Race, Refuge, and Rescue: US Immigration Policy Reconsidered

The oft-voiced expectation that the United States should have recognized the refugee crisis that was prompted by the rise of Nazi Germany as exceptional and opened its borders tends to ignore a much more fundamental and disturbing reality: the policies and practices that affected Jewish refugees occurred at a time of intense racial tension, panic, segregation, and outright violence in the United States. Debates on the resettlement of European Jewry occurred within as part of a broader national conversation on the changing definition of whiteness, the status of Americanness, and the question of who deserved to have full rights of citizenship before the law. Examinations of the United States and the refugee crisis prior to Holocaust, therefore, cannot be restricted to considerations of antisemitism alone. The ambivalence that did exist on nearly all sides of the debate concerning Jewish refugees was shaped in part by shifting perceptions of Jews’ racial composition, the very fraught racial policies in America after World War I, and questions regarding the United States’s imperial ambitions. This paper will demonstrate how structural racism in America–as reflected in post-World War I legislation that imposed an immigration quota system—governed the fate of many Jews seeking to escaping Nazi Germany. In its desire to preserve white racial supremacy and to isolate the country from foreigners, the United States Congress had established a policy that exacerbated the refugee crisis in pre-World War II Europe and provided Hitler with evidence to claim that the world had turned its back on German Jews.