First of all the American immigration laws of the early-mid twentieth 20th century were an proactive attempt to severely restrict the growing Jewish population in the United States of America. Your majority of veteran Americans, aka the WASPs-White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, were horrified when they noticed that "too many" Jews and Catholics" had entered the United States in the end of the 19th century.
To stop that trend/phenomena, they crafted laws to create a quota system based on the percentage of various national and ethnic groups to replicate older demographic statistics. That gave lots of immigrant visa to the British, who couldn't fill them, and almost none to the various central and eastern European countries which ended up with large backlogs of requests.
When the Nazis took over Germany and began its systematic discrimination of Jewish citizens culminating in the Holocaust murder of six million European Jews, the United States Government under the instructions of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt held to that law, even claiming that anyone from Germany -including Jews- could be Nazi spies.
|A Twitter Tribute to Holocaust Victims,|
A new social-media project commemorates refugees turned away by the United States in 1939. Bettman / Getty
Remember that until the immoral shocking brutality of the Nazis was revealed to the world, Germany was considered a cultured, sophisticated and highly moral country. Many of those Jews fleeing were professionals, doctors, professors and successful businessmen along with their families. Some weren't even Jewish, because the Nazi law considered anyone with a Jewish grandparent to be a Jew.
Quite a number of countries around the world stepped in to accept the Jews who fled Germany and the rest of Europe. Canada, various South American countries, South Africa, the Dominican Republic and even China. There are no stories of increased crime, rape etc the way we're hearing about those trying to flee Arab countries and Africa, too.
Except for some Christian Arabs trying to get away from Moslem rule, those leaving aren't fleeing religious persecution and/or death camps. They just want out. None of those countries are pleasant places to live, except maybe for those on the take. As Americans should know after years of trying to turn some, like Iraq and Afghanistan into western style democratic states, their concepts of justice, good citizenship etc. aren't quite like the "western model." So to expect a quick and easy transition and absorption/assimilation into law abiding citizens is unrealistic at best. The new restrictions by American President Trump is to better investigate the potential immigrants to keep out those who could endanger American society.
Let’s analyze the key provisions, separate the fact from the hysteria, and introduce just a bit of historical perspective. First, the order temporarily halts refugee admissions for 120 days to improve the vetting process, then caps refugee admissions at 50,000 per year. Outrageous, right? Not so fast. Before 2016, when Obama dramatically ramped up refugee admissions, Trump’s 50,000 stands roughly in between a typical year of refugee admissions in George W. Bush’s two terms and a typical year in Obama’s two terms.Most Americans have no idea how hard it is for an Israeli just to get a tourist visa to visit. It should be much more difficult to enter as a refugee.
Read more at: National Review