Had there been no Johnson-Reed Act constraining his escape from doomed Poland, it’s likely that Yehoshua Rotenberg would have eluded his fatal destiny and made it to America. He had sufficient funds. He had family in the United States ready to help. And for at least the last six years of his life, he had compelling motivation. Johnson-Reed alone made it impossible for him to act on it.
As it did for so many others. In the last year before the quotas were established, 50,000 European Jews entered the country; unsheathed, the new law worked like a scythe. From 1925 until the beginning of World War II, the number plummeted to an annual average of slightly less than 9,000. Subtract the new number from the old, and straight-line math would presume 41,000 a year who wanted to come but were unable to—in all, some 574,000 people over the fourteen-year period. A more aggressive accounting would recognize that the rise of the Nazis would have accelerated the pace, increasing the total radically, to . . . what? A million? A million and a half?
But speculation calls for caution; sorting through such a grim accounting demands the most conservative math possible. Let’s assume that the wheel of history turns at a steady pace, that in the 1930s Hitler merely drew attention to an endemic anti-Semitism that was a perpetual plague across Europe, that the lure of an American future maintained a steady, unwavering glow. Let’s begin, then, with those math-measured 574,000. Even if we assume that half of those managed to emigrate to other nations in the Western Hemisphere (it wasn’t nearly that many), we’re down to 287,000. And let’s also assume that the rate of immigration would have slowed anyway during the worldwide depression of the 1930s to, say, only half of its previous rate. And let’s further stipulate that half of these remaining 143,500 who might have emigrated were instead stranded in Europe but somehow managed to escape the Nazis. What happened to that last 70,000-plus? Or, just to be even more conservative, make that 50,000. Or even 10,000. No number one can conjure is so small that we can ignore it.
We know all too well what happened. This is not to blame the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands on the eugenicists and the anti-immigrationists, on the congenitally xenophobic, or the defensively xenophobic, or the situationally xenophobic. We can contemplate possibility, but we cannot be conclusive; besides, attributing blame to anyone but Hitler and his Nazis can only dilute their responsibility for their unspeakable crimes. But this, surely, is undeniable: because of the 1924 immigration law, many, many people who might otherwise have found their way to Chicago or Boston or Dallas or Batavia, New York, perished instead.
While weighing this awful truth, we can add another portion of woe to the scales: in 1946, at the Nuremberg “Doctors’ Trial,” the Nazi defendants (including Hitler’s personal physician, Karl Brandt) invoked the Buck v. Bell sterilization decision in their defense. And The Passing of the Great Race. And the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 itself. When Ernst Rüdin was apprehended after the war, he was quick to cite his extensive collaboration with international researchers as an exculpatory factor.
These men didn’t say they were “following orders,” in the self-exonerating language of the moment; they said they were following Americans.
The singular position of Europe’s Jews in the genocidal crosshairs of the Nazis’ final solution will forever require specific attention. But the suffering of others kept out of the United States by the 1924 act demands notice as well. Add the two hundred thousand Serbs killed by Nazi-connected death squads, the seventy thousand executed Greeks, the slaughtered Gypsies and homosexuals, even the millions of Russians who gave their lives in the Red Army or fell to starvation and disease in the streets of besieged Leningrad. Italians under the heel of fascism. Poles caught in the brutal vise of the German and Soviet war machines. Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians. And then go steps further, and add to this desolate roster the Japanese, Chinese, and other Asians permanently barred from entry to the United States for decades, many hundreds of thousands of whom would no doubt have preferred to move to America. How different it might have been.
But change did come—slowly at first, then all of a sudden. The first crack in the dike appeared during World War II when the American wartime alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalists provoked repeal of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Through the 1950s, various ameliorative measures opened the doors to people fleeing the eastern European countries that were under Soviet domination. Finally, in 1965, on a bright October day in New York Harbor, Lyndon B. Johnson sat at a desk on Liberty Island and signed a new Immigration and Nationality Act into law. The pack of politicians standing behind him included, among others, Senators Robert Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey—and the bill’s coauthors, Senator Philip Hart of Michigan and Representative Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn. As a freshman congressman in 1924, it was Celler who had risen on the House floor to call the Johnson-Reed Act “the rankest kind of discrimination . . . set up against Catholic and Jewish Europe.” Now, forty-one years later, he was the dean of the House of Representatives, and it was his bill that had abolished the quotas, establishing instead a nationality-blind system of immigration.
“Over my shoulders here,” Johnson said in his prepared remarks, “you can see Ellis Island, whose vacant corridors echo today the joyous sound of long ago voices. And today we can all believe that the lamp of this grand old lady is brighter today—and the golden door that she guards gleams more brilliantly in the light of an increased liberty for the people from all the countries of the globe.”
Eugenic theories of race were long forgotten. Now the racialized policies those theories had helped establish were dead as well. For believers in the promise of the nearby statue, the future of American immigration policy looked as bright as the brilliant sun overhead.