The U.S. Turned Jewish Refugees Away During The Holocaust. Its Refugee Policy Hasn't Changed Much Since.
The United States says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”—unless they don’t look or act like me.
Rick Perlstein October 27, 2021
Published in
November 2021
In 1975, Congressman Thomas Rees (D‑Calif.) summarized the phone calls he was getting from constituents about the war refugees housed on a Marine base in his district: “They think of the Vietnamese as nothing but diseased job-seekers.” In a Florida military town, kids joked about organizing a “Gook Klux Klan.” California Gov. Jerry Brown demanded Congress reserve “jobs for Americans first” in its refugee aid bill. Democratic Sen. Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island suggested Borneo instead: “It has the same latitude, the same climate, and would welcome some anti-Communists.”
If the United States is too racist to take care of the people who help us prosecute our wars, perhaps we shouldn’t start them in the first place.
Even our most humane administration failed the moral test of welcoming the world’s tired, huddled masses. In 1939, the cabled pleas to FDR from 937 German Jews anchored within sight of Miami went unanswered—except by the State Department (they must “await their turns”) and a Coast Guard vessel (that ensured no one swam for shore). Echoing that failure 82 years later, thousands of Haitians fleeing the aftermath of natural disaster and political chaos (to which the United States helped contribute) were sent back to further misery after many were manhandled by Border Patrol agents on horseback.
https://inthesetimes.com/article/immigration-afghan-resettlement-refugee-policy-diaspora-flee-afghanistan
