Immigration Solutions: Essay

In 1942, a 15–year–old German Jewish girl and her family vanished from the streets of Amsterdam. For two years, she and her family and four other Jews went into hiding, cramped in an annex, terrified to make a sound. On one fateful day in 1944, the group heard footsteps approaching the hidden annex. The doorknob turned, the door swung open, and three members of the German secret police stood at the entrance. The Nazis arrested the group and sent them out on cattle cars to Auschwitz. Eight people went into hiding in that secret annex; only one survived the Holocaust. The 15–year–old girl’s story, from hiding to a death camp, serves as a constant reminder of human apathy and evil. But there could have been a different story, a story in which the U.S. didn’t deny the family’s visa application, a story in which Anne Frank didn’t die in the Holocaust. The narrative of Anne Frank is similar to that of many other Jewish refugees who applied for sanctuary in America during the Holocaust but were instead forsaken. Throughout Hitler’s genocide from 1933–1945, 6 million of the 9.3 million Jews that lived in Nazi-occupied Europe were exterminated, and 176,000 of the 270,000 German Jews who applied for refuge in the U.S. were denied asylum. Given the vast amount of Jewish families that were displaced during the Second World War, it is important to examine the circumstances in the United States that led its citizens and government to abandon so many indigent refugees. Ultimately, America rejected a myriad of Jewish immigrants during the Holocaust due to stringent immigration policies, enacted before the start of World War II, which restricted the groups of people that were allowed to enter the country and limited the annual immigrant quota, and exceptions were not made to these policies because the majority of Americans did not want to take in any immigrants, Jewish or not and because prominent antisemites and antisemitic communities deliberately campaigned against U.S. rescue efforts.

U.S. Immigration Policy: Ethnic Discrimination

The foundation of America’s neglect of Jewish Holocaust refugees had developed long before the start of World War II in 1939: between 1875 and 1924, the U.S. government enacted thirteen pieces of legislation that imposed stringent restrictions on the flow of immigrants. It is not that each individual law was implemented to specifically exclude Jewish refugees; rather, the laws coalesced into an extremely discriminatory and stringent immigration system that happened to be in place at the start of the Holocaust and that therefore functioned to legally deny entry to Jewish immigrants in their time of need. Furthermore, many of these policies were passed by a large majority in Congress and signed into law by an amenable President, indicating that, at the very least, restrictive immigration policies historically had bipartisan support and were desired by politicians from all over the country. After all, the first major polling agency, Gallup Inc., did not form until 1935, and there were very few reliable polls taken before 1935, so one of the best approximations of the public’s stance on an issue at an earlier time in American history is to examine the actions and votes of politicians. America’s stance on immigration can best be summed up by Massachusetts Representative and prominent Federalist party leader Harrison G. Otis in 1797, just 21 years after America was founded: “When the country was new, it might have been good policy to admit foreigners, but it is no longer so.”

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Still, it was not until almost a century later when Congress finally acted upon Otis’s words and passed the first restrictive immigration law on March 3rd, 1875, called the Page Act of 1875 and nicknamed the Oriental Exclusion Act. This bill was named after its main sponsor, Representative Horace F. Page, who stated that the bill was enacted to, “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women,” namely prostitutes and convicts. Building upon the exclusions of Chinese women set by the Page Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 proscribed Chinese men from immigrating to the United States. Moreover, the Chinese Exclusion Act was championed by both Republicans and Democrats throughout the entire country and was resoundingly approved in Congress: 68% of voters in the Senate and 85% of voters in the House of Representatives voted in favor of this bill. American objection to Chinese immigration stemmed in part from fear that Chinese laborers would undercut American laborers by working for cheaper wages. That is, most Chinese workers who came to the United States sought to send money back to their families in China; this, coupled with debt to Chinese merchants who subsidized the laborers’ voyages to America, pressured many Chinese to work for whatever wages they were offered. In addition to job insecurity, Americans in the 1870s and 1880s associated Chinese immigrants with depravity. Even President Ulysses S. Grant, in a State of the Union speech delivered in December of 1875, warned Americans of the moral threat that Chinese immigrants posed: “I invite the attention of Congress to another, though perhaps no less an evil–the importation of Chinese women, but few of whom are brought to our shores to pursue honorable or useful occupations.” Like both Asian exclusion acts, subsequent laws will be implemented in order to protect Americans against economic and moral threats posed by immigrants (such as the Jewish people during the Holocaust).

Just three months later, in August of 1882, the United States government passed another restrictive immigration law. The Immigration Act of 1882, signed into law by President Chester Arthur, implemented an immigration tax: “[…] there shall be levied, collected, and paid a duty of fifty cents for each and every [immigrant] not a citizen of the United States…” Furthermore, this act empowered State Commission officers to examine the passengers of every immigrant ship according to a set of exclusionary criteria and bar from entry into the United States “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of him or herself without becoming a public charge.” The discriminatory powers of state officials to screen immigrants and enforce immigration laws were increased even further with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1891 and the Geary Act of 1892. The next major piece of legislation, the Immigration Act of 1903, came just two years after an anarchist assassinated President William McKinley and was signed into law by McKinley’s successor, Theodore Roosevelt. The Anarchist Exclusion Act, as this has come to be known, was passed in order to “exclude and expel from the United States aliens who are the members of the anarchistic and similar classes,” as well as deny entry to epileptics and beggars.

Though Anarchist Exclusion Act and several previous bills established the powers of government to regulate immigration, the lack of standardization, and the fraud that it bred, led Congress to formally ascribe this authority to the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization with the Naturalization Act of 1906. Moreover, this legislation established a new requirement for naturalization: the applicant must speak English. The last piece of immigration legislation passed before World War I, the Immigration Act of 1907, further restricted Asian immigration, set limitations on Muslim immigration, expanded the definition of female immigrants considered undesirable, and regulated the immigration of the “disabled” and the “diseased.” In particular, the Immigration Act of 1907 was passed largely due to the rise of American nativism, which is the philosophy of promoting the interests of native inhabitants over those of immigrants. By the 1930s, this policy expanded into isolationism, in part because Americans began to associate immigrants with Marxism and anarchism, blaming riots in major cities in from 1905–1907 on anarchist immigrants, and in part, because Americans associated immigrants with mental and physical inferiority. It was not that these immigration policies resulted in xenophobic, eugenicist, and antisemitic sentiment in the country; rather, these laws were a consequence of these attitudes. Inasmuch, the racist and xenophobic provisions of these bills function as evidence of racist and xenophobic attitudes in the American public.

U.S. Immigration Policy: Ethnic Limitation

Since Representative Harrison G. Otis’s declaration in 1797, immigration into the United States became increasingly difficult: there were eleven pieces of legislation passed between 1875 and 1918 that restricted the specific groups of people who were able to immigrate to the United States. However, it was not until after World War I, in 1921, that Congress first started to limit the number of immigrants into the United States with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. This bill, also known as the First Johnson Act in honor of its main sponsor Representative Albert Johnson, established the first immigration quota in U.S. history. This was enacted because, at the turn of the century, unprecedented amounts of immigrants flooded into the United States, which aroused public support for strict immigration laws. Though the flow of immigrants transiently slowed during World War I, immigration began to rise after the war, and with it rose anti-immigrant sentiment. Specifically, the number of immigrants that were granted entry into the United States dropped from 3,174,610 people between 1901 and 1910 to only 404,806 people between 1911 and 1920, a decrease of over 80%. Accordingly, the objective of the First Johnson Act was to temporarily limit the number of immigrants, such that the maximum number of immigrants allowed per year was equal to 3% of the total number of foreign-born citizens of that country counted in the 1910 census.

The First Johnson Act was only supposed to be a temporary measure, designed to control the flood of immigration until Congress could pass permanent legislation. The Immigration Act of 1924, nicknamed the Johnson-Reed Act, then established permanent immigration quotas that would be in place in America until the 1960s, in that (after 1927) the maximum allowed number of immigrants of a given race or ethnicity were proportional to the percentage of people with the same race or ethnicity that were in the country in the 1890 census. The Immigration Act of 1924 essentially gave the U.S. government control over the country’s ethnic composition. That is, the sponsors of the Johnson-Reed Act deliberately based immigration quotas on the 1890 census–which was not only more than 30 years out of date but also 20 years older than the quota system used in an earlier law, The First Johnson Act–because they found the ethnic ratios on the 1890 census more optimal than that of 1900, 1910, or 1920 censuses. The greatest amounts of immigrants allowed in the country were from Northern European countries like Great Britain, Ireland, Sweden, and Germany, as these were the predominant nationalities in the United States at the time of the 1890 census; conversely, Southern and Eastern Europeans were not that well represented in the 1890 census and did not have many spots on the quota system. Irving Fischer, Professor at Yale University and Chairman of the Eugenics Commission summed this up well to the Committee on Selective Immigration of the United States: “This [law] would change the character of immigration, and hence of our future population, by bringing about a preponderance of immigration of the stock which originally settled this country.”

Like other restrictive immigration bills, the Johnson-Reed Act was passed by a large majority of Congressmen, with 88% of all Senators and 83% of all Representative voting in favor; yet, it is the beliefs and qualities of the bills’ main sponsors that best exemplify American nativism and xenophobia. For example, Senator Albert Johnson, chief author, and sponsor of both Johnson Acts was a notorious antisemite and was an Honorary President of the Eugenics Research Association. When pressured about the motivation behind Johnson-Reed Act in 1927, Senator Johnson openly admitted that the bill was intended to defend against a significant threat to America, “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed.” Senator David Reed, a co-author of the Immigration Act of 1924, held similar beliefs to Congressman Johnson. Reed openly declared that the American public favors discrimination and that discrimination was not only fair but necessary to America. A eugenicist, Reed went on record stating that prior immigration laws, “[disregard] entirely those of us who are interested in keeping American stock up to the highest standard—that is, the people who were born here,” and he argued that Jewish immigrants arrived sick and starving and should therefore be kept out of America in 1933. Another eugenicist who was influential in drafting the law, Representative Elton Watkins, agreed with Fischer’s analysis: “So far as I am concerned, it would be all right to go back [to 1790] and begin anew and let nobody in this country except those who have Anglo-Saxon or Nordic blood throbbing in their veins.”