Connections: Closing America’s Doors
Nothing upsets me more about the nastiness coming from Donald J. Trump and Ted Cruz, the presumptive front-runners for the Republican nomination for president, than their idea that Muslims should be barred from entering the country. Jews were virtually barred once, too, and it wasn’t all that long ago.
Senator Cruz thinks only Christian Syrians should be allowed in, and he has the nonsensical idea that the more than four million Syrian refugees “should be resettled in the Middle East, in majority Muslim countries.” I am frightened by even a hint of a religious test for who should be admitted to this country not only because it is immoral, but because I am old enough to remember World War II.
During his long tenure as president Franklin Roosevelt was held in high regard by my parents and just about everyone they knew. What they didn’t know was his failure to open America’s doors to European Jews seeking to escape the Holocaust. The Great Depression and fears that Jewish refugees might alternately become financial burdens on the state or take away jobs have been described as reasons why the American public did not favor admitting Jews. You can decide for yourself if religion had anything to do with it.
The civilized world may not have been aware of Hitler’s “final solution” when German Jews were stripped of citizenship in 1935 or when on Nov. 9, 1938, Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, occurred, in which Jews were viciously attacked throughout Germany. But surely it was a warning of what was to come.
President Roosevelt and the State Department were not moved. More than 300,000 mostly Jewish Germans applied for visas in 1939. Only a little over 20,000 were approved under the federal quota.
The president remained silent when the St. Louis, a ship loaded with refugees seeking asylum in this country, was turned away, with concentration camps the eventual destination for many of those aboard. Nor did mounting evidence about the death camps sway American policy even after we entered the war.
It wasn’t until 1944, and because of the intervention of a Jewish secretary of the treasury, Henry Morganthau Jr., that Roosevelt finally urged Congress “to take all measures . . . to rescue victims of enemy oppression in imminent danger of death.”
My maternal grandfather, who had emigrated from eastern Europe long before I was born, warned me that I shouldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t Jewish. As a child during the war years, I was sure he was mistaken, but I came to understand why he thought as he did after the war, when a couple with tattooed numbers on their arms who survived a concentration camp came to live nearby.
The process by which refugees are considered for resettling in the United States today is more humane, I suppose, although it takes between 18 months and two years. The United Nations Refugee Agency first refers people for United States visa consideration. By November of 2015, it had referred 22,427 Syrians, although only 2,290 were admitted to this country since 2011. With more than 4 million Syrians among other refugees seeking new lives, even President Obama’s suggestion that we take in 10,000 is paltry.
I wonder what those in future generations will think of that.