The leading cheerleader of this thinking is Donald Trump, grandson of immigrants, and he brought it to a new low this week in calling for a registry of Muslim Americans.
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I was nearly 5 years old, and soaring from the excitement of my first plane ride. I hadn’t slept a wink, despite the 10-hour flight from Moscow to NY. “Who knows who they are – a few could be ISIS”.
Of course, those men with rifles were not our executioners, but our escorts.
Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said he would welcome refugees who can “prove” they are Christians. Both crises fed the fears of foreign infiltration that have long lurked within American culture. Conclusion: we must throw open our borders.
More than 50 years later, Bennett is fighting for Syrian refugees to receive better treatment than she did when she first came to the United States as a young child.
Left: Final notice of approval for entry.
The backlash to Paris: Since the terrorist attacks in Paris, more than 30 governors (all but one of whom is a Republican) have expressed opposition to letting Syrian refugees enter their states.
“You look at the United States in the 1920s and ’30s, we built high walls, we stopped legal immigration”, he said.
“We are not going to make that mistake in our time, and voices of intolerance and voices of division are not going to cause us to do something that is against our values”, DeBlasio said.
Historical Opinion, which keeps records of past public opinion surveys, sent out certain figures from polls around the time of the Holocaust that are grim proof that those 26 governors in the USA not wanting to help the Syrians are mirroring decisions made then to abandon persons displaced by war.
Polls in 1938 and 1939 showed a majority of Americans opposed to allowing Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria into the country.
In the early years of World War II, a small group of German Jews were settled in Pender County, safe from what was soon to come in Nazi-controlled Europe.
But data also tweeted by @HistOpinion shows that two-thirds of Americans polled in January 1939 – well after the events of Kristallnacht – said they would not take in 10,000 German-Jewish refugee children. It had to return to Europe, where about 250 of the passengers eventually died. But even before the United Nations got its act together, the USA was engaging in ad hoc refugee programs during the 1940s in the aftermath of the war. But Cuba allowed entry to only about two dozen.
“The State Department cooperated in preparing a Saturday Evening Post article warning the public that ‘disguised as refugees, Nazi agents have penetrated all over the world, as spies, fifth columnists, propagandists, or secret commercial agents, ‘” he wrote. Her husband was later sent to a concentration camp in southern France.
Sol Messinger was just 7 when he stood with his father at the rail of the ocean liner St. Louis and stared into the gathering darkness.
John B. Trevor, a prominent Capitol Hill lobbyist, argued against a proposal to settle Jewish refugees in Alaska, claiming they would be potential enemies – and charging that Nazi persecution of the Jews had occurred “in very many cases … due to their beliefs in the Marxian philosophy.”… In 1939, a cruise ship of 900 Jews called the SS St Louis fled Germany and was prevented from docking in Germany and then Florida, who repeats history now and is one of the states refusing Syrian refugees.
The danger of stigmatization: Focusing our hatred and fear on refugees is not only wrong-headed and un-American, it also plays directly into ISIS’ goals. “You can think about all the other instances of looking back and saying we should have done something different”.
Such fears have been echoed by a number of elected officials since the terrorist attacks in Paris on Friday. None of them were refugees.
McCrory, who is seeking re-election next year, declared that North Carolina would not accept any refugees after authorities found a link between one alleged perpetrator of the atrocities in Paris and the wave of refugees from the civil war in Syria streaming into Europe.
The America that welcomed my family and me on October 24, 1991, was proud of its leadership role as a beacon for freedom. That is the America that I grew up in and proudly became a citizen of. We have choices to make. The story of American exceptionalism is sustained in moments like these.
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The main goal, the historian said, was to help people understand what happened in the past and have it inform the present and future.
