Yes, This is America
Whenever I see someone say, of Trump’s cruel policies towards asylum seekers and their children, “This is not America,” I think of Breckenridge Long, the U.S. State Department’s man in charge of administering immigration laws from 1939 to 1944. “He was an isolationist, willing to accommodate Berlin when necessary, a sophisticated anti-Communist, an anti-Semite, and a self-righteous paranoid who interpreted criticism of his work as a personal affront,” writes Jamie Sayen, the author of “Einstein in America: The Scientist’s Conscience in the age of Hitler and Hiroshima.” All of the following quotes are taken from Chapter 6, “Refugees,” of Sayen’s book.
“Even before [Long] joined the State Department in 1939, the restrictionist forces had been so successful in blocking rescue attempts that the German quota for 1932–1938 was not filled […] From 1939 to 1943 Long almost single-handedly blocked Jewish immigration. Justifying his actions by exploiting the spy hysteria, he interpreted the 1924 [immigration] law with merciless rigidity and invented numerous legal ploys to delay processing papers for those who were lucky enough to qualify for a visa.
On June 26, 1940, Long wrote in a departmental memo: “We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone the granting of visas. One of Long’s tricks was the invocation (or failure to invoke) Section 7(C) of the 1924 immigration law which required the applicant to furnish a police certificate of good character for the preceding five years “if available.” The police in most cases were, of course, the Gestapo.”
“In 1938–1939 a committee whose membership included Otto Nathan and the daughter of Rabbi Stephen Wise (Einstein was an inactive member) managed to have special legislation introduced into Congress to permit the admission of 20,000 Central European children to the United States outside of the yearly quota. Known as the Wagner-Rogers Bill, it was supported by Eleanor Roosevelt and most religious groups, but was denounced by patriotic groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the American Legion. After President Roosevelt, guided by State Department advice, had written on the bill “File, no action” it was killed in committee by one of Long’s allies. More than forty years later, memory of the story was “heartbreaking” for Nathan. Long, however, viewed sympathy for refugee children as “an enormous psychosis.” […]
“The Einstein Archives overflow with letters from refugees, and Einstein did everything in his power to help them,” Sayen writes. “He wrote affidavits for so many, despite his own limited resources, that by the late thirties his signature on an affidavit no longer carried much weight with the authorities. For others, he wrote letters to relatives, if they had any, or to wealthy nonrelatives who were willing to sponsor strangers.” […]
“By the summer of 1941, Long’s policies, callously and efficiently implemented by most of the American consuls in Europe, had succeeded in closing off the United States to all but a few refugees. In June Long managed to push a law through Congress that permitted the consuls to deny visas to anyone they felt would “endanger the public safety of the United States.” At the same time the “close relatives” edict made it almost impossible for anyone without relatives in the States to enter America.
Because of the imaginative steps taken to complicate the visa procedure, it now took six months to process each application. The screening procedure required a biographical statement, two financial statements, and supporting letters of reference from two United States citizens. The applicant and the affiants were then investigated for security clearance. After the outbreak of war, the State Department required signers of affidavits to come to Washington to face the interrogation of what Nathan has described as the “most unfriendly committee I ever saw,” which asked such questions as “For whom did you vote in the last election?”
“The application was then screened by an interdepartmental committee with representatives from the State Department, Justice, the FBI, Military Intelligence, and the Office of Naval Intelligence. If the application managed to pass this bureaucratic maze, the consuls in Europe still had the authority to deny the visa, and, in an effort to gain the favor of their superiors, often did just that. In 1939 and 1940 the combined German-Austrian quota was 27,370, and in both years it was filled. In 1941, with America still neutral, less than half of the legally possible visas were issued; in 1942 the figure fell to 17.8 percent. The State Department, in fact, managed, between 1933 and 1943, to leave unfilled more than 400,000 places within the quota for countries which were under Nazi domination.”
