The issue is about how a nation serves its people, and whether it protects American people and their culture.
America is not an economic zone but a nation with a responsibility to its citizens not random foreigners handed visas.
"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "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!"
The United States was built on welcoming immigrants and achieved its greatness in no small part on the efforts of immigrants.
Woefully out of date. We don't even politically understand the concept of freedom anymore. Hell, just look at how much of our jurisprudence is pinned on the "Interstate Commerce" clause, which somehow applies to purely Intrastate commerce.
Furthermore, the vaunted "freedom" provided nowadays is the freedom to die for refusal to accept the current yoke of the "captains of industry" who ran off with the reins of our legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
The United States is post any ideal expressed on that plaque, and too afraid of the people already here to even live up to it's founding ideals as written. The only way anyone wants to get anything done is to ship in people who ultimately won't suffer the consequences of the work they're doing, then weaponizing the output of that work against the group of people here who refused to enable them in the first place.
The poem was written one year after the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. In the Immigration Act of 1917, the US excluded people from British India.
Hardly an example of "welcoming [all] immigrants."
Everyone understood the necessity to properly assimilate foreigners, and therefore there were periods of moratoriums to preserve American culture.