The first clear annunciation of the ideal around which the American colonists united in distinction from England came in these famous words from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
It does not say merely that our citizens but that all people are created equal.
The next great proclamation was the Preamble to the Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The first priority is the Union and the second is justice. Other priorities are to be seen in the context of Justice, not instead of it.
During the War of 1812 Francis Scott Key penned the words that later became our national anthem. It ends with this affirmation:
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
What a perfect expression of the American ideal! We are the land of the free and the home of the brave.
In 1885 parts of the French gift to America — the Statue of Liberty — began to arrive in the US. It was assembled and then in 1886 dedicated. Not long after, a poem which had been written for the occasion was engraved on a plaque at the base of the Statue.Its most beautiful lines are:
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!
Though we have recently slipped into thinking that the “American dream” is nothing more than financial success, the real genius of the American spirit is that we are the home to which the world’s tired, poor, oppressed peoples, the wretched refuse of far shores, can come to find a welcome.
Is there a single Republican candidate who believes in these ideals, these dreams? I think not.
mikenowandthen 
That statue of liberty poem is perfect, i used it in a post talking about Syrian refugees and its wrong to turn them away. Republicans are spreading fear about them, its not right.
That poem was written in part as a response to European antiSemitism. We know what happened to the Jews when America (among other nations) closed its doors to Jews trying to flee Nazi Germany.