<p><strong>To the editor:</strong></p>
<p>Is the "golden door" closing?</p>
<p>The base of the Statue of Liberty is New York City Harbor holds a poem by Emma Lazrus entitled ‘The new Colossus," a reference to the Colossus of ancient times. The poem closes, "I lift my lamp beside the golden door."</p>
<p>The statue has welcomed millions of people to America. It also says "give me your tired, your poor..send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me." We are not about wall building. That is NOT what we do.</p>
<p>Now the president has proposed to build a wall on our southern border. He must be aware that his forefathers came to this country from the Bavaria part of modern Germany in the 1860s. Not an early arrival, but not a late comer either, as are the Vietnamese, Puerto Ricans and now people from Mexico and further south.</p>
<p>People whose skin is slightly darker than the European immigrants of the past century. Yes, some of them will turn out to be crooks and criminals, but so are some of us.</p>
<p>To build a wall, one should think of Robert Frost’s poem, "Building Wall," which ends "I’d ask to know, what I was walling in or walling out."</p>
<p><p style="text-align: right"><strong>Mary Holeman</strong></p>
<p><p style="text-align: right"><strong>Greenwood</strong></p>
