Vol. 73/No. 37      September 28, 2009

BY PETER SEIDMAN  
In the wake of this mounting Nazi repression, refuge in other countries became a matter of life and death for hundreds of thousands of Jews and other fighters against fascism as well. By May 1939, for example, there were enough applications for U.S. entry visas on file in the U.S. consular offices in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to fill the existing U.S. immigration quotas for the next five years!

The Roosevelt administration, the upholder of the “liberal democratic values” so beloved by the B’nai B’rith [a prominent Jewish organization that supported the creation of Israel], followed a consistent policy of barring entry to this country for these refugees, thereby condemning many of them to death. This policy of the U.S. government showed that any serious effort to save the victims of European anti-Semitism would require a fight against Roosevelt’s administration, and not reliance on it.

The Socialist Appeal, a predecessor of the Militant, in an editorial that appeared on July 9, 1938, explained the reason why: “Capitalism in its death agony can no more solve the refugee problem than any of the other social problems clamoring for solution. The existence of these refugee hordes is in itself a symptom of its social decay and political reaction… .

“Revolutionary socialists must everywhere fight for unrestricted immigration into their countries, and especially for the right of asylum for all victims of reaction.”  
 
New Deal and refugees
Following Hitler’s march into Austria in March 1938, President Roosevelt announced plans for an international conference to aid refugees from Germany and Austria to be held at Evian, France. Roosevelt launched this conference with a statement about how the U.S. has always been a haven for the oppressed and a land of the free.

But in motivating the conference, he explained that no country that attended would be expected to raise its immigration quotas to solve the refugee crisis, that the U.S. would not raise its quota, and that all funds for projects of the conference would be raised from private agencies.

This general approach of the New Deal to the refugee crisis was first conceived in the State Department, where Cordell Hull, then secretary of state, circulated a memorandum in response to growing public outcries over the events in Europe. Hull said it would be better for the State Department to “get out in front and attempt to guide the pressure, primarily with a view toward forestalling attempts to have the immigration laws liberalized.” (Emphasis added.)

With this kind of purpose discreetly buried behind a lot of government hoopla about “America’s concern for the refugees” it is not at all surprising that the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees that finally emerged from the Evian Conference was a farce. By August 1939, this committee, which was supposed to represent the relief efforts of thirty-two nations, had a bank balance of $9,672! …

The outcome of all these artificial barriers to immigration was that even the existing quotas were not filled. Between 1933 and 1943, more than 400,000 more people could have legally entered the U.S. from countries under Nazi domination than were actually permitted. Between 1938, the year of “Kristallnacht,” and 1941, the year the involvement of the U.S. in the second world war made transportation from Europe almost totally unavailable to refugees—a period of time when the acute plight of the refugees was at the height of public attention—there were still some 60,000 unfilled places in the U.S. immigration quota.

More revealing than this, of course, is the fact that quotas existed at all. At a time when so many lives were threatened, the U.S. insisted on maintaining an immigration quota system based on restrictive legislation aimed at cutting off the flow of immigrants into the country.

In 1944, John Pehle, at the request of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, issued a study of State Department refugee policy since 1938, which he entitled: “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” Any honest estimate of the Roosevelt administration’s policies would confirm these findings.  
 
Zionist opposition to lifting quotas
In 1942, Rabbi Stephen Wise, the leading Zionist spokesman in the U.S., complained to his friend Felix Frankfurter, “I don’t know whether I’m getting to be the J of Jude, but I find that a good part of my work is to explain to my fellow Jews why our government cannot do all the things asked or expected of it.”

As was pointed out above, the Roosevelt administration, far from aiding the masses of European refugees from Nazi terror, had in fact stood quietly by while hundreds of thousands of Jews and others were being murdered. Estimates as to the total number of refugees that were permitted to enter the U.S. between 1933 and 1945 vary from about 150,000 to a high of about 250,000. A very small number indeed compared to the millions of victims of fascism.  
 
 
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