1890-1901 period anarchist terrorists murdered the president of France, the empress of Austria, and the president of the United States.

Lefties don’t know much about history, because knowing it might interfere with feelings.