![handle is hein.journals/tcrit12 and id is 1 raw text is:
Idaho Critical Legal Studies Journal 2018 Symposium Keynote Address
By Idaho Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones
One of the subjects that I have talked about a lot in my guest opinions is immigration and
refugees. And of course, as Moniquel said, we are a nation of immigrants; and we started our
immigration to this country about seventeen-thousand years ago, give or take, at which time we
didn't having rising seas. People came over from Asia across the bearing straights and settled in
here. From that point forward, everybody that has arrived here has immigrated [] from some place.
And, one of the things that I have always loved is the poem or sonnet that Emma Lazarus wrote
back in 1883, The New Colossus, and what she said: 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!
You know, that was written at a time when America had just come out of the Civil War.
We were climbing to greatness, and since that time we have become a moral beacon to the world.
We became the economic power-house of the world, and we are envied, or at least we were, by
many nations. And the reason we reached that pinnacle is because of the work of immigrants and
their descendants. We need to keep that tradition going because we are also becoming an aging
nation. We have the lowest birth rate that we [have] ever had in the nation's history. People are
getting older, and there are about six persons contributing to social security for every one that was
receiving benefits. In 2035, there will be two people contributing for every person receiving
benefits, and we can't do it.
Congress is not going to take care of it. Congress is not going to fix Medicaid or Social
Security, so we have got to have more people coming into this nation or we are going to stagnate
1 Monique Lillard, Professor of Law at the University of Idaho College of Law. Professor Lillard gave a brief speech
to introduce former Chief Justice Jones as the keynote speaker.
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