"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 host to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door." Inscription on the Statue of Liberty New York Harbor

Democrats tend to like immigrants, and vice versa. Why? Because we tend to take seriously the notion that our strength as a nation has always been rooted in our ability to welcome new people to our shores and, as part of that reception, to do our best to do our duty to live up to our highest ideal: the notion that all men are created equal.

Indeed, we democrats tend to believe that those ideals, even when imperfectly implemented, have helped to attract and keep the best of the best of the world's emigrants, whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated; skilled or unskilled; male or female; young or old; of every race, creed, color and culture.

If an immigrant had the will, the get-up-and-go, and could beg borrow or steal the wherewithall to get here, we always believed we could find a way to welcome them and be stronger for doing so. It was and is, we believe, not only the right thing to do, its good for all of us.

Our friends on the right, however, tend to disagree.

Ask them about those scribbles on the statue in New York Harbor and they'll tell you, directly or indirectly, "Just kidding."

With all too rare exception the leadership of what's left of Mr. Lincoln's glorious mid-19th century GOP agrees with their neo-knownothing Tea Party masters-of-the-primaries: tired, poor, huddled masses need not apply and are, with rare exception, an existential threat to the good old U S of A no matter what they yearn for. Its an old and oft-repeated story in our history . . . and not a pretty one.

For the latest version of the "new" GOP (the "Tea-P" we might call them) the watchwords are now: Katie bar the door; put out the light; deepen the moat; man the wire; issue the lads extra ammunition; scramble the drones; away all boats; and while you're at it, see if we can't get some of those folks to build us an inverse variant of the Berlin Wall before we ask them to "self deport.".

After all, from a Tea-P perspective, who really needs folks with the courage to risk their lives to cross a heavily guarded noman's land, ford a river or two, pass through a desert more desolate than a Bush-McCain-Romney big tent, in order to . . . horrors . . . go to work?

The GOP clearly believes there are at least twelve million other Americans who would do the work immigrants do for the very same price they're willing to pay immigrants to do it.

Call it the GOP immigration "job-creators" gold standard: melt down the golden door, bow down to the golden calf, and invest only in golden arches where the wages of sin are low.