"There are those in our own country who today speak of the protection of country, of survival. A decision must be made in the life of every nation... when it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy to rest survival upon what is expedient."
The words belong to lead judge Dan Haywood, played by Spencer Tracy, in the epic 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, as he addresses the tribunal that convicted the film's four fictional defendants who had been high level judges in Hitler's Germany. Those judges had subverted the rule of law by rendering decisions based on what served the political ends of the Nazi regime. Haywood concludes, "A country (is) what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult."
The film resonates today as we watch fanatical conservative politicos and pundits challenge the legality and morality of the United States accepting thousands of Syrian refugees who are fleeing genocide. As the Stanley Kramer production examined the soul of the German people that emerged from its dark days under Hitler, the discussion in America during this pre-election season focuses again on who we are as a people.
We've been here before. It's American history's stains redux. As in slave trafficking. As in rejecting the Irish. Or the Italians. Or Latinos. Or the Jews. In the 1940s we uprooted Americans of Japanese ancestry from their homes and placed them in desert internment camps.
We like to think of our nation of immigrants as the shining beacon on the hill, symbolically reflected in Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus" engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
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!
In the wake of the turmoil in Syria, the Islamic State's genocidal horror in the Middle East and the terrorist attacks in Paris and elsewhere last month, President Obama wants to provide welcome sanctuary to at least 10,000 more Syrian refugees who are fleeing the savagery and destruction of their homeland. The president's extended hand is consistent with our national soul and its articulation in the Lazarus verse.
But these days the lamp beside the golden door is flickering, uniformly doused by the band of Republican presidential wannabes, their wildly applauding supporters at speeches and rallies, their cheerleaders on Fox News, and scattered Democrats, all of whom reject welcoming the wretched refuse of the teeming Syrian shore.
In a notable historic parallel from 1939, Cuba and the United States refused asylum to more than 900 refugees fleeing Nazi Germany on the ocean liner SS St. Louis. At the time, Cuban law restricted entry of all foreigners except U.S. citizens unless they were specifically authorized by the Cuban secretaries of State and Labor. Hundreds of the passengers who were returned to Europe died there during World War II.
Similarly, in this country 76-and-a-half years later on November 19, almost all House Republicans and 47 Democrats passed legislation requiring the Director of the FBI, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence to certify to Congress that any refugee from Syria or Iraq is "not a threat to the security of the United States" before being allowed to settle here. The provision is a redundant requirement because all refugees considered for admission undergo intensive security screening involving multiple intelligence and law enforcement agencies, according to a detailed administration briefing conducted in November. The House action could doom a great many of these Syrian refugees to calamitous consequences much as the SS St. Louis tragedy did to its civilian passengers decades ago.
Among Republican presidential aspirants, Marco Rubio supports the House-passed act but in September he was open to accepting Syrian refugees. He now falsely claims that they can't be properly vetted although he's indicated he'd accept young children and the elderly. Rubio asserts that we're involved in "a clash of civilizations" and that "there is no middle ground on this. Either they win or we win."
Ted Cruz, currently ascending in the polls, has said that taking in refugees is "lunacy!"
Additionally, several Republican candidates want to employ a religion test. Cruz would specifically ban Syrian Muslims from entering the United States. Jeb Bush has said he's willing to accept Christian refugees but not Muslims. On NBC's Meet the Press, when asked for his opinion about a candidate's eligibility for the presidency, Ben Carson responded, "I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation; I absolutely would not agree with that." And Donald Trump, the man who's a big time leader in Republican polls and hyperbolic nonsense, would consider establishing a Muslim database and shutting down "hard line mosques!" These aspirants to the nation's highest office tacitly dismiss the First Amendment which mandates that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
In other words, in the views of these anti-immigrant anti-constitution purveyors of hostility, Emma Lazarus's reference to the torch held by the beacon-hand of a mighty woman, the flame of which is the imprisoned lightning that glows the world-wide welcome, shouldn't apply to the tempest-tossed Syrian refugees. It's these critics' exception to American exceptionalism. Xenophobia lives on here, shadowing our country's basic core of compassion and decency.
In the climactic scene of Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 thriller Foreign Correspondent, Joel McCrea, cast in the title role, beams a live broadcast to America as he witnesses first hand the German blitz in London. "Hello, America," he implores, "it's too late to do anything here now except stand in the dark and let them come... as if the lights were all out everywhere, except in America... Keep those lights burning... Hello, America, hang on to your lights -- they're the only lights left in the world!"
That message summons us today. The coming weeks and months, maybe years, will determine whether we continue to be the shining beacon on the hill or whether we succumb to what Judge Haywood would say is the means of the enemy to rest survival upon what is expedient.