My parents were immigrants. They left Vienna on March, 1938, and arrived in Philadelphia in November, 1942, on a Portuguese ship called the Serpa Pinto.

Connected to the Quaker community through their pacifism, they settled in Philadelphia.

Though they’d only brought two suitcases with them in 1942, by the mid-1950’s, they’d already sold our row house in a working-class suburb south of the city and built a split-level on a one acre plot in a middle-class suburb in the northwest. My little family truly lived the American dream.

Occasionally, we’d have guests from Europe or other parts of the country, usually other immigrants. After a day in Philadelphia seeing the Liberty Bell, which you could touch then, and Independence Hall, we’d cram into our car, me in the middle of the front seat, guests in the back, and take route 1, or later the turnpike, through New Jersey to New York City, where my father’s sister and most of their social circle had settled.

Aside from the visit to Eclair Bakery, the best part of the trip to New York was the ride on the Staten Island Ferry. It cost a quarter round-trip and it went by the Statue of Liberty.

Most of the other passengers on the ferry were commuters, so it wasn’t too hard to find places to stand on the side where you could see the statue. Every time we passed her, my father would proudly tell the story of how the statue was a gift from France, where he and my mother lived between 1938 and their arrival in America. My favorite part of the tale was where the money came from to build the enormous statue and the pedestal to hold it.

It wasn’t France’s national government that paid for the gift. That would have been considered inappropriate. Instead, hundreds of municipalities, from tiny villages to great cities, gave thousands of francs to build the statue. Schoolchildren saved up and donated centimes. Descendants of French soldiers who fought in the American Revolution contributed. The skin of the statue is made of copper offered by a French copper company.

Yet when the gift was finally finished, it wasn’t certain that the statue would ever be erected in America, Many powerful Americans, including the New York Times, opposed it. But in the end, Joseph Pulitzer organized a campaign asking children to contribute pennies, and enough money was raised to install Lady Liberty in New York Harbor.

I collected pennies. And I carried a carefully constructed Unicef donation box with me every Halloween. I knew about children contributing to great causes.

And then there was Emma Lazarus’s poem, The New Colossus, which was written for 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!”

I felt both embraced and empowered by the Statue of Liberty.

Now, that idealism is gone, the wretched refuse scorned, and immigrants imprisoned. My father, a green card holder who was never naturalized, would be living in fear instead of pride.

It breaks my heart.