September 17, 2003
Immigration and The Holocaust: Debunking The
Myth
By
Robert Locke
[Also
by Robert Locke:
Is Population Transfer The Solution To The Palestinian
Problem – And Some Others?]
It’s the
standard canard against immigration reform: the last
time this country had immigration under control
(1924-65), it caused the exclusion of Jewish
refugees—who ended up exterminated by the Nazis.
Therefore (though this would not follow even if this
premise were true) restrictions on immigration are
immoral.
Because of the understandably strong emotional
associations, this myth is highly effective. It must be
debunked forthwith.
The first thing to get clear is
this: no matter what else may be true, six million is
not the number of people who could have been saved.
The reason is simple: most of the
victims were residents of
Poland, the USSR, and other
Eastern European states that only became killing
grounds after the
German invasions of 1940-1. After these invasions,
there was no way the victims could have escaped these
countries. Before, there was no way to know that the
Germans would win and be able to start their horrors.
We have to judge the Allied
policy by what was known at the time—not by what we know
in hindsight. The Jewish populations of these countries
could hardly have been expected to say in 1935:
"Germany is about to attack, win the war, and start
exterminating us. Therefore we wish to emigrate."
Nobody knew that, or could have known, at the time.
The historical record shows that
some people indeed suspected what was coming. But more
people thought the Nazi madness would be confined within
the traditional limits of the European experience, or
that the whole thing would burn itself out and die down.
The proof: there were Jews
voluntarily returning to Germany as late as 1938.
Furthermore, no receiving country
could have been expected to take such speculations
seriously as grounds for granting an entry visa. How
would we feel about being asked to accept the entire
population of Seoul, Korea as refugees today in order to
save them from the North Korean nuclear strike of 2005?
And what if there is a nuclear strike in 2005?
Will we be responsible for their deaths?
According to Sir Martin Gilbert’s
Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust, the
numbers of Hitler’s Jewish victims break down roughly
thus:
(I have used the conventional six
million figure and Gilbert’s 5.7 million estimate
interchangeably because the difference does not affect
the force of my argument.)
The USSR constitutes an
especially clear case of why most of the victims would
not have been saved by an American open-door policy. The
simple reason: the
USSR did not generally grant exit visas. The very
act of asking for an exit visa, individually or
collectively, would have been considered a treasonous
act, likely to bring down the wrath of the
Stalinist state on the head of whatever poor
unfortunate, or ethnic group, had the temerity to try.
In consequence, the only
plausible case for rescue-by-immigration is for the Jews
of Germany itself and Austria. After 1933 (1938 in
Austria's case) they were under the rule of a government
whose hostility was unconcealed. Many of them certainly
wished to emigrate to America. Enough of them succeeded
(137,000) that to this day one can see the elderly
remnants of a
German-Jewish population in the Washington Heights
neighborhood of Manhattan.
To be fair, there is evidence
that some non-German European Jews—especially Poles but
some others too—would have taken the chance to emigrate
before WWII, just out of rational fear. But the most
this would mean, based on quantitative estimates made by
people I have talked to whose relatives were among them,
is that perhaps the total number of potential rescuees
should be as high as half a million.
The general argument stands: we
are
not talking about six million victims who could have
been saved.
So could the Jews of Germany and
Austria have been saved if they had been allowed to
emigrate to the U.S?
Well, yes and no.
Yes, they would have been saved
if they had been allowed to become immigrants. But
no—they could also have been saved if they had been
allowed to become
refugees. Which is not the same thing.
Let's
clarify this distinction: an immigrant moves to a
country permanently and becomes part of the society of
the receiving country. A refugee moves to a country
temporarily and remains a foreigner. Often, this
distinction is expressed by the physical sequestration
of the refugees in refugee camps. These exist to this
day in
Pakistan, Lebanon and other countries.
What should have happened in the
Nazi era is that the international community should have
set up refugee camps where these people could wait out
the war and either go back to Europe, or to Israel, at
war's end. But there was no compelling reason why they
should have come to the United States permanently (with
the obvious exception of a few exceptional talents like
Albert Einstein and
Leo Strauss.)
Setting
up refugee camps, of which there were hundreds after
WWII, would not have been that hard. Indeed, it was
done, albeit insufficiently. For example, the British
set up camps in Cyprus to intern 50,000 Jewish refugees
they caught trying to get into Palestine illegally.
(They probably should have let them go there, but that
is another issue.)
In
1938, a
conference was held at Evian in France by the
various allied powers to discuss what to do about the
problem of Hitler’s unwanted Jews. They made nice
humanitarian statements but did nothing. In retrospect,
this was the key moment of failure.
To be
absolutely scrupulous, the historical record contains a
few hints that there might have been some possibility of
saving some Holocaust victims even after the
German victories of 1940-1. There is evidence suggesting
that, as late as 1941, elements in the Nazi government
were willing to consider deporting Germany’s Jews,
perhaps in exchange for money, rather than exterminating
them. And there are examples of consular officials of
other countries who helped Jews escape. But this just
proves that the refugee option should have been pursued
even after the war began—not that immigration to the
U.S. was the answer.
But
wouldn’t it have been somehow terribly mean to
stick these poor people in refugee camps rather than
allowing them into America?
Sorry,
but no. To allow foreigners to immigrate to one's
country is a profound decision to share finite civic
resources in an intimate way. It is essentially a free
gift to the immigrant and is a much higher level of
transaction than merely accommodating refugees. It is
not an obligation.
On the other hand, helping
people who are under threat of extermination is what any
decent nation would do—just as a decent person would
throw a life-saver to a drowning man. But he need not
invite him to come and live in his house forever after.
So the
problem in World War II was a failure of refugee policy,
not immigration policy. The attempt to make an issue of
immigration is ex-ante politics
It
follows that the Allies certainly deserve some blame for
not having set up refugee camps—but that’s it.
America
is certainly not blameworthy for having refused Jewish
immigration prior to WWII. And it is certainly
not responsible for six million deaths, as some have
implied.
While I'm sorry to have to be so
firm, I can't helping pointing out that all these events
transpired during the
Depression years of the 1930s, when a third of
America was living in poverty, and then during the early
1940s, when a substantial part of the population was
drafted and sent off to fight.
So I can't be convinced that
refugee camps would have been inordinately worse than
what Americans were going through. I know it’s not a
pleasant life. But given that 300,000 Americans died
fighting World War II, I cannot consider it unfair.
How does
my argument apply today? There is even less reason to
subordinate immigration policy to carte-blanche
humanitarianism:
