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.

These lines come from Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus,” written in 1883 to help raise funds for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty through an art-and-literature auction. Lazarus, a New York poet of Sephardic Jewish background, had become deeply engaged with the plight of refugees fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe and with the broader realities of immigration in the United States. The poem reimagines the Statue of Liberty not as a martial monument like the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, but as a welcoming “Mother of Exiles.” The sonnet was later cast on a bronze plaque and mounted inside the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal in 1903, helping cement its association with immigration and asylum.

The passage frames America’s promise as moral refuge rather than imperial power. By addressing “your tired, your poor” and “huddled masses,” Lazarus elevates the displaced and impoverished as worthy recipients of welcome, overturning older ideals that tied national greatness to conquest or aristocratic lineage. The “golden door” suggests both entry and transformation: a threshold into civic belonging and renewed possibility. The “lamp” evokes guidance and sanctuary, casting the Statue as a beacon whose light is ethical as much as physical. The lines have become a touchstone in debates over immigration, often invoked to argue that national identity is defined by openness to newcomers and compassion for the persecuted.

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!"

1) “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” (often quoted without the later lines)
2) “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” (punctuation and line-break variants; sometimes an exclamation point appears at the end)
3) “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” is sometimes misquoted as “the wretched refuse from your teeming shore.”