“A Thing of Shreds and Patches:” Challenging Immigration Restriction through Refugee Legislation

At the end of World War II, Italian Americans and American Jews had been fighting against immigration restriction since 1924, when Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Act. The law instituted a national origins quota system that marked Southern and Eastern European immigrants as undesirable. After two decades of failed attempts, the intersection of the refugee crisis that followed World War II with the emerging Cold War geopolitics presented the two groups with a new opportunity to challenge the draconian immigration system. Aware of the hostile climate to comprehensive immigration reform, Italian and Jewish organizations decided to pursue immigration reform through a series of minor laws, amendments, and executive orders intended to mitigate the punitive character of the existing legislation and demonstrate the untenable nature of the overall immigration policy. Immigration reform advocates’ “patchwork” efforts were so effective that, by the beginning of the 1960s, two-thirds of the new immigrants were nonquota, half of whom were from the Eastern Hemisphere. Their efforts were possible only because American legislation did not yet distinguish immigration policy from refugee policy and only relied on ad hoc legislation to address the refugee crisis. Although their push for reform came to a halt with the passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality act, Italian and Jewish organizations’ efforts to reform refugee policy prepared them to fight for a further overhaul of American immigration policy in the 1960s.  They worked to build alliances in and out of Congress to lobby for reform and, as Italian and Jewish organizations mobilized to promote reform on their own, they also began to create a coalition with other groups interested in immigration reform to present a united front.  Although they achieved only limited success in the 1950s, this collaboration laid the foundation for broader inter-ethnic cooperation in the 1960s.