Mr. Speaker. we must not forget that AnAtoly Shcharansky is in prison today not because he committed any crime. On the contrary. he was one of the leading spokesmen for Soviet Jews seeking their legitimate rights to emigrate to Israel. At the time of his arrest he was one of a group of Jewish leaders monitoring Soviet compliance with the humanrights aspects of the 1975 Helsinki accords. Mr. Speaker. we in the United States often take many of our freedoms for granted. One freedom in particular we tend to assume is the freedom to emigrate. So close is this freedom to our national spirit that when Emma Lazarus wrote her inscription for the Statue of Liberty she called upon the nations of the world to sent your tired. your poor. your huddled masses yearning to breathe free and the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. The spirit of openness contained in these passages says much about we as Americans. It says first of all that we are a land of immigrants. And it also says that we naturally expect that those who desire to come to our shores will be allowed to come. What is not recognized in these lines. however. is the fact that the Soviet Union has intertwined the freedom to emigrate into one of the most perverse political systems ever to darken the human record. What we in the United States assume as a natural inalienable right is flagrantly disregarded in the Soviet Union. On August 1. 1975. in Helsinki.
Keywords matched
emigrate immigrants