Comments Elsewhere

“The U.S. immigration system severely limited the number of German Jews admitted during the Nazi years to about 26,000 annually — but even that quota was less than 25% filled during most of the Hitler era, because the Roosevelt administration piled on so many extra requirements for would-be immigrants. . . . Why did the administration actively seek to discourage and disqualify Jewish refugees from coming to the United States? Every president’s policy decisions are shaped by a variety of factors, some political, some personal. In Roosevelt’s case, a pattern of private remarks about Jews, some of which I recently discovered at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem and from other sources, may be significant. . . . In 1923, as a member of the Harvard board of directors, Roosevelt decided there were too many Jewish students at the college and helped institute a quota to limit the number admitted. In 1938, he privately suggested that Jews in Poland were dominating the economy and were therefore to blame for provoking anti-Semitism there. In 1941, he remarked at a Cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon. In 1943, he told government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa that the number of local Jews in various professions ‘should be definitely limited’ so as to ‘eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany.’ There is evidence of other troubling private remarks by FDR too, including dismissing pleas for Jewish refugees as ‘Jewish wailing’ and ‘sob stuff’; . . . But the most common theme in Roosevelt’s private statements about Jews has to do with his perception that they were ‘overcrowding’ many professions and exercising undue influence. “This attitude dovetails with what is known about FDR’s views regarding immigrants in general and Asian immigrants in particular. FDR’s decision to imprison thousands of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II was consistent with his perception of Asians as having innate racial characteristics that made them untrustworthy. Likewise, he apparently viewed with disdain what he seemed to regard as the innate characteristics of Jews. Admitting significant numbers of Jewish or Asian immigrants did not fit comfortably in FDR’s vision of America. “Other U.S. presidents have made their share of unfriendly remarks about Jews. . . . But the revelation of Franklin Roosevelt’s sentiments will probably shock many people.” It should only shock people whose ideas about the private views of political figures come from extrapolations from war propaganda and ideological mythology, rather than from paying any attention at all to what they consistently, publicly did. This was one of the more notorious public policy decisions by the United States government as the Holocaust began in Europe; Roosevelt was in charge of that, and he chose to do that, and nobody should be surprised if his private comments end up lining up pretty well with his immensely harmful public actions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis This is, incidentally, part of the reason why government borders are violence and a bloody stain on the face of the earth.