This past Sunday, University of Southern California professor Roberto Suro announced in a Washington Post editorial that Emma Lazarus’ “Give me your tired, your poor…” poem should be permanently removed from the Statue of Liberty:

I’d like to suggest a little surgery that will make the symbol more appropriate today: Let’s get rid of The Poem…Inscribed on a small brass plaque mounted inside the statue’s stone base, the poem is an appendix, added belatedly, and it can safely be removed, shrouded or at least marked with a big asterisk.

According to Suro, the Statue of Liberty was meant to be a symbol of freedom and liberty, not immigration. Suro also points out that most immigrants come to the U.S. for economic reasons that he deems totally unrelated to the political values that Lazarus’ poem conveys. Suro thinks most immigrants are “adventurous” and “ambitious,” not “tired and poor.”

Yet Suro doesn’t account for the fact that, for many immigrants, shear economic destitution is often what drives ambition and any sense of adventure. He also doesn’t consider the notion that economic mobility (or the lack thereof) is often tied hand-in-hand with economic justice and various degrees of political despotism. Maybe immigrants don’t come as “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but chances are they’d have an easier time feeding their families in their home countries if government corruption and dysfunction didn’t lock them into rigid class systems that even emerging democracies are still struggling to shake off.

Now, Suro’s notion that “we live in a different era of immigration” and that the “schmaltzy sonnet offers a dangerously distorted picture” is being used by others to argue against immigration altogether. A Fox News broadcast that aired this past holiday weekend used an interview with Suro as a launching pad for Mark Krikorian’s vehemently anti-immigrant views:

KRIKORIAN: The problem really isn’t that immigrants are coming here to rip us off. This isn’t like a welfare queen issue. The problem here is that immigrants are a mismatch for a modern society like ours.

Watch it:

Krikorian also followed-up his interview with an article, “Bad Poetry Makes for Bad Policy,” in which he referenced Suro’s remarks to convince his readers that the U.S. has “outgrown” immigration. Krikorian authored the book, entitled “The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal,” which features the Statue of Liberty on the cover with her hand blocking new waves of immigration. Most economic data suggests that Krikorian is wrong.

As other have noted, Friday’s news that the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qom, a prominent Iranian clerical group, have declared Iran’s recent elections illegitimate is pretty significant, though by no means decisive. Even though Khamenei has spent the last years cultivating a stronger and deeper relationship with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), maintaining a genuine sense of religious legitimacy is obviously important for a regime that bills itself as “Islamic,” and the clerics’ statement took a big whack at that already battered legitimacy.

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Reuel Marc Gerecht suggests that the clerics’ dissent “guts the religious attacks of Khamenei’s most powerful allies–the Revolutionary Guard Corps and their baton-wielding thuggish appendage, the Basij–against Mir-Hussein Mousavi, the leader of the opposition.”

To use an Iraqi parallel: what the clerics of Qom just did to Khamenei is similar to what Ayatollah Sistani did to the Bush administration’s original idea of caucus balloting in Iraq (if we recall, the Bush administration came up with this plan since it feared both the demands and the results of a free election). Qom has shown itself to be the worthy inheritors of the more progressive clergy of the 1905-11 Iranian revolution, when ideas about representative government began to seep into traditional clerical views about the need for independent religious scholars to supervise the ethics of government. Qom has clearly said that the June 12th elections were fraudulent and therefore null and void; most of the city’s religious scholars have now implied, more openly than ever before, that Khamenei is an illegitimate ruler, who has betrayed the faith as well as the people.

I think Gerecht’s reference to Sistani’s deft management of Bush is pretty interesting, though the situations obviously differ in important ways. (To say that Khamenei is more attuned to the realities of Iran’s religious politics than Bush was to Iraq’s is to commit felony understatement.) It goes without saying, though, that whatever criticisms Qom’s clerics may have of Khamenei, they are not secular democrats seeking to join with the West. Nor have we seen any evidence that Iran’s demonstrators are seeking to eject religion from their political life.

Interestingly, Gerecht’s article indicates a new acknowledgment of the explicitly Islamic nature of the Iranian political resistance. Writing a few weeks ago, in the immediate wake of Iran’s elections, Gerecht claimed that “we are witnessing not just a fascinating power struggle among men who’ve known each other intimately for 30 years, but the unraveling of the religious idea that has shaped the growth of modern Islamic fundamentalism since the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928.”

I think this was off the mark, but it was in keeping with the general tendency of conservative pundits to define Islamism as narrowly and negatively as possible in order to deny it any legitimate place in the ongoing debate in the Middle East over political reform. Read more