Lessons From The Past

Should the Government allow 10,000 refugees to come to the United States?

At first glance one might think this poll reflects public sentiment on the growing Syrian refugee crisis following the tragic attacks on Paris last week;  but that would be incorrect.

Two-thirds of Americans polled by Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion in January 1939 said they would not take in 10,000 German Jewish refugee children. Fewer than 5 percent of Americans surveyed at the time believed that the United States should raise its immigration quotas or encourage political refugees fleeing fascist states in Europe — the vast majority of whom were Jewish — to voyage across the Atlantic. Two-thirds of the respondents agreed with the proposition that "we should try to keep them out.

In May, 1939, the SS St. Louis, a ship of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution left Hamburg, bound for Havanna, Cuba. Without their knowledge, their landing passes had been voided by the Cuban President, Laredo Bru. When the ship arrived in Cuba, the passengers were not allowed to debark. Representatives from the Jewish Joint Distribution committee negotiated with the Cuban government, but to no avail. The passengers appealed to President Roosevelt to allow them to land in the United States, but they were again turned away. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where two-thirds of the passengers would perish in the Holocaust.

What might have happened had the US reacted differently?

What does the past teach us about the events of today?