A rising tide of calls in the British parliament, media, and churches for Allied assistance to Jewish refugees in early 1943 prodded the British Foreign Office and the State Department to plan an Anglo-American conference on the refugee problem. They initially chose Ottawa as the site for the event,...
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The National Origins Immigration bills of 1921 and 1924 imposed severe limits on immigration to the United States, reversing the nation's tradition of welcoming the downtrodden from around the world. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, many Americans came under the sway of anthropologists and eugenicists...
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Proposals by refugee advocates to bring European Jews to the United States during World War II were often rejected by Roosevelt administration officials on the grounds that ships were not available. One official told Congressman Emanuel Celler in 1943 that to rescue Jews, the U.S. would have to “divert...
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In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, large numbers of Jews sought to flee Nazi Germany. A ship called the St. Louis, carrying 930 German Jewish refugees, set sail from Hamburg in May 1939. The passengers held visas to enter Cuba. But Cuban public opinion was turning sharply against immigration, and when...
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In early 1939, in response to the Kristallnacht pogrom, U.S. Senator Robert Wagner (D-New York) and Rep. Edith Rogers (R-Massachusetts) introduced legislation to admit 20,000 German--presumably Jewish--children to the United States, outside America's strict immigration quotas. The Wagner-Rogers bill...
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