[TimorousBestie]

The full title of the statue is “La Liberté éclairant le monde”—it’s impossible not to see it as a symbol of the ideals of the Enlightenment spreading across the world. That’s the common philosophical ground of both American and French Revolutions, and from there the source of the friendship that the statue represents.

At least some minimal notion of hospitality with respect to migration is part of that Enlightenment. (Kant’s Perpetual Peace is emphatic about this; Derrida annotates the relevant section with fresh eyes in Hospitality vol. 1, the first lecture and ff.)

That said, I also agree with you that symbols are not fully formed at birth and it is not the case that what they represent never changes at all in the course of their history.