The House of Representatives just voted to turn off the Statue of Liberty’s “lamp beside the golden door” and send the “wretched refuse” back to their “teeming shore.” The tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free are no longer welcome here – except for a handful of preferred white people.
Asylum seekers, refugees, and others fleeing oppression, persecution, and poverty are not only being told to stay home, but a million or more already here are being rounded up, put in detention centers and deported, often in the dead of night and to strange lands, sometimes ripped from their families.
The targets of anti-immigration fervor
Today’s wretched refuse are usually brown or black and from the southern hemisphere.
A century ago, the targets of anti-immigration fervor were Jews, Irish, Poles, Italians, Russians, Lithuanians, and others from Eastern Europe who had fled the extreme poverty and life-threatening violence in their home communities in search of a better life.
Once in America, they found “The work was demanding and exploitative, in precarious conditions – and yet still gave them the opportunity to thrive – to live, to be free, to expect and demand justice – that they hadn’t had in the old country. For women, the independence those jobs gave them was a particular departure,” theater educator Shoshannah Boray wrote about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed many young Jewish women immigrants.
That tragedy was particularly devastating to the Jewish community of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It galvanized workers, activists and lawmakers to fundamentally change our society to give workers basic human rights and dignity.
Those immigrants would be unwelcome in today’s America.
The costs of a wall
The Big Beautiful Billionaire Benefits Bill includes over $50 billion to finish building a wall across the southern border, another $6 billion for Border Patrol agents, and $45 billion more to build detention camps to house 100,000 people the government considers undesirables plus $14 billion to fly them out of the country.
To help pay for this and tax cuts for their wealthy donors, the House Republican majority – on a party-line vote – cut over $1 trillion (with a T) from Medicaid and antipoverty food assistance programs.
Donald Trump had campaigned for president on promises of massive roundups of immigrants he would send back to their “sh**hole countries.” Anti-immigration fervor also swept the country a century ago, leading to bipartisan passage of the 1924 Immigration Act. It severely limited immigration to the United States by establishing national-origin quotas.
While Jews were not named in the bill, they were one of its clear targets as the bill focused on regions with large Jewish populations. That had a devastating impact on Jewish refugees – who were not considered White – fleeing Europe and soon the Holocaust.
Not unlike today, many Americans felt too many foreigners were flooding our cities, people who were poor, couldn’t speak English and wrongly blamed for high crime rates. More than 2.5 million Jews, mostly Ashkenazi from Eastern Europe, came to America between 1880 and 1924, according to the New York’s Eldridge Street Synagogue Museum. That included all my grandparents and the ancestors of most Jews in this country today. Often called “greenhorns” (like the new, soft horns of young, inexperienced cattle), immigration records listed their race as Hebrew.
Jews were fleeing pogroms, poverty, and persecution in Eastern Europe. Often having no money or skills, they were just seeking the golden medina, the land of opportunity. Not only weren’t they Christian but they weren’t considered White either.
History of immigration
Prior to 1924, immigration was largely open. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1880 permitted Chinese immigration but barred citizenship, a policy subsequently extended to all Asians.
The Immigration Act of 1924 set quotas at 2% of national origin of each nationality living in the United States in 1890. The intent was to favor those from Northern and Western Europe while restricting those from Southern and Eastern Europe, where most Jews lived, as well as Asia.
This reflected the growing isolationism many Americans embraced following World War I. The America First movement of that period is not dissimilar to its present incarnations. Leading elements of the MAGA movement and White nationalist groups cite the Great Replacement Theory, a debunked white nationalist conspiracy notion accusing non-whites of flooding America to take it over from White Christians of Western European descent.
Barely a decade after the 1924 law, this toxic mixture of xenophobia, racism, and White nationalism slammed shut America’s doors to millions of refugees facing the rising tide of Nazism and fascism, including passengers aboard the SS St Louis. The German liner, carrying 907 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939, was turned away by Cuba and the United States, forcing it to return to Nazi-occupied Europe, where many of its passengers were murdered in Hitler’s death camps.
Denial of asylum to refugees
Once again, the United States is denying asylum to refugees and sending them back to places where they face persecution, economic hardship, discrimination, and even death. Some are not being returned to the countries they fled but to foreign prisons or to places where they do not even speak the language. Many are taken to remote centers and flown off in the middle of the night, denied any hearing in immigration courts, with no access to family or lawyers.
A glaring exception has been the case of 59 White South African Afrikaners who were granted expedited refugee status and given a fast track to citizenship. Trump falsely claimed that they were victims of white genocide, a charge adamantly denied by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Truthout, a nonprofit news organization, contends that Trump “is weaponizing the asylum process to further fuel racial division and entrench a white nationalist vision for the United States — in the name of ‘human rights,’ no less.”
Look beyond his exaggerated hype about immigrants from south of the border being “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists.” As it was a century ago, immigration policies are driven by racism, not national security. Today’s focus is keeping out non-whites and other undesirables.
Jews are pawns in this administration’s immigration and human rights policies. Administration actions ostensibly combating antisemitism are, in fact, part of the effort to muzzle Trump’s foes among immigrants, minorities, universities, political opponents, and the media. This president has a history of antisemitic social media posts, accusing Jews of dual loyalty, embracing notorious antisemites, spreading bigotry and intolerance, and embracing antisemitic nativists and militias – and his administration is chock full of appointees with histories of antisemitism.
This administration will defend Jews against antisemitism when it suits its larger goals and throw us under the bus in a heartbeat when that better serves them. It matters little what color our skin is, or what race we are categorized as at that moment, or whether we vote blue or red.
The writer is a Washington-based journalist, consultant, lobbyist, and a former legislative director at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.