Migration, Mobility & Borders: Porter Notes

Benevolent Empire : U.S. Power, Humanitarianism, and the World's Dispossessed Porter (2017) Introduction “The United States has long reached out to aid some of the world’s most vulnerable persons, but only in the twentieth century did the practice become an important way in which both the American state and civil society staked a claim for their country as a truly global power. The term “benevolent empire” emerged in the nineteenth century as a moniker for the explosion of Protestant missionary societies that spanned the continent and lands beyond to spread the Gospel and, often, the purported benefits of American civilization.” (1) “Benevolent Empire interrogates this phenomenon by examining political-refugee aid initiatives and related responses to humanitarian crises led by American people and institutions from World War I through the 1960s. These developments open an important window onto what has been called the Short American Century, when the United States rose to a position of a major world” (2) “Chronicling both international relief efforts and domestic resettlement programs aimed at dispossessed populations of foreign nationals, this study asks how, why, and with what effects American actors took responsibility for millions of victims of war, persecution, and political upheaval during these decades. It argues that the U.S. ascendance to and maintenance of a position of elite global power was significantly justified and fueled by the proposition that the country’s objects of philanthropic concern might potentially include any vulnerable people across the globe. Benevolent Empire is thus simultaneously a history of the United States and the world beyond, embedding its narrative in several signal markers of the twentieth century, including massive human- made crises, organized efforts to assuage their effects, and the emergence of the United States as a world power.” (2) “The book advances and challenges several issues that have animated conversations in a variety of fields of U.S. and international history. As an exploration of American governing strategies, it engages with studies in the history of politics, law, welfare, and institutions that have, for the past several decades, comprised a field often referred to as American Political Development (APD).” (2) “Benevolent Empire offers a corrective contribution to this emerging synthesis. It shows how associational governing techniques (also referred to here as “hybrid” or “public- private”) were central to how a diverse array of persons and institutions, ones collectively representing the United States, presented themselves to the world, both explicitly and implicitly, genuinely and duplic-itously: as a benevolent empire, a new kind of global hegemon. Whether implemented abroad or in the United States, aid initiatives on behalf of refugees and other vulnerable persons represented a vast project of hybrid governance.” (3) “If the massive overseas programs of humanitarian aid explored in this study signaled a dramatically new level of commitment to such endeavors by America’s state and voluntary sectors, so too did the related 1 projects of refugee admissions and resettlement represent a novel development in American immigration history” (5) “First, it demonstrates how the history of refugee admissions into the United States was tied to a broader history of humanitarian- based endeavors outside American borders on behalf of not only refugees, but also other dispossessed civilians. Second, while the state was central to many of the international and domestic dimensions of these endeavors, a fuller understanding of them requires sustained attention to the associative governing relationships forged by both state and non- state representatives and their institutions. The nature of these institutions and the relationships between them underwent fundamental transformations during the First World War, Great Depression, and Second World War.” (6-7) “Motivated variously by cultural ties, geopolitical imperatives, humanitarian sensibilities, and even economic profit, the Americans engaging in these endeavors initially dedicated most of their labors to a wide swath of those Europeans victimized by the two World Wars, Nazism, and Soviet rule, until Castro’s 1959 Cuban Revolution began turning the attention of the American refugee aid community elsewhere. Well over one million of these dispossessed and displaced people found refuge in the United States during the book’s time period, with many millions more such persons receiving American support outside U.S. territory. While the state played an important role in these operations throughout the book’s narrative arc, its commitment expanded over time, recharging long- standing debates over whether certain of the world’s vulnerable populations should be the primary responsibility of the U.S. government, its voluntary sector, or neither.” (8) “ Chapter 1 engages with what has been called “America’s Humanitarian Awakening,” the bold foray of American people, money, goods, and state power into the vast expanse of human suffering that blanketed Europe and the Middle East during World War I and, especially, its aftermath. Initially offering a wide view of the crisis itself, it surveys the multiple institutional outlets through which millions of Americans could express their philanthropic identities. Sometimes such expression meant alleviating the suffering of the war’s victims, while at others, it meant, by offering welfare assistance to combatants, greasing the machinery of war. The chapter then focuses on the ground- level experience of one young American who, like so many others, was pulled into the field of war relief through an overlapping and evolving set of loyalties and attendant empathetic sensibilities. His experiences reveal that, amid the mass of human suffering that marked large swaths of the world after the Great War, there was a hierarchy to the plight, one that could deepen and bend the commitments of those agencies and persons attempting to address the worst instances of inhumanity. Whereas in the past, however, such advocates for the most vulnerable Europeans often worked to alleviate humanitarian crises by facilitating many victims’ immigration to the United States and other receiving countries, the gates of entry were, in the 1920s, now fast closing. This development seemed especially foreboding for overseas Jews and their American advocates.” (8) Chapter 2 reveals what we might think of as an incubation “Covering the twelve years of Nazi rule, period for a nascent refugee resettlement regime. It explores the collaborations of a handful of government officials and a small army of private welfare and immigrant aid personnel who toiled below the radar to fuse federal admissions decisions on behalf of refugees with the promise of organized 2 resettlement assistance, all with the goal of providing refuge for as many European Jews as possible amid a hostile environment in the United States of tight immigration restrictions and anti- Semitism. This study complicates the traditional scholarly approach to examining U.S. refugee policies during the Nazi era, one which has, until now, emphasized the myriad missed opportunities to create a separate wing of U.S. immigration law, one sympathetic to the special needs of the dispossessed. It demonstrates that, on the contrary, and with full acknowledgment of the tragic consequences of restrictive U.S. immigration policies, when one digs below the conspicuous events of high politics, mass rallies, and public figures, the foundations of a distinct refugee policy can be unearthed, situated at least a decade earlier than when others have typically placed it. This development emerged through new working agreements between private refugee advocates and federal immigration officials, whereby the advocates could help to secure legal haven for refugees as long as those immigrants were guaranteed access to private rather than public institutional welfare support.” (8-9) “ Chapter 3 explores how an explosion of philanthropic activity by millions of Americans on behalf of World War II’s civilian victims overseas in turn prompted the federal government to capture that energy in a nearly unprecedented wave of civil society regulation. The state then “recruited” those transformed war philanthropies for America’s vast international relief and rehabilitation operations during and after the war. The chapter argues that these public- private endeavors produced a massive hybrid welfare state that was exported to a war- torn world abroad as a critical part of America’s rise to a position of global superpower. The chapter concludes by exploring the fleeting attempts of voluntary humanitarian aid personnel to use the cultural currency they had amassed during the war, a currency accrued to promote a nongovernmental style of diplomacy. This was to be a diplomacy that might maintain friendly ties across a rising Iron Curtain at a moment when state- to-state relations between East and West were in a state of geopolitical free fall. While that project failed, the ties forged between the private American agencies and the state during the war would help to fuel a decades- long maturation of a powerful network of civil society organizations engaged in humanitarian work on behalf of displaced and other dispossessed people. In other words, important seeds for what would later be called an “NGO Revolution” were sown with the deep involvement of a powerful government.” (9) “ Chapter 4 refocuses the lens on domestic resettlement, examining the U.S. Displaced Persons Program of 1948 to 1952. It asks whether America’s international hybrid welfare state, and the often- professed humanitarian and human rights rationales justifying it, could be transported back to American territory to aid the nearly half a million European “displaced persons” admitted to the United States in the country’s first Congressionally legislated large-scale refugee admissions and resettlement program. The lofty goals of American refugee advocates came under fire, within an ideologically charged early Cold War environment, as stories emerged that many thousands of Central and Eastern European refugees were being resettled in highly exploitative living and working arrangements, including as debt- bound cotton sharecroppers and sugarcane stoop laborers throughout the Deep South. Some of the same federal officials who had pushed America’s postwar vision for human and civil rights onto an international stage made a difficult choice.” (10) 3 “ Chapter 7 highlights a sea change in American refugee resettlement policies— sparked by Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba— when the federal government began, for the first time, directly channeling vast amounts of public resources to newly arrived refugees to aid in their resettlement. These developments fueled the ire of American citizens who resented the specter of non- citizens receiving welfare support from the federal government. Ultimately, though, an unusually long and large refugee influx joined with Cold War political imperatives to ensure that the federal government maintained its newfound role in resettlement. The changes initiated with the Cuban program set a mold that would largely persist into the twenty- first century. Refugee admissions would continue to be tied to special guarantees for the welfare of refugee immigrants, but with the federal government assuming a significant degree of those promises.” (11) “ The Epilogue demonstrates that, though the admission of hundreds of thousands of Indochinese beginning in the mid- 1970s represented a significant change in the geographical and cultural composition of the refugees entering the United States, American refugee affairs betrayed significant continuities in the way that the institutions of America’s state and civil society sectors would help them adjust to life in their new homeland. The federal government funneled funds through the voluntary agencies who maintained their new roles as subcontractors for the state, engaging directly with the refugees, but on a more limited basis than in the past.” (11-12) Chapter 7: “Revolutions in Cuba and Refugee Welfare” “Beginning in the 1930s, the central model for absorbing admitted political refugees into America’s economic, political, and cultural fabrics relied, with occasional exceptions, on relatively little direct government support. Instead, the country’s voluntary agencies were primarily enlisted to find admitted refugees jobs, housing, and the cultural, material, and legal support they would require in their new communities.” (182) “The American political environment at the time, however, continued to mitigate against either deporting the Cubans or refusing entry to any more. Castro’s alliance with the Kremlin had solidified both politically and economically, and the Kennedy administration seemed poised to receive substantial political capital by receiving and sheltering the refugees. The administration also had the option of permitting continued immigration but at the same time providing considerable federal resources for resettling many refugees away from southern Florida to other parts of the country, where available jobs and housing would then give them the opportunity to be self- sustaining. The Kennedy administration chose none of these options immediately, instead adopting a policy that concentrated on continuing to admit the Cubans, but initiating a federally funded welfare program for the refugees where they already were: in the Miami area.” (192) “The initial $4 million allocation came from the State Department’s International Cooperation Administration— predecessor to today’s Agency for International Development, or AID— but for many 4 years thereafter, a sympathetic Congress would regularly earmark exponentially higher amounts for the Cuban program, to be channeled directly through HEW, and upon its creation in 1979, the Department of Health and Human Services.36 Between fiscal years 1961 and 1966 alone, the Kennedy administration spent $214 million to help Cuban refugees adjust to life in America” (193) “If the new federal welfare program for Cubans offered exiles a sense of entitlement and welcome in their host country, it also bred resentment from Americans who believed that the Cubans were being treated too well by their host country. This had also occurred with the arrival of previous refugees, but now, as a considerable amount of taxpayers’ dollars were being given to the latest group of exiles, the federal government could be seen as more directly and broadly culpable.” (198) “Legislators with liberal records on immigration affairs, such as Senator Phillip Hart, grew alarmed that the rising tensions in Miami over public welfare allowed the Cubans to become “a convenient scapegoat for Miami’s ills.”55 The bold and unprecedented federal welfare program for the Cubans in Miami had assuaged their unacceptable material plight, but that same program fo-mented untenable social and political resentment. The welfare program initially designed to sustain the policy of large- scale Cuban admissions was now challenging that policy’s continued viability.” (198) “What had been a trickle of Cubans leaving Miami for other parts of the country soon grew to hundreds, and sometimes even thousands, leaving each month. While Miami remained the epicenter of America’s Cuban community, this development critically eased the pressure on the city by dispersing tens of thousands of Cuban refugees around the country. It also made the voluntary agencies centrally relevant once again to the governance of refugee resettlement in what was fast becoming the largest domestic refugee program the United States had yet seen.63 These developments not only signaled well ahead of the 1966 status adjustment law that the Cubans were beginning to be considered more as a settled immigrant population than a temporary group of asylees ready to return home upon Castro’s fall.64 They represented as well a wider sea change in American refugee affairs, a dramatic departure from the relationship between what had long been the operational heart and soul of America’s diffuse resettlement network, the voluntary agencies, and a state largely willing to commit only relatively limited resources to refugees’ adjustment in the United States. As a significant portion of the relationship between the two sectors began running along fiscal lines[…]” (201) “The decision by U.S. authorities shortly after Castro’s rise to power to begin providing legal sanctuary to thousands of Cubans has come to be understood in both popular memory and historical scholarship as not only a signal marker of Cold War gamesmanship, but also as a turning point in American immigration affairs.” (203) “But so, too, did an ever more powerfully entrenched lobby, consisting not only of the Cuban American community itself, but also of various public officials, representing both Florida and Miami, who between them bristled at the prospect of losing the significant federal funds that had been flowing their way. As had been the case for decades, American refugee affairs continued to be informed at least as much by politics and institutional arrangements as they were by human need.” (204) 5 Epilogue “Yet the effects of these changes have not always been to the benefit of the refugee immigrants. In decades past, most refugees admitted to the United States regularly enjoyed the dual benefits of, on the one hand, Cold War imperatives that valued narratives of refugees leading better lives in the United States than under communism and, on the other hand, well- established American ethnic communities moved by cultural affinities to help the newcomers adjust to their new lives. With both phenomena no longer animating American refugee advocacy as they once did, a series of other contributors have filled the void, including human rights politics and norms, more formalized collaborations between the American government and UN refugee operations, and refigured American foreign policies. Much as refugees and their advocates have welcomed these changes, this latter cluster of imperatives may have produced a more diffuse and ultimately weaker network of support for refugees, as those refugees continue to struggle against considerable obstacles to resettle comfortably and prosperously in their new homeland. This dynamic has been made even more challenging by anti- public- welfare politics and the effects of the attacks of September 11, 2001.” (206) “The policy rested on the logic that, because Washington had admitted large numbers of persons expected to require high levels of organized assistance before becoming self-supporting, the refugees were accordingly the responsibility of the national government. Also similar to Cuban refugee operations, separate and parallel federally funded cash and medical welfare programs were made available to those needy Indochinese refugees who, because of family composition or age, were not eligible for the mainstream public welfare program” (208) “While proponents of more robust refugee admissions used often powerfully articulated human rights rationales to justify a policy change, various factors once again pushed against their goal. First, the would- be refugee immigrants from Syria boasted no significant group of national comrades in the United States to vigorously advocate on their behalf. Second, political imperatives that had once driven Americans to support refugee programs they believed would convince the world of the country’s benevolence still existed, but seemingly in a less vigorous state. The prospects for increased admissions di-minished further beginning in late 2015 when extremists tied to the group calling itself the Islamic State launched attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California. The voices of support for some of the world’s most desperate refugees sounded faint amid renewed cries to keep them out of the United States.” (219) “Such observations surely do not suggest, however, that America’s concern for the dispossessed should return to periods when geopolitics and domestic political culture meant that the overwhelming proportion of persons the country assisted suffered only at the hands of America’s enemies and, until the Indochinese 6 program, boasted European ancestry. Rather, the history of those developments, for all its problems[…]” (219) 7