In 1883, Emma Lazarus, a young Jewish woman who cared for detained immigrants in New York, wrote a poem she titled “The New Colossus” to raise money for the pedestal to support the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France.

To many Americans, the last few lines are the most meaningful and familiar.

“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!”

The lamp is out

The lamp is dark, the door slammed shut.

Nothing remains, it would seem, but for Donald Trump to tear down the statue, as he did the East Wing of the White House, and sell the 31 tons of copper and 125 tons of steel for scrap.

On the eve of the government shutdown, Sept. 30, the most xenophobic president in American history ordered there to be no more than 7,500 people admitted as refugees this fiscal year.

The quota for the past year, under Joe Biden, was 125,000.

Trump’s quota is the lowest since Congress established the present refugee program in 1980. True to form, he didn’t consult with Congress, as required, before slamming the door and snuffing out the lamp.

Trump also specified that most of the 7,500 be Afrikaners — white people of Dutch and French settler descent, from majority-Black South Africa.

Even South African political parties that represent Afrikaners call Trump’s claim of a genocide of white people in South Africa “nonsense.”

“There’s no genocide and there’s no government seizures [of land],” Jaco Kleynhans, a senior official in the Afrikaner lobby group Solidarity, told the BBC of a message he had relayed to U.S. government officials.

Certainly, Afrikaners are not in the peril faced by the potential victims of drug gangs in Central America, ethnic violence in Africa or religious persecution in Iran.

But to Trump, inconvenient facts are irrelevant.

An all-too familiar story

His refugee quota order is the most overtly racist act by any presidential administration since Woodrow Wilson’s imposed racial segregation on the federal workforce more than a century ago.

It is not surprising to see Trump for what he is, because it’s so familiar.

He and his father built their residential rental empire on racial discrimination, compelling the government to sue them twice to enforce the fair housing law.

Trump paved his path to his first presidency by questioning the American birthright citizenship of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president.

His gambling casinos discriminated against Black workers. He welcomed the Ku Klux Klan’s political support and declared that there were“very fine people on both sides” among the torch-bearing mob at Charlottesville. He has persistently demeaned minorities.

In his first term, he wished volubly for more immigrants from Norway, one of the whitest, least diverse nations. He has selectively fired Black generals. History displays at federal museums and in national parks are being bleached of references to slavery, which was the origin of the endemic racism in the U.S.

Crude profanity toward Haiti

He has banned federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. He called Haiti and African nations “ shithole countries.”

The travel ban he decreed in June, foreclosing even standard immigration, affects primarily African and Middle Eastern nations.

It is not the first time the U.S. has belied the promise expressed so movingly by Emma Lazarus. Early last century, Congress imposed quotas that favored Northern European immigrants over those from Eastern Europe and Italy, who were shunned because they were Jewish or Catholic.

The U.S. maintained quotas long after it became clear what Nazi Germany had in store for Europe’s Jews. Many thousands of people, whose American relatives could have sponsored them, died in the death camps after being turned down for U.S. visas.

Nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees were turned away at the Port of Miami in June 1939 and sent back to Europe aboard the SS St. Louis — while yearning to breathe free.

Antisemites at the State Department fictionalized that many desperate refugees would be spies, and even President Roosevelt bought into it. The Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt described it as “persecuting the refugee” and as “Jew hatred … as official policy.”

It persisted until it was exposed by a damning report from the Treasury Department.

That shameful history was the inspiration for the refugee policy that Trump has now turned into something equally deplorable: white racism as official policy.

Maybe the French should ask for the Statue of Liberty back — before Trump demolishes that, too.

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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board includes Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant.

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