Aldrich's Poem 'Unguarded Gates'

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Shmoop’s Immigration Big Picture 1. How did Emma Lazarus's poem transform the Statue of Liberty's meaning? Lazarus transformed the Statue of Liberty—built by the French to commemorate shared Franco-American ideals of democracy—into a beacon of hope for foreigners seeking a better life in the United States. 2. What is nativism? citizens who fear that large influxes of foreigners will corrupt American culture, undermine American democracy, and impoverish American workers. 3. How does Thomas Bailey Aldrich's poem "Unguarded Gates" represent a strain of American thought? Aldrich's poem may strike modern readers as embarrassingly xenophobic, if not downright racist. But "Unguarded Gates" represents a strain of American thought on immigration with roots every bit as deep as the open-door ideals of "The New Colossus." 4. What are some examples of nativist thought in America prior to 1882? Benjamin Franklin worried that heavy German immigration into Pennsylvania would leave the English…show more content…
These "old immigrants" were mostly Britons, Irishmen, or Germans, with smaller numbers of Frenchmen and Scandinavians thrown in for good measure. These groups shared similar ethnic and cultural backgrounds; they were all, to use the pseudoscientific racial categories of the time, members of the Anglo-Saxon or Nordic races. After 1882, however, the source of America's immigrant population shifted dramatically toward Southern and Eastern Europe. Italians, Jews, and Poles became the three largest ethnic groups within the "new immigration," leading a heterogeneous movement that also included hundreds of thousands of Slovaks, Magyars, Croats, Greeks, Lithuanians, Finns, Ruthenians, Serbians, and Bohemians. None of these ethnic groups—which scientists at the time believed to comprise entirely distinct races—had ever formed a major portion of the American population
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