I’m really glad we’re having a discussion about what the Statue of Liberty means to America, even if it is precipitated by nefarious thinking. This week, the Trump administration moved forward with a change in legal immigration policy that will limit people allowed to enter the country to those who are well enough off not to need public assistance. It is called the “public charge” rule.

This is yet another way for the administration to restrict people coming from poorer countries, many of them countries with black and brown people. What we are witnessing is an all-out, every-avenue strategy to maintain America as a white majority country — and, by extension, to extend white power and white supremacy — for as long as possible.

This is the game. This has always been the game. This is why President Trump’s base loves him. He is fighting for their primacy, their privileges and their power. But media, politicians and liberals in general make a huge mistake when they respond by invoking the Statue of Liberty and the poem inscribed on the pedestal.

The poem says of the statue:

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!

But, the statue was not conceived as a beacon of liberty and immigration. The idea was conceived by French abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye in 1865, just two months after the Civil War ended, a monument to the emancipation of this country’s slaves.