{"id":81389,"date":"2015-12-06T10:25:28","date_gmt":"2015-12-06T18:25:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=81389"},"modified":"2015-12-06T10:26:41","modified_gmt":"2015-12-06T18:26:41","slug":"what-did-americans-say-about-jewish-holocaust-refugees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=81389","title":{"rendered":"What Did Americans Say About Jewish Holocaust Refugees?"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Haaretz<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Back in the 1930s and \u201940s, the fear was of Nazi and Communist infiltrators sneaking in along with the refugees rather than the ISIS militants or Mexican criminals that some fear today.<\/p>\n

JTA \u2013 They were called \u201cso-called\u201d refugees, told they were alien to American culture and warned against as potential enemies of the United States.
\nThis heated anti-refugee rhetoric in America was directed against Jews trying to flee Europe, not Mexicans or Syrians. Back in the 1930s and \u201940s, the fear was of Nazi and Communist infiltrators sneaking in along with the refugees rather than the ISIS militants or Mexican criminals that some fear today.
\nHere\u2019s a snapshot of what Americans were saying about Jews as they sought to escape Hitler\u2019s Nazi vise for refuge in the United States.
\n‘Try to keep them out’
\nIn 1938, when Hitler\u2019s threat to Jews in Germany already was apparent, America still was emerging from the Great Depression, and xenophobia and anti-Semitism were commonplace. In a July 1938 poll, 67 percent of Americans told Fortune magazine that America should try to keep out altogether German, Austrian and other political refugees, and another 18 percent said America should allow them in but without increasing immigration quotas.
\nIn another 1938 poll, cited in the book \u201cJews in the Mind of America,\u201d some 75 percent of respondents said they opposed increasing the number of German Jews allowed to resettle in the United States.
\nIn January 1939, 61 percent of Americans told Gallup they opposed the settlement of 10,000 refugee children, \u201cmost of them Jewish,\u201d in the United States.
\nIn May that year, 12 percent of Americans said they would support a widespread campaign against Jews in the United States and another 8 percent said they would be sympathetic to one, according to the book \u201cFDR and the Jews.\u201d By June 1944, the number had risen to 43 percent of Americans who said they would support a campaign against the Jews or would be sympathetic to one. Polls cited in \u201cJews in the Mind of America\u201d showed 24 percent of Americans believed Jews were \u201ca menace to America.\u201d
\nAt the same time, however, 70 percent of Americans said in an April 1944 poll commissioned by the White House that they supported creating temporary safe haven camps in the United States where war refugees could stay until the war\u2019s end. Only one such camp was set up, at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York; 982 refugees were placed there in August 1944.
\n‘A Jewish empire’
\nRepresentative Jacob Thorkelson, a Montana Republican, said Jewish migrants are part of an \u201cinvisible government\u201d tied to the \u201ccommunistic Jew\u201d and to \u201cJewish international financiers.\u201d
\nSenator Robert Reynolds, a North Carolina Democrat, said Jews are \u201csystematically building a Jewish empire in this country.\u201d
\n\u201cLet Europe take care of its own people,\u201d he said. \u201cWe cannot care for our own, to say nothing of importing more to care for.\u201d
\nReynolds told Life magazine he merely wanted \u201cour own fine boys and lovely girls to have all the jobs in this wonderful country,\u201d according to TheIntercept.com.
\nPresident Franklin D. Roosevelt himself warned that Jewish refugees might be Nazi spies, coerced to do the Reich\u2019s bidding with threats against relatives back home. At a news conference, Roosevelt explained how refugees \u2013 \u201cespecially Jewish refugees\u201d \u2013 might be forced into service for the Nazis with the threat that if they declined, they would be told, \u201cWe are frightfully sorry, but your old father and mother will be taken out and shot.\u201d
\nSimilar warnings against Nazis disguised as refugees appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Reader\u2019s Digest and American Magazine, according to Reason.com.
\nThe numbers
\nAmerica did not take specific action to help Jewish refugees until January 1944, when Roosevelt, conceding to pressure from members of his own government and American Jews, established the War Refugee Board to help rescue Jews in Europe.
\nUntil then, several thousand Jewish refugees had gained admittance into the United States under the German-Austrian quota from 1938 to 1941, which wasn\u2019t limited to Jews. But for most of Roosevelt\u2019s presidency, the U.S. quota for immigrants from Germany went less than 25 percent filled, according to the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. In all, more than 190,000 quota places from Germany and Axis-occupied countries sat unused during the Holocaust.
\nIn 1938, just two weeks after the Kristallnacht pogrom, the U.S. interior secretary floated the idea of settling refugees in Alaska, and soon his office began researching the possibility. In March 1940, Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Representative Frank Havenner of California proposed bills to resettle 10,000 war refugees in the remote territory who wouldn\u2019t count toward America\u2019s immigration quotas. But the idea ran into opponents in Congress who expressed concerns that \u201cthese foreigners cannot be assimilated in Alaska, and will constitute a threat to our American civilization.\u201d
\nIn one of the most infamous incidents involving Jewish refugees, the SS St. Louis, a ship loaded with Jews fleeing the Nazis, sailed to the waters off of Florida in 1939, its passengers begging Roosevelt to enter the country. But Roosevelt said no, and the ship \u2013 once close enough for passengers to see the lights of Miami \u2013 returned to Europe. Nearly half its passengers would perish at the hands of the Nazis.
\nEven after World War II, Jewish refugees and displaced persons who wanted to resettle to the United States faced tight restrictions. Overall immigration to the U.S. did not increase after the Holocaust, but in an effort to bypass congressional inaction and help war refugees, President Harry Truman ordered that existing immigration quotas be filled by displaced persons. Under the provisions of the Truman Directive, some 22,950 DPs came to the United States between late 1945 and 1947; two-thirds were Jewish.
\nIn 1948, Congress loosened immigration restrictions to allow 400,000 DPs into the United States. Most of those spots went to Christians, however; only about 20 percent, or 80,000, were Jews.
\nIn all, 137,450 Jewish refugees had settled in the United States by 1952, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
\nBy comparison, more than four years into Syria\u2019s civil war, America has accepted about 1,500 Syrian refugees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Haaretz: Back in the 1930s and \u201940s, the fear was of Nazi and Communist infiltrators sneaking in along with the refugees rather than the ISIS militants or Mexican criminals that some fear today. JTA \u2013 They were called \u201cso-called\u201d … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[161,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-immigration","category-jews"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81389"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81391,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81389\/revisions\/81391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}