The final lines of the poem inside the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor read …

“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-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

The poem is entitled, “The New Colossus,” and was meant to identify the United States as the modern home to an “ancient wonder of the world” — the Colossus of Rhodes. Eventually, the power and the statue represented the hopes and aspirations of millions of immigrants.

For more than a century, then, Americans have thought of their country as the obvious preferred destination for outsiders keen to make a better life for themselves.

But does it still apply? Is the U.S. still the “golden door” to life, liberty and happiness? And, especially, to prosperity?

Or has it been eclipsed by countries like the one I’m sitting in right now, the United Arab Emirates? If you wanted to make a decent wage and find plenty of work, would you go to New York? Or Abu Dhabi?

In the U.S., we operate under a lot of assumptions that are increasingly invalid. The biggest, the best, the wealthiest, the most-envied.

Meanwhile, the UAE — which turns 38 years old tomorrow — is a country that is about 80 percent immigrants. That represents a far higher percentage of immigrants than the U.S. was absorbing at any point in its history.

And the immigrants here, some 4.8 million in a total population of 6 million, almost entirely are here to make money. To feed their families. To get ahead. They are here. Not the U.S.

Most of them are Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, yes. Countries with economies ranging from emerging (India) to disastrous (Bangladesh).

But they come here to find work, and there is work aplenty.  Even during what passes for a slowdown, locally.

Actually, it’s rather like the U.S. was a century-plus ago. Immigrants could arrive at the mouth of the Mississippi, navigate up the river and find prairie land for the farming. They could reinvent themselves, and most did.

Does the United States provide that anymore? Other than to impoverished Mexicans and Central Americans? (And not even them so much since the economic crisis began.)

I increasingly am coming to believe that economic considerations are what drive migration. Representative democracy, all well and good, and maybe some immigrants went to the U.S. so they could vote for their Congressman.

But if my family is starving, and I can come to the UAE and find work at a rate of pay two or three times that of what I could make at home … well, UAE, here I come, and I’m not going to get too worried about the form of government as long as it allows me to double or triple my income.

The U.S. is forfeiting its “New Colossus” designation. Unemployment is up, the middle class is disappearing. Increasingly, the rest of the world doesn’t believe it is the Land of Opportunity.

Meanwhile, mentally tough, ambitious men and women from all over this region enter the UAE every day and get to work. Building, painting, cleaning, polishing, digging, pumping … the sorts of jobs that don’t seem to exist in the U.S. anymore.

They may not be eligible to vote, they may have no say in who rules the country, but they are sending home money to their relatives every month, and maybe supporting a half-dozen of them.

Until the United States reinvents itself as a land of opportunity — because it has lost its way — we will continue to see more and more of the bold and the energetic, those huddled masses yearning for a hot meal — continuing to stream to places like Abu Dhabi and Dubai and the rest of the emirates, where there is a sense of progress and moving forward and a better tomorrow, and not a sense of Something Gone Wrong and rotting out and going stale — and going broke.

We’re close to being ready to declare a New New Colossus. And the little United Arab Emirates, for one, is in the running.