The Politics of Immigration (2nd Edition). David Wilson
the United States until 1980, a patchwork of laws and provisions allowed for the entry of individual refugees and groups of refugees based on ethnicity, nationality, and specific geographic or political circumstances. Several of these laws, starting with the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, provided quotas or access to a certain number of nonquota visas for refugees and other displaced persons. Refugees were generally still required to fulfill the standard immigration criteria of the time: they had to have job offers, a place to live, and proof that they would not become a “public charge.”7
Throughout the Cold War period, the U.S. government’s active opposition to communism guided refugee and asylum policy; U.S. law generally defined refugees as people fleeing a “Communist or Communist-dominated country.” Accepting and even encouraging refugees and asylum seekers from such countries served to discredit their governments as oppressive regimes, recruit away their educated elites in what’s referred to as “brain drain,” and bolster exile-led opposition movements to attack them. Not until the Refugee Act of 1980 did the U.S. government finally adopt the politically neutral definition of a refugee established by the 1951 UN Convention and its 1967 Protocol, and lay out procedures for the processing of refugees and asylum seekers.8
But foreign policy still plays a role in asylum policy: “Immigration judges are required to consult and incorporate in their decisions the official country report published by the United States Department of State in any asylum case,” Dana Leigh Marks, an immigration judge in California and the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told a reporter in 2011. “Obviously our foreign relations position with regard to a country from which the asylum seeker comes is an important factor in the judge’s decision.”9
FLEEING THE NAZIS
As people persecuted on the basis of their religion and their perceived ethnic characteristics, the Jews fleeing the German Nazi regime in Europe from the 1930s to 1945 clearly fit today’s definition of refugees. Unfortunately, most were not able to reach safety, as worldwide anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant sentiment led many countries to close their doors.
In the 1930s, the United States was facing the widespread unemployment and poverty of the Great Depression. From the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s, polls showed the U.S. public firmly opposed to accepting more refugees from Europe or elsewhere; polls also reflected strong anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States during this period.10
The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 had imposed strict nationality caps and economic requirements on people seeking to come here. There was no exception for people fleeing persecution. Many European Jews had family and friends in the United States who tried to help them escape, as well as the support of a large and active Jewish community here. Some U.S. citizens made extraordinary efforts to save the refugees by providing information—sometimes falsified—about family relationships, financial support and job offers for U.S. visa applications.11 U.S. diplomatic officials rejected the vast majority of visa applicants, claiming they were “likely to become a public charge.”12
In May 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg to Havana with 937 passengers, nearly all of them Jews seeking asylum from the Nazis. The Nazi government backed the voyage as part of its efforts to encourage Jews to leave Germany voluntarily.13
The Nazis also hoped the voyage would justify its anti-Semitic policies by highlighting the world’s rejection of Jews. This rejection was already apparent in July 1938, when delegates from thirty-two countries, including the United States, met at the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains to discuss the European refugee crisis. Only one country at the Évian conference agreed to accept Jewish refugees: the Dominican Republic, whose brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo believed European immigration could “whiten” his country’s largely African-descended population. The other countries declined to increase their limited quotas or to take any action to save Jews or others fleeing persecution.14
The majority of the St. Louis passengers hoped to wait in Cuba while the U.S. government processed their visa applications. But the Cuban government, then a close U.S. ally, allowed only twenty-eight passengers to disembark—four Spanish citizens, two Cubans, and twenty-two people who already had valid U.S. visas. After six days, the ship left Havana and sailed toward Miami as passengers cabled President Franklin Roosevelt asking to be allowed to come ashore. The U.S. State Department answered that they had to “await their turns on the waiting list and then qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.”
Unable to land anywhere in the region, the St. Louis turned back toward Europe on June 6, 1939. Because of the high profile of the voyage, Jewish organizations were able to negotiate entry visas to Britain for nearly a third of the passengers, and to the Netherlands, Belgium, or France for the rest. Of those who went to the European continent, more than 40 percent—254 people—died in the Holocaust.15
The St. Louis was one of many ships carrying desperate refugees from Europe, seeking to enter the United States. At the end of May 1939, 104 German, Austrian, and Czech Jewish refugees aboard the French ship Flandre were turned away from Havana and forced to return to France. Another two hundred refugees from Germany aboard the Orinoco were denied entry to the United States and were returned to Germany in June 1939. The fate of these rejected refugees remains unknown.16
At least half a million European Jews managed to flee to safer countries, and many later found their way to the United States to join friends and relatives already living here. Others were trapped by the war and unable to escape. Once the war started, the United States closed its doors to the refugees, seeing them as potential spies.17
When the war ended in 1945, an estimated six million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust.18 Could more have been done to save those fleeing genocide? Some people broke laws and took personal risks to help the refugees, including individual diplomats from a number of nations who issued unauthorized travel documents and visas. But the United States played a minimal role in such rescue efforts.19
Most of the activity that helped European refugees to escape was illegal, violating not only the unjust laws of the Nazi regime but often the restrictive immigration laws of allied and neutral nations. In an April 1997 speech at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, then-UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata noted that those who managed to escape Nazi-occupied Europe “often did so by using fraudulent documents,” an action for which asylum seekers are now criticized.
“In looking back, the refugee issues of the 1930s and 1940s seem simple,” observed Ogata. “Yet at the time, the issues seemed to be as complex as similar issues appear today.”20
Does the United States accept too many refugees?
The number of people who arrived in the United States as refugees averaged just over 80,000 a year between 1980 and 2013, ranging from a high of 207,000 in 1980 (a year that saw nearly 130,000 migrants arriving from Cuba) to a low of 26,800 in 2002, after the September 2001 terrorist attacks prompted a review of the refugee program, dramatically slowing admissions. In fiscal year 2013, just under 70,000 people entered the United States as refugees.21
Each year the U.S. president sets a cap on refugee admissions after consulting with Congress. Since 1980 the number of refugees admitted has reached this limit only once—in 1992. Actual admissions plummeted after 2001, even as the cap stayed at 70,000 to 80,000 a year. Between 2002 and 2012, actual admissions averaged less than 70 percent of the allotted number. Since 2013, each year’s 70,000 limit has essentially been reached.22
The U.S. government granted asylum status in an additional 23,000 cases each year on average between 2000 and 2013.23
Can’t refugees go somewhere else?
Most refugees do go somewhere else. The vast majority of the world’s refugees—86