WE'RE IMMIGRANTS, NOT FRENCH:

While Lazarus wrote her poem "The New Colossus" before the statue came to the US in the late 19th century, it took years for the words to be inscribed and decades to become famous. These gaps allow modern-day critics like White House policy adviser Stephen Miller to dismiss the poet's words as an irrelevant add-on, as he did during a now-famous press conference.

The critics, says Schon in an interview with the Monitor, are wrong.

Q: How did Emma Lazarus come to transform the meaning of the Statue of Liberty?

At first, the statue was ostensibly a tribute to Franco-American friendship. Édouard de Laboulaye [a French political thinker known as the  "Father of the Statue of Liberty"] wanted to honor the American emancipation of the slaves and show that it came out of the French Enlightenment.

The Americans revealed what they thought of the statue by not donating to a fund to pay for a pedestal. As part of an effort to raise money, Emma Lazarus wrote the poem to be auctioned off at an art exhibition, and it was published the following month in early 1884 by a small magazine.

She reinvisioned the statue as a Mother of Exiles. For her, the statue was an emblem of the nation's mission to welcome and absorb immigrants and to flourish with their arrival.

Q: What happened to the poem after she wrote it?

It wasn't well known even after the inscription was installed in the statue in 1903, 15 years after she died at the age of 38. But in the 1930s, pro-immigrationists realized the poem was an eloquent statement of their cause. Since then, the poem and the statue have been inextricably linked.

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