Contested Terrain
Debating Refugee Admissions in the Cold War
In January 2016 the New York Times Magazine published a feature story by Elizabeth Griswold about the admission of Syrian refugees, or lack thereof, to the United States. Titled “Why Is It So Difficult for Syrian Refugees to Get into the US?” the piece explored the limited commitments made by the Obama administration to refugees from Syria and the labyrinth of screening measures and security obstacles that prospective migrants were encountering. The subtext was that the American response to migrants fleeing the civil war in Syria was atypical and belied the traditional openness of the United States to refugees from around the world. Yet an examination of the history of refugee admissions to the United States during the Cold War suggests instead that the debate about Syrian refugees was, in fact, quite representative of historic discussions around welcoming refugees as potential citizens.
Debates about whether to assist certain groups of refugees—and how best to do so—characterized discussions among US government officials and religious and secular humanitarians in the postwar period, especially prior to the milestone year of 1965. These conversations became increasingly politicized during the tension-seeped days of the early Cold War.1 Supporters of refugee admissions argued their case by insisting alternatively on reforms to US immigration laws or the provision of financial and social resources to orchestrate the resettlement of refugees across borders. Although religious and secular humanitarians generally framed their arguments in terms of both US responsibility and the potential benefits that refugee admissions portended, there was no consensus among supporters about whether admitting or resettling refugees was in fact the most desirable or effective form of humanitarian assistance.
Differences in opinion among advocates, and evolving notions about what constituted appropriate assistance and what such help signified, influenced the manner in which appeals to officials in Washington were formulated and pursued. This, in turn, shaped the legal landscape in which refugee admissions and reforms to American immigration law were developed prior to 1965. The question of whether assisting migrants through admission opportunities was a viable, and helpful, contribution to humanitarian crises around the world shaped the context in which proponents advanced proposals about refugees throughout the Cold War, particularly those traditionally marginalized in US immigration policy, and ultimately shaped the modest refugee reforms embodied in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
The 1965 act removed the national quotas that had shaped migrant admissions to the United States since 1924. In signing the act into law, President Lyndon Johnson declared that it “repaired a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice.”2 Indeed, the 1965 Act has been roundly celebrated for putting an end to race-based discrimination. Recent scholarship, however, has pointed to the limitations of the legislation in dismantling exclusionary structures.3 This is particularly true of refugee admissions.4 Until 1965, refugee admissions were developed in an ad hoc manner, and the US government relied heavily on religious groups and NGOs to provide material, social, and spiritual support to new arrivals.5 The 1965 amendments created a slight opening for refugees as a distinct category of migrants, allowing for the admission of a maximum of 10,200 refugees per year. Preference was given to those with relatives in the United States.6 The moderate changes expressed in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act resulted from the differing, and sometimes conflicting, visions that various religious and secular organizations advanced as their ideas and strategies about how best to assist the world’s refugees evolved throughout the Cold War. Exploring how arguments put forward by religious groups and NGOs, including the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the National Lutheran Council, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals Inc. (ARCI) and the United Presbyterians, changed over the course of two decades, this chapter highlights the many divergent viewpoints on refugee admissions during the Cold War and how these contributed to carving out a small space for refugees in the scope of the much-fêted 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
After the Second World War, the United States and other white settler societies experienced a growing conflict between their ongoing repression of indigenous peoples, their restrictive and selective immigration programs, which worked to displace and dispossess indigenous peoples, and an increasingly pervasive global humanitarian agenda around refugees. Built on immigration policies that were at their core exclusionary, rather than inclusionary, white settler societies sought to protect the hierarchy of desirable migrants and settlers established by their immigration programs even as they paid lip service to the evils of race-based discrimination and the merits of humanitarian initiatives, including refugee assistance, admission, and resettlement.7
At the core of postwar humanitarian campaigns were the efforts of religious and secular organizations, which built on earlier strategies to assist refugees in order to convince American policymakers and politicians of the merits of the diverse solutions they envisioned for refugees. This work required concerted effort, as Congress had proved to be almost entirely resistant to the idea of admitting refugees to the United States throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. Although Presbyterian and Catholic church groups experienced some success in sponsoring and supporting refugees, admissions were only facilitated on an ad hoc basis. Campaigns to secure the entry of Jewish refugees were generally rebuffed.8 Renewed and intensified efforts to secure the admission of Jewish refugees from Europe after the Second World War were therefore critical in shaping the postwar humanitarian landscape in the United States.9 Campaigns by the AJC—established in 1906 in response to religious persecution in Russia—shaped the landscape in which subsequent reforms were undertaken.10 These campaigns evolved as the AJC grew from an organization with a few select members to a more broad-based organization focused on social justice and human rights issues, including “education and ‘prejudice reduction’ programs.”11
In the face of sustained congressional opposition to refugee admissions but with the support of groups such as the AJC, President Truman issued an executive order, remembered as the “Truman Directive,” on December 22, 1945. This directive initiated a practice of executive discretion on refugee admissions, a practice that endured for decades. The order designated existing immigration quotas for displaced persons. As a result, almost twenty thousand people, the majority of whom were Jewish, were admitted to the United States between December 1945 and 1947. The AJC and other advocates built on this initial effort and lobbied Congress for further admissions emphasizing the need for emergency legislation that would “alleviate the distress of non-Jews as well as Jews.”12 Although the AJC was preoccupied first and foremost with the plight of Jewish people in Europe, it recognized that to gain any traction with Congress, it needed to build a coalition of supporters among Catholic and Protestant churches.
This mindset led to some progress, but the limited quotas meant there was also considerable interfaith conflict about admissions—most obviously with the passage of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act.13 The legislation allowed for the admission of two hundred thousand displaced persons or refugees, as defined by the International Refugee Organization, in its first two years of operation. The legislation was highly restrictive, limiting eligibility to persons who had been in camps in Europe before December 22, 1945.14 Moreover, the Displaced Persons Act did not substantively increase the total numbers of people admitted to the United States. It was therefore “a way to admit refugees without admitting more people than the ceiling allowed.”15 Two thousand visas were set aside for nonquota refugees, and another three thousand were designated for orphaned children. Relatives were given preference, and any excess admissions per country were mortgaged against future entries. Four hundred thousand displaced persons were ultimately admitted to the United States under this legislation.
Yet even though it was numerically significant, the 1948 Displaced Persons Act was troubling for the manner in which it discriminated against Jewish migrants. The 1948 Act favored “agricultural workers,” a category that rendered many Jewish refugees inadmissible. Members of the AJC were dismayed by the restrictive nature of the legislation, calling it a “disaster,” while other religious groups were relieved that the needs of groups they favored, such as Baltic refugees, were addressed.16 The 1948 Act’s discriminatory provisions made Jewish activists all the more committed to securing a sustained commitment for refugee admissions. In a letter to President Truman in July 1948, AJC officials declared that the Displaced Persons Act “contains provisions which in their effect, if not in each case by design, impose the most rigorous limitations upon the admission to the United States of Jewish displaced persons. The fact that the bill does not establish religious quotas in no [ways] reduce its discriminatory effects.”17 In calling for a series of ten amendments to “re-write this discriminatory and exclusionist bill into a genuine displaced persons bill,” the AJC emphasized that Congress needed to introduce legislation that was “worthy of our great democratic nation and its traditions as a haven for the oppressed.”18
Appeals to an imagined history of refuge and sanctuary were instrumental in advancing the case for refugee admissions, particularly as the United States sought to position itself as a kinder, gentler nation vis-à-vis the Soviet threat in the emerging Cold War.19 Amended in 1950 to be more favorable to Jewish refugees, the 1948 Displaced Persons Act was the last piece of legislation that emerged specifically out of the European refugee crisis. From then on, refugee initiatives were bound up explicitly with the politics of the Cold War; the language and strategies of groups invested in securing refugee admissions evolved accordingly.20
In contrast to its efforts with regard to the 1948 Displaced Persons Act, the AJC used pointed Cold War rhetoric to advance its agenda around refugee admissions in 1953, the year the Eisenhower administration introduced and passed the Refugee Relief Act. With the Refugee Relief Act, the US government sought to carve out space (and secure propaganda points) for the admission of refugees from communism. The 1953 Refugee Relief Act allowed for 205,000 “non-quota” immigrant visas to be issued until December 31, 1956, and included room for up to three thousand Asian refugees in the Far East as well as two thousand visas specifically for Chinese refugees from the People’s Republic of China. With these provisions, the Refugee Relief Act essentially “assimilated” refugee policy “back into the mainstream of immigration politics, where generosity was measured out according to its potential domestic effect.”21
The Refugee Relief Act was a critical piece of legislation, for it followed on the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which had preserved the national-origins quota system almost intact.22 For the AJC and other Jewish organizations, the refugee legislation represented an opportunity to undo some of the work of the previous year. In a joint memorandum to AJC offices across the country, Sidney Liskofksy and Sol Rabkin, active human-rights campaigners, noted that despite the progress suggested by the Refugee Relief Act, the national origins legislation remained “the chief obstacle to the orderly handling of this emergency immigration program.”23 Rather than dwell on the quota system, however, AJC leaders underscored the importance of adopting “the bill on humanitarian grounds and on the further ground that it will enhance America as well as serve as an example to other countries in a position to receive immigrants.”24 The AJC was not alone in evolving its campaigns on refugee admissions and marrying them to a Cold War paradigm. The National Council of Jewish Women, the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society, and the United Service for New Americans, in a statement to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, explained:
We recognize that even the admission of 240,000 persons in two years will not fully solve the problem of the refugee, the displaced and the unsettled. However, this action has great significance for the world as a demonstration of the interest and responsibility of the US and as a stimulus to other receiving countries which look to the United States for leadership in the solution of such problems. We believe that it will hearten the displaced and unsettled persons including those who have risked their lives fleeing from Communist terror to seek refuge in the Western democracies.25
The three organizations then proceeded to tie immigration reform and the admission of Jewish refugees, especially those who had moved to China during World War II while Shanghai remained an open port, to the principled role they envisioned for the United States as a humanitarian leader internationally. Although they, and the AJC, continued to advocate on behalf of Jewish refugees in particular, the rhetoric of their advocacy campaigns had evolved in a few short years from merit-based claims to assistance tied to the experience of Jewish refugees in World War II, and then to broader appeals for refugee admissions based on the politics of the global Cold War and the role that they believed the United States should be playing in the battle against communism.26
The emphasis that religious and secular organizations placed on the United States as a role model with regard to the plight of refugees globally was unique among white settler societies. Elsewhere, such as in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, advocates spoke about the need to demonstrate a commitment to humanitarianism, but without referencing a global leadership position, as was the case in the United States.27 As a result, the attention to America’s profile internationally meant that the issue of refugee admissions to the United States became profoundly politicized—to the delight of some humanitarian leaders, and the dismay of others.
The conflict over politicized refugee admissions was perhaps most evident in the case of Chinese refugees from the People’s Republic of China. Chinese migrants had been excluded from permanent settlement in the United States for decades, and, as in the case of other white settler societies, it took decades more to dismantle the formal structures of exclusion.28 The 1790 Naturalization Act, for instance, had made it impossible for migrants from Asia to become naturalized; the 1875 Page Act had prohibited the admission of forced laborers and prostitutes before the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act banned almost all permanent migration from China. The exclusion era formally ended in 1943 with the Magnuson Act, which established an annual quota of 105 Chinese migrants globally. The act was a piece of compromise legislation, reflecting China’s allied status during World War II as well as the American government’s continued anxiety about admitting subjectively large numbers of Chinese migrants.
Cold War security concerns in particular meant that fear continued to drive migration policy in the United States even after the formal end of the exclusion era. Political turmoil in Asia compounded these anxieties, as did the movement of large numbers of people in the wake of various wartime upheavals, including the decolonization of many parts of Southeast Asia. Massive displacement followed the expansion and defeat of the Japanese empire as well as decolonization conflicts in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The decade-long civil war in China, which culminated in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, propelled millions of people to seek refuge in Hong Kong and Taiwan.29 In subsequent years, humanitarians in Hong Kong and the Guomindang government in Taiwan worked persistently to secure humanitarian support for Chinese refugees. It was a difficult course, as barriers to entry in the United States and other white settler societies limited the possibility of refugee admissions.
The inclusion of Chinese refugees and other refugees in Asia within the scope of the 1953 Refugee Relief Act was a token nod toward the large and pressing humanitarian situations in the region. Somewhat paradoxically, these limited openings spawned intense debates about the best way to assist refugees in Asia. The possibility of admitting Chinese refugees gave proponents the opportunity to campaign for their vision of a liberal, democratic, and humanitarian America based on their perception of how best to assist a migrant group previously marginalized in US government policy, and by American society more generally. Still, some humanitarians disapproved of using refugee admissions to cast American society in a particular light, believing that admissions, and resettlement programs in particular, did not effectively address the needs of refugees themselves. The substance of what constituted a humanitarian nation was very much up for debate. As a result, there was open conflict between groups such as the AFSC, which believed in long-term relief projects in Hong Kong (where many Chinese migrants had sought shelter) and ARCI, which sought to exploit the humanitarian situation in the British colony for political gain domestically and internationally.
The AFSC was established in 1917, following the lead of Quakers who had been involved in war-relief efforts in Britain from the early 1800s.30 The original premise of the organization was to provide conscientious objectors with the opportunity for nonmilitary service in providing aid; the AFSC only worked belatedly on the question of refugee reception in the United States. In 1938 the AFSC established a refugee committee in the wake of Kristallnacht. However, an apathetic support base hindered the intended largesse of the organizers’ efforts. Staff were engaged with the issue of refugee resettlement, but “rank and file Quakers were uninterested.”31 The organization’s focus therefore shifted toward providing welcome programs through “hostels, American seminars, summer camps, college workshops, and other educational projects”, which were designed to “Americanize” and assist the few arriving refugees from Europe in order to send a signal to “the large relief agencies [about] the ‘Quaker Way’ in which refugees should be treated.”32 Throughout their work with refugees, the AFSC sought to maintain a distinct identity and voice on the question of relief work. This led to strained relations with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in postwar Europe, as the AFSC pursued “spiritual reconstruction” in the context of an organization dedicated to “physical relief.”33 For this reason, the AFSC was much more inclined to operate independently in the field of refugee relief, as it did in Asia.
The AFSC was active in China during the civil war; however, after 1951, it shifted its operational base to Hong Kong, joining other Western missionaries and humanitarians who were expelled or barred from entering the People’s Republic of China. Determined to continue their work in Asia, many religious and secular organizations relocated their offices to Hong Kong with the idea of waiting out the political turmoil on the Chinese mainland. Once in the British colony, however, the AFSC and others became attuned to the humanitarian need created by the movement of almost a million people in the short period following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. As a result, the AFSC gradually became invested in providing relief services in the colony, focusing its attention on social welfare programs such as community daycares and pursuing critical infrastructure projects, including the construction of roads and paths that facilitated agricultural production among some of the more rural settlements.
Although the bulk of the US government’s attention was on refugees in Europe and defectors from the Soviet Union, humanitarian appeals and campaigns for international support to provide for Chinese refugees did reach sympathetic ears in Washington. Working with Western humanitarian organizations in Hong Kong, including the AFSC as well as the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation, the US government gradually increased the financial and material resources it dedicated to humanitarian aid in the region. In 1954 President Eisenhower introduced the Far East Refugee Program (FERP), born of the United States Escapee Program introduced two years prior to encourage defections from the Soviet Bloc.34
The Escapee Program helped qualified individuals who were fleeing from communist rule to resettle to the United States. However, FERP, as it operated in Hong Kong, was focused less on encouraging defections, which required admission and settlement in the United States, and more on relief and rehabilitation projects. These initiatives ranged in scope from medical clinics and programs to an array of food distribution projects.35 FERP was designed to advance the image of the United States as a humanitarian nation without requiring the government to invest heavily in this work. Instead, the program provided financial support to private US interests who then delivered relief and support to the refugees in question. The ultimate aims of the program, as well as this hands-off approach, were understood by all levels of government involved in the delivery of refugee programs. As Richard Brown, head of the Refugee Migration Unit in Hong Kong noted, “the bulk of support for refugee assistance throughout the world should come from the free will private offerings of the American citizens rather than by through government subsidy.”36 Through FERP, the Refugee and Migration Unit in Hong Kong provided funds to a number of NGOs in the colony and “assisted with the resettlement abroad of over 19,000 refugees and … provided direct help in the local integration of over 156,000 refugees.”37 Organizations such as the AFSC were wary of the program’s political overtones and were therefore reluctant to accept FERP funds.38 At the other end of the spectrum, organizations such as ARCI embraced the political nature of refugee admissions to the United States and exploited this opening to push for the resettlement of refugees from Hong Kong to America.
ARCI was established in 1952, the inspiration of Ernest Moy, a Chinese American and avowed anticommunist with close ties to the Republican Party, who dreamed up the idea of an organization to identify and resettle “intellectual refugees” to the United States. The result was ARCI, a small organization with powerful supporters that successfully lobbied for Chinese refugee resettlement to the United States. The organization’s focus was explicitly on “intellectuals,” defined as anyone who had studied at an American university. This careful scoping tapped into the long history of Chinese students abroad and was practical as well as strategic: “intellectuals” were desirable citizens.39 Moreover, there was significant propaganda value in having intellectuals resettled to the United States, dovetailing with Moy’s beliefs that supporting refugees was a critical element in the battle against communism.
In addition to advancing America’s propaganda efforts, ARCI regularly used the idea of saving refugees as a way of garnering financial and political support for its work. For instance, in September 1942, ARCI’s chair (the former medical missionary and congressman Walter Judd) wrote, “It is in our power to give opportunity for a new life to many Chinese men and women who have made the greatest sacrifices to remain free. If we stand aside they will be destroyed or absorbed and enslaved. Nothing can be of greater importance to those of us who are concerned with the world-wide struggle to preserve freedom for all mankind.”40 Judd and other ARCI leaders wanted the US government to resettle refugees from Hong Kong for a number of reasons. For one, they firmly believed that it was in the best interest of people who had escaped from communist oppression to be given opportunities in the United States. They also saw refugee resettlement as critical to advancing the battle against communism and shoring up the moral authority of the United States globally. Their ambitions were complicated, however, by the fact that resettling refugees was expensive. As one internal ARCI memorandum observed, the costs involved went beyond the act of resettlement; they emerged the moment that a commitment was made to a family “in order to resettle people they have to be supported, kept alive, their families kept together during the period of weeks, months and sometimes years before actual resettlement is accomplished.”41
The cost of resettlement and the realities of FERP and existing immigration legislation meant that there was actually very little scope for assisting refugees in Asia through resettlement programs. Indeed, the gulf between rhetoric and practice proved almost insurmountable. Resettlement was limited and strategic, and most of the refugees that ARCI worked with in Hong Kong were ultimately resettled to Taiwan between 1952 and 1969.42 It was one thing to voice support for refugees in Asia but quite another to actively facilitate the admission of persons long excluded on racial, economic, and political grounds. Still, despite their limited success, ARCI staff insisted that the resettlement of even a few refugees to the United States was evidence of America’s benign character and its welcome embrace of people from all parts of the world.43
The politics of resettling and admitting refugees during the Cold War simultaneously advanced and undermined US efforts to represent a more humanitarian image of the country. The resettlement and admission of refugees was measured in terms of how they might refract an improved perception of the United States domestically and globally. As policy documents made clear, assistance (financial, material, or via resettlement) would “be undertaken only for refugee groups or individuals where such assistance demonstrably contributes to the advancement of US political, psychological or intelligence objectives.”44 For staff of the AFSC such objectives undermined the humanitarian character of the supposed relief efforts.45 Staff considered the use of refugee relief for political gain to be the equivalent of “political warfare” that did little to benefit the refugees themselves.46 In private correspondence, AFSC members observed that because the “large numbers of Chinese” leaving China appeared to symbolize “a condemnation of the Red Regime,” the US government had developed an interest in the migrants. The concern was that the people of Hong Kong had become “politically exploitable.”47 Despite such criticisms, and even though AFSC staff in Hong Kong were generally opposed to resettlement initiatives given the political and financial costs and the limited number of people who were assisted, a number of local AFSC chapters in the United States did pursue resettlement opportunities, believing in the merits of welcoming refugees within and giving weight to claims of humanitarian generosity.48
As suggested by the split within the AFSC on refugee admissions, the question of how best to provide humanitarian assistance to the world’s refugees was one that combined short-term concerns with broader considerations about the implications of ad hoc and inherently politicized admissions. In contrast to the efforts of local chapters, AFSC leaders advocated for long-term admission opportunities rather than piecemeal initiatives. After the Kennedy Administration used its executive authority to parole five thousand refugees to the United States in response to a major influx of migrants from the People’s Republic of China to Hong Kong in the spring of 1962, William Channel of the AFSC noted that Hong Kong “is the world’s most densely populated city, increasing in numbers every year. The problems of housing, feeding, clothing and caring for the needs of these people are overwhelming ones.”49 Although he commended the parole initiative, he insisted that the United States should “take greater numbers of Chinese immigrants and refugees,” arguing that “raising the quota on Chinese immigrants from 105 to more than 5,000 and permitting the admission of up to 50,000 refugees a year—including Chinese refugees—[will] encourage a more liberal policy on the part of other nations.”50
The tenor of Channel’s intervention, which focused on the merits of structural reform for domestic and international purposes, revealed the manner in which the politics of refugee admissions evolved from the immediate postwar period over the course of the Cold War. Advocacy was no longer dominated by groups that focused on refugee admissions solely on the basis of the needs of one ethnic group; rather, refugee policy was understood as an essential crucible upon which the United States could reform its restrictive immigration programs and project an image of benign humanitarianism globally. When efforts emerged in the early 1960s to introduce new immigration legislation, religious and secular organizations intervened to voice their concerns about the ongoing limitations of the national-origins system and the need to embrace refugee admissions as a regular, rather than exceptional, component of America’s immigration system.
Organizations that had been involved with refugee settlement work in the United States previously lent credence to the symbolic and utilitarian value of incorporating refugee admissions into US immigration policy more generally.51 The AJC spoke out on behalf of immigration reform, and other religious groups had their interventions read into the Congressional Record as evidence of the moral merits of reform. At the 1963 General Assembly of United Presbyterians, attendees agreed that immigration laws should be revised to “remove restrictive and discriminatory provisions” and to “provide for the admission of refugees in large-enough numbers to alleviate emergency situations which result in refugee communities requiring resettlement.”52 The National Lutheran Council declared its “firm conviction that the existing immigration legislation has severe short-comings, as a result of which neither traditional Christian humanitarianism nor enlightened self-interest are adequately exhibited.” The council argued that the United States needed to assume its “proper share of international responsibility for the resettlement of refugees and of other persons urgently in need of the compassionate haven of a new homeland.”53
Ultimately, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act incorporated refugee policy into its framework by creating a new category of quota immigrants, that of individuals from “Communist or Communist-dominated lands.”54 The idea was to create a permanent conduit through which to assist refugees. The initial categorization of refugees as victims from communism, which was later amended to include refugees from natural calamities, reflected the dominant cold war paradigm that had emerged in the postwar period. In rallying support for the bill, the author of the legislation, Congressman Emanuel Celler (NY), noted “special provisions [were] made for emergency situations, thus eliminating the need for emergency legislation which we have been called upon to pass over the years.”55 More generally, Celler emphasized that the “fundamental feature” of the proposed legislation was “the elimination from our laws of the fallacious belief that the place of birth or the racial origin of a human being determines the quality or the level of a man’s Intellect, or his moral character or his suitability for assimilation into our Nation and our society.”56 Pointing to the “two Displaced Persons Acts” as “the first loud and public admission of the obsolescence and the unworkability of the national origins formula of the 1924 law,” Celler noted that the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 remained “an equally convincing piece of evidence of the bankruptcy of the system [National Origins Act] so very unfortunately incorporated in the statute now in effect [McCarran-Walter Act].”57 Celler’s vision of immigration reform—and one that was shared by many—was that it should be a tool to dismantle exclusionary immigration programs as well as a strategy for advancing a particular version of US humanitarianism.
Despite Celler’s aspirations, the 1965 act provided only a modest opening for refugee admissions by setting out a fixed number in the annual quota for this purpose. Critics, including Congressman John Lindsay (NY), believed that the government needed to do more. Lindsay proposed that the 1965 act be amended to dedicate space, time and funds to the issue of resettling refugees—in other words, to actively selecting and relocating refugees across international borders to the United States. This was the kind of work that ARCI had promoted and pursued in Hong Kong. Lindsay proposed that the Secretary of State “be authorized to make grants to public or private agencies in the United States to assist them in resettling within the United States needy hard-core refugees admitted under the Immigration and Nationality Act, including the furnishing of care and rehabilitation services.” Lindsay also suggested that an appropriation of $2.5 million be authorized for this purpose.58 His efforts, however, were in vain.59 The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act created a small opening for permanent, ongoing refugee admissions to the United States but fell short of facilitating and encouraging the work of resettling refugees that had animated the efforts of more politicized humanitarian organizations during the Cold War.
Conclusion
Debates over how best to serve the interests of refugees and what qualities constituted a humanitarian nation foreshadowed congressional debates on the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.60 In the early years of the Cold War, secular and religious humanitarians were divided on the best way to approach the question of refugee relief in the context of America’s international and domestic concerns. Groups such as the AJC focused initially on the plight of Jewish refugees before expanding their scope to invest in more broad-based alliances and campaigns. In doing so, they began to use rhetoric that positioned the United States as a humanitarian nation. Such rhetoric required substantive action, and the nature of such overtures was the subject of considerable debate among those involved in refugee-relief efforts. The refugee situation in Hong Kong was particularly illustrative of this dynamic as it reflected the paradox of organizations interested in using refugee relief and resettlement for propaganda purposes and those invested in structural humanitarian assistance.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and its limited inclusion of refugees as a distinct category of immigrant admissions, reflected the mixed humanitarian advocacy in the previous years and foreshadowed the continued piecemeal approach to refugee admissions in the United States despite efforts to establish a firm structure for admissions. Notwithstanding the opening created by the 1965 Act, the Executive Branch continued to rely on parole authority for substantial admissions, especially for Cuban refugees. Only with the Indochinese refugee crisis of the late 1970s did Congress pursue significant legislative action, resulting in the United States Refugee Act of 1980 that facilitated permanent rather than conditional entries. The legacy of the debates over humanitarian assistance to refugees in the lead-up to 1965 is therefore mixed. This outcome is perhaps not surprising given the diversity of opinions and ideas about whom the American government should assist and how, particularly in the early days of the global Cold War. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act reflected the contests that attended relief and humanitarian efforts throughout the Cold War. That these debates continue to the present day, manifested most demonstrably in discussions over the admission and resettlement of refugees from Syria, points to the limited nature of the humanitarianism envisioned and ultimately embraced in Cold War America.
Notes
1. The prevailing consensus is that America’s postwar refugee policy was shaped, domestically and internationally, by the geopolitics of the Cold War, which in turn informed the character of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Indeed, scholars, including Madeline Hsu, Michael G. Davis, and Aristide Zolberg, have identified the treatment of refugees during the Cold War, and refugees from Asia in particular, as a key factor in the 1965 reforms. They argue that encounters between lawmakers, refugee advocates, and the refugees, as well as the Cold War rhetoric that accompanied the movement of refugees to the United States, transformed notions of desirability and created the framework in which future, and more substantive reforms could be argued. See Madeline Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015); Michael G. Davis, “Impetus for Immigration Reform: Asian Refugees and the Cold War,” Journal of American—East Asian Relations 7, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 1998): 127–56; Aristide Zolberg. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). This chapter’s focus on religious and secular organizations is in keeping with the renewed focus on nongovernmental actors in shaping policy at home and abroad. Historians have begun to shed new light on the work of voluntary agencies in shaping laws, policies, and regulations in the domestic context of the United States as well as the country’s international affairs. See Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
2. “President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Remarks at the Signing of the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York, October 3, 1965,” LBJ Presidential Library, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/lyndon-baines-johnson/timeline/lbj-on-immigration.
3. Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, “The Immigration Reform Act of 1965” in The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn, ed. by Brooke L. Blower and Mark Philip Bradley (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015), 127.
4. Aristide Zolberg, “The Roots of American Refugee Policy,” Social Research 55, no. 4 (1988): 667. Scholars remain divided on the overall impact of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act on American refugee policy. Historian Libby Garland, for instance, suggests that the law “spoke to the ongoing power of the more conservative, restrictionist side of US immigration politics.” She notes that the law did “grant a permanent place in US immigration policy to refugees” but that this was a very small place, amounting to only 6 percent of the visas allotted. She notes that the language of the act reinforced the centrality of the Cold War in shaping America’s refugee policy, resulting in a kind of “sorting mechanism.” After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 211. Other scholars describe the act as a “halfway measure,” in that it made progress on race but took the opposite tack on numerical limits, a description that applies to the refugee-specific clauses as well. Cheryl Shanks, Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890–1990 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 144. Brian Soucek also notes that although the act provided the “first permanent statutory basis for the admission of refugees … the 1965 Act’s refugee scheme embraced so many tensions that its permanence was bound to be temporary.” “The Last Preference: Refugees and the 1965 Immigration Act,” in The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965: Legislating a New America, ed. Gabriel J. Chin and Rose Cuison Villazor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 183. Soucek underscores in particular the limited geographical reach of the refugee provision, which he sees as a perpetuation of the “national origin discrimination.” Such discrimination, he maintains was contrary to the act as a whole and, more pointedly, “did nothing for the thousands of refugees arriving in the United States each month from communist Cuba in the Western Hemisphere.” Meanwhile, scholars Gil Loescher and Jon Scanlan emphasize the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act as a jumping-off point for further advocacy. They observe that during the late 1960s and early 1970s, “churches, human rights organizations, and public interest law firms began to champion the causes of refugees who lacked broad ethnic support, and whose admission into the United States either served no clear foreign policy interest or ran counter to the prevailing cold war ideology.” Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945 to the Present (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 86.
5. On the critical role churches and NGOs played in resettling and welcoming refugees, see Anastasia Brown and Todd Scribner, “Unfulfilled Promises, Future Possibilities: The Refugee Resettlement System in the United States,” Journal on Migration and Human Security 2 (2014): 101–20; Todd Scribner, “‘Pilgrims of the Night’: The American Catholic Church Responds to the Post–World War II Displaced Persons Crisis,” American Catholic Studies 124, no. 3 (2013): 1–20.
6. “Amending the Immigration and Nationality Act, and for Other Purposes” US Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Calendar no. 733, Report no. 748, September 15, 1965.
7. Zolberg, “Roots of American Refugee Policy,” 668. On the pervasiveness of exclusionary politics, see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
8. Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, Unfulfilled Promise: Rescue and Resettlement of Jewish Refugee Children in the United States, 1934–1945 (Juneau, Alaska: Denali, 1990); Saul Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy toward Jewish Refugees, 1938–1945 (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1973).
9. See Genizi Haim, America’s Fair Share: The Admission and Resettlement of Displaced Persons, 1945–1952 (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1994).
10. Margaret Sands Orchowski, The Law That Changed the Face of America: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (New York: Roman and Littlefield, 2015), 42; Garland, After They Closed the Gates, 194.
11. See Jerome A. Chanes, “American Jewish Committee” in Encyclopaedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society, ed. Richard T. Schaefer (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 2008), 65–66.
12. Memorandum, Dorothy M. Nathan, Community Service Department, November 29, 1946, AJC Subject Files (RG–347.17.10), box 132, folder–Displaced Persons Act / Legislation, American Jewish Committee Archives, New York.
13. Haim Genzi, “Interfaith Cooperation in America on Behalf of the DP Acts, 1948– 1950,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 8, no. 1 (1994): 75–93.
14. Haim, America’s Fair Share, 78.
15. Shanks, Immigration, 131.
16. S. Andhil Fineberg, Community Service Department, Memorandum, July 21, 1948, AJC Subject Files (RG–347.17.10), box 132, folder—Displaced Persons Act / Legislation, American Jewish Committee Archives, New York. By contrast, the historian Genzi Haim argues that the act was “a turning point in American immigration policy,” as it emphasized “resettlement, rather than immigration.” He observers further that “the Act required advance social planning, including assurances for housing and employment.” In other words, the government was making a commitment not only to the admission of displaced persons but also to ensuring that they would be successful as new Americans. America’s Fair Share, 114.
17. Letter to President Truman, July 23, 1948, AJC Subject Files (RG–347.17.10), box 132, Folder—Displaced Persons Act /Legislation, American Jewish Committee Archives, New York.
18. Ibid.
19. For a full discussion of refugees and the emergence of the Cold War in Europe, see Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
20. For an elaboration, see Carl Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 7.
21. Loescher and Scanlan, Calculated Kindness, 47.
22. Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate, 41.
23. Sidney Liskofsky and Sol Rabkin, August 11, 1953, re: Refugee Relief Act of 1953, Joint Memorandum to CRC Offices, AJC Area Offices, AJC–Subject Files (RG–347.17.10), box 150, folder—Refugee Relief Act, 1953, ADL Regional Offices, AJC Archives, New York.
24. Ibid.
25. “Statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee in connection with Hearings on S.1917 in behalf of the National Council of Jewish Women, the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society, United Service for New Americans,” May 28, 1953, AJC–Subject Files (RG–347.17.10), box 150, folder—Refugee Relief Act, 1953, AJC Archives, New York.
26. Memorandum from Sidney Liskofsky to Irving M. Engel, June 3, 1953, AJC—Subject Files (RG–347.17.10), box 150, folder—Refugee Relief Act, 1953, ADL Regional Offices, AJC Archives, New York. Liskofsky discusses the strategy for enlarging categories to benefit Jewish migrants while at the same time not alienating potential support from Catholic and Protestant allies. In doing so, Liskofsky reflected the AJC’s (not surprisingly) enduring preoccupations with assisting Jewish migrants, but his views also reflected the shifting politics around refugee admissions in the Cold War. On tensions between the universalist and particularist camps within the AJC, see Marianne Rachel Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong: The American Jewish Committee, 1945–2006 (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2007).
27. On refugee admissions specifically, see Laura Madokoro “‘Slotting’ Chinese Families and Refugees, 1947–1967,” Canadian Historical Revie, 93, no. 1 (2012): 25–56.
28. See, for instance, Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia (Carlton North, Vic.: Scribe, 2005).
29. There is considerable debate about the size of the refugee population in both Hong Kong and Taiwan after 1949 as a result of the politicized manner in which statistics on population movements were compiled. For an outline of the controversy, see Joshua Fan, China’s Homeless Generation: Voices from the Veterans of the Chinese Civil War, 1940s-1990s (New York: Routledge, 2011), 5.
30. Rebecca Gill, Calculating Compassion: Humanity and Relief in War, Britain, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2.
31. Haim, America’s Fair Share, 11.
32. Ibid., 12.
33. Ibid., 45.
34. On Truman’s Cold War politics, see Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006); Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, The Truman Administration and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992).
35. Susan L. Carruthers, “Between Camps: Eastern Bloc ‘Escapees’ and Cold War Borderlands,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 913. For a fuller discussion of the program as it operated in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, including its important publicity components, see Susan Carruthers, “Chapter Two: Bloc-Busters,” in Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape and Brainwashing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
36. Richard Brown to Rep. Magnuson, February 27, 1962, 846G.46/8-460, RG 59, box 2535, Central Decimal File, 1960–63, National Archives Records Administration.
37. File 6: Congressional File: Trips—1961/Hong Kong, box 86, AFSC Archives, Philadelphia.
38. Jack and Janet Shepherd to William Barton et al., September 2, 1958, Letters: London to P, Foreign Service Section, AFSC Archives.
39. On ARCI’s work, see Madeline Hsu, “‘The Best Type of Chinese’: Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals and Symbolic Refugee Relief, 1952–1960,” in The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 130–65.
40. Walter Judd to Whitney Shepardson, September 17, 1952, III.A.1. A-B, box 6, file 5 ARCI, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Columbia University Archives.
41. Oram to Emmet, January 3, 1952, file 167.2 China File, ARCI Correspondence / General, 1957–59, ARCI Collection, Hoover Institute Archives, Stanford University.
42. In a 1954 report, ARCI acknowledged “openings in other parts of the world have been few: 45 persons were resettled in various parts of Southeast Asia; 17 in the US and Canada.” “A Report to Our Contributors,” ABMAC / ARCI Collection, box 69, file “A Report to Our Contributors,” Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University.
43. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
44. Memo for John H. Ohly, “Preparation of Escapee Program Congressional Presentation,” General—Escapee Program, ARCI, A1 1199, box 4, Record Group 59: General Records of the Department of State, 1763–2002, NARA.
45. For a full discussion of the conflict over US refugee policy in Hong Kong, see Laura Madokoro, Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).
46. Frank Hunt to Esther Rhoads, June 20, 1958, [Hong Kong, Letters to Japan, 1958], AFSC.
47. Ibid.
48. “Testimony before Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with Refugees and Escapees of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary,” Richard Smith, American Friends Service Committee, July 14, 1961, box: AFSC Minutes: 1961, AFSC Archives.
49. United States Senate, Refugee Problem in Hong Kong and Macao: Hearings Before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with Refugees and Escapees, 87th Congress, 2nd Session, (1962), 63.
50. Ibid.
51. ARCI, which had been the most vocal advocate on refugee resettlement as a humanitarian solution, had ceased operations in 1959 and did not contribute to the emerging conversation around immigration reform.
52. Senator Neuberger, Statement in the Senate of the United States, July 29, 1964, Congressional Record.
53. “Text of a resolution adopted by the National Lutheran Council supporting President Johnson’s proposal for revision of the immigration law,—Extension of Remarks of Hon. John Brademas of Indiana,” February 18, 1965, United States Congress, House of Representatives, Congressional Record (1965), A777.
54. Loescher and Scanlan, Calculated Kindness, 69.
55. Statement by Emanuel Celler, New York, House of Representatives, June 16, 1964, Congressional Record—Appendix (1964), A3268.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. “Speech by Congressman Jon V. Lindsay,” April 13, 1965, United States Congress, House of Representatives, Congressional Record—Appendix (1965), A1836.
59. See discussion of economic contributions in “Immigration and Nationality Act— Conference Report,” September 29, 1965. US Congress, Committee of Conference, 89th Congress, 1st Session, Report No.1101, 1. There was no financial commitment to refugee resettlement in the 1965 Act despite the fact that the Committee on the Judiciary (US Senate) believed that the historic practice of admitting refugees to the United States “through the sponsorship of voluntary agencies and private citizens” should continue “so that each refugee will have an opportunity to adjust and develop in this country without fear of abandonment and without the possibility of becoming a public charge.” “Amending the Immigration and Nationality Act, and for Other Purposes,” US Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Calendar no. 733, Report no. 748, September 15, 1965, 16.
60. Soucek, “Last Preference,” 175.