Page 10A
NATION/WORLD
East Oregonian
Saturday, November 21, 2015
A history of refugees
Refugee refusal today
compared, contrasted
to that of WWII
By ADAM GELLER
AP National Writer
Sol Messinger was just 7 when he stood
with his father at the rail of the ocean liner St.
Louis and stared into the gathering darkness.
But nearly eight decades later, Messinger
still recalls the lights of Miami glittering off
the bow, so near to him and more than 900
fellow Jewish refugees aboard, yet beyond
their reach.
Today, “I look out into the ocean and I
get this queasy feeling,” says Messinger,
whose family escaped Europe for the U.S.
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away the vessel in 1939. Now 83, he is a
pathologist in Buffalo, New York. “The Jews
did not pose any threat to the U.S... It’s really
unforgivable.”
Now, fresh angst about whether to admit
refugees or turn them away has put the spot-
light back on the shunning of the St. Louis
and other decisions, now widely regretted,
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War II.
A week after the Islamic State terrorist
group killed 130 people in Paris, a backlash
against the U.S. admitting Syrian refugees
— most of them Muslims — has fueled a
bitter debate, with politicians, pundits and
others drawing lines between present and
past.
There are differences between now and
then. But disturbing similarities between
the rhetoric of today and the attitudes of the
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II make that history worth recalling, scholars
say, as the country confronts new fears of
terrorism.
“No historical parallel is perfect, obvi-
ously,” says Allan Lichtman, co-author
of “FDR and the Jews” and a professor of
history at American University.
But U.S. limits on refugees during World
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fed by fears the Nazis “would plant agents,
spies and saboteurs among the Jewish refu-
gees and that they would pressure the Jews,
particularly those whose families were still
in Germany, to act as agents on behalf of the
Third Reich,” Lichtman said.
“Those arguments are chillingly similar
to the arguments being made against the
admission of the Syrian refugees.”
Lichtman isn’t alone in making the
comparison.
On Monday, an Ohio professor, Peter
Shulman of Case Western Reserve Univer-
sity, used Twitter to post results from a 1938
public opinion poll showing Americans
overwhelmingly rejected admission of
German Jews in the years leading up to the
outbreak of war.
The reaction “was instantaneous and
totally overwhelming. It was like nothing
I’ve ever experienced before,” said Shulman,
who was been posting historical tidbits for
about two years. One of his tweets of the
decades-old polling data has been relayed
4,600 times, cited by commentators in The
Washington Post, Time and other publica-
tions.
“When we sent Jews back to Germany
and when we sent Japanese to internment
camps, we regretted it and we will regret this
as well,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Illinois,
said before 47 House Democrats and 242
Republicans voted this week for a bill to put
new security limits on a plan by President
Barack Obama to admit 10,000 Syrian refu-
gees over the next year.
On Wednesday, New York Mayor Bill
AP Photo, File
In this June 17, 1939 i le photo, German Jewish refugees return to Antwerp, Belgium, aboard the St. Louis after they had been
denied entrance to Cuba and the United States. More than 76 years later, fresh angst about whether to admit refugees or turn
them away has put the spotlight back on the shunning of the St. Louis and other, now widely regretted, decisions by U.S.
ofi cials before and during World War II.
AP Photo/Carolyn Thompson
Sol Messinger holds the book “To Hope
and Back” which features a photograph
of Messinger and his parents on the cov-
er, at his Buffalo, N.Y. home on Friday.
DeBlasio, criticizing a number of Repub-
lican governors for opposing admission of
Syrian refugees, cited the 1938 poll — in
which 67.4 percent of Americans said the
U.S. should try to keep German and Austrian
refugees out of the country and 61 percent
opposed allowing 10,000 German Jewish
children to enter.
“We are not going to make that mistake
in our time, and voices of intolerance and
voices of division are not going to cause us
to do something that is against our values,”
DeBlasio said.
The comparison has been rejected by
some critics.
“This is prima facie nonsense,” Ian
Tuttle wrote Wednesday in the conservative
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obvious difference: There was no interna-
tional conspiracy of German Jews in the
1930s attempting to carry out daily attacks
on civilians on several continents.”
But debate was stoked further when the
Democratic mayor of Roanoke, Virginia,
David Bowers, noted the U.S. detention of
thousands of Japanese-Americans in camps
in a call to bar Syrian refugees.
“It appears that the threat of harm to
America from ISIS now is just as real
and serious as that from our enemies
then,” Bowers said in a statement issued
Wednesday.
Such rhetoric continues a long pattern in
U.S. politics of labeling refugees as a threat,
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the Hungarian Revolution or boat people
uprooted by the Vietnam War, said Kelly
Greenhill, author of “Weapons of Mass
Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion
and Foreign Policy.”
“Every time this country is confronted
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becomes politicized,” said Greenhill,
a professor of political science at Tufts
University and a research fellow at Harvard
University’s school of government. “This is
a movie we’ve seen before and it’s sort of
unfortunate, but it has a curious sameness
across time, which doesn’t make it better.”
It’s easily forgotten now, but the 1930s
saw widespread disdain for European Jews,
Lichtman said. Opposition to admitting
refugees was heightened by the economic
worries left by the Great Depression. Those
public attitudes were reinforced by the U.S.
State Department and other agencies, which
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Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled as poten-
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When President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt pondered relaxation of refugee
quotas, Vice President John Nance Garner
counseled that if Congress were allowed to
vote in private, the legislators would ban
immigration altogether, Lichtman said.
In the years since, the U.S. has become
the world’s largest recipient of international
refugees.
But of the 784,000 refugees resettled
in the U.S. since the September 11, 2001
attacks, just three have been arrested for
planning terrorist activities, according to the
Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan
think tank. Only one of those, an Uzbeki
immigrant, spoke of targeting the U.S. itself,
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While taking in 10,000 Syrian refugees
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roughly 2,000 admitted since the country’s
civil war began in 2011, it is a fraction of
those going to other countries. Up to 800,000
people are expected to seek asylum in
Germany by the end of this year, according
to MPI.
Messinger, whose family found brief
refuge in Belgium after both Cuban and
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Louis, sees some similarities between that
experience and the one endured by those
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tion and mistreatment based on their religion,
he said, recalling that just six weeks after his
family won entry to the U.S. in 1942 all the
remaining Jews in their village were shipped
off to a concentration camp.
But the danger Syrians face is less because
of their religion than the geopolitics that has
put their homes in a war zone. What’s more,
unlike fears that today’s refugees may harbor
terrorists, nobody aboard the St. Louis posed
a potential threat.
“I understand that Syrians who come here
are vetted very carefully and so the chances
of some terrorist getting through are prob-
ably small, but they are not non-existent,”
he said.
But Robert Krakow, whose SS St. Louis
Legacy Project has documented the history
of the voyage and successfully pushed for
an apology from the U.S. State Department,
said he sees more similarities than differ-
ences between the refugees of different eras.
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the ship of Jewish refugees because it was
politically expedient, said Krakow, who
lives in Boca Raton, Florida.
Although the calculus may be a little
different with today’s Syrian refugees, “the
parallel for me is politics,” Krakow says.
“Ultimately, it’s all grounded in the
human condition. It’s grounded in human
need and suffering, and here’s a case where
we can do something. ... It’s a practical ques-
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disturbing the way this hysteria is invoked
for political gain.”
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By KARL RITTER
and LORNE COOK
Associated Press
PARIS — A week after the dead-
liest attacks on France in decades,
shell-shocked Parisians honored
the 130 victims with candles and
songs Friday, knowing that at least
one suspect is still at large and
fearing that other militants could be
slipping through Europe’s porous
borders.
Having established how the
attacks against a soccer stadium,
sidewalk cafes and a rock concert
were carried out, investigators were
still piecing together details on the
assailants and how they converged
in the French capital.
Prosecutors said Friday that they
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print checks that two of the seven
attackers who died in the bloodshed
had entered Europe through Greece
on Oct. 3.
Previously they had said only
one attacker had been registered
in Greece, an entry point for many
of the hundreds of thousands
of migrants seeking asylum in
Europe. That man carried a Syrian
passport naming him as Ahmad
Al-Mohammad, though it’s unclear
whether it was authentic.
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had links to France and Belgium.
One of the seven dead has not
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is underway for one suspect who
“We must move swiftly and with
force,” French Interior Minister
Bernard Cazeneuve said. “Europe
owes it to all victims of terrorism
and those who are close to them.”
Cazeneuve said the 28-nation
bloc must move forward on a
long-delayed system for collecting
and exchanging airline passenger
information, data he said is vital
“for tracing the return of foreign
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Highlighting how easily some
Islamic militants seem to be able to
move in and out of Europe, French
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and how Abaaoud, a 28-year-old
Belgian of Moroccan descent,
AP Photo/Thibault Camus
entered France. They had believed
A woman lights a candle near the Cosa Nostra restaurant, in he was in Syria until receiving
Paris on Friday. French President Francois Hollande will preside over a tipoff Monday that he was in
a national ceremony Nov. 27 honoring the victims of the deadliest
France.
attacks on France in decades.
Abaaoud was wanted in Belgium
escaped, Salah Abdeslam, 26. who said she was his cousin. where he had been convicted
French police stopped Abdeslam Prosecutors said Friday that a third in absentia of recruiting foreign
the morning after Friday’s attacks at person was killed in the raid but did ¿JKWHUVIRUWKH,VODPLF6WDWHJURXS
the Belgian border but then let him not release the identity.
and kidnapping his brother, who he
go.
They also said Aitboulahcen had persuaded to join him in Syria at
)UHQFKSROLFHRI¿FLDO-HDQ0DUF not blown herself up with a suicide age 13.
Falcone, speaking on France-Info vest, as initially believed, which
According to Moroccan news
radio, said he was unable to say if suggests the body parts collected site Le360.ma, which has close ties
Abdeslam, whose brother, Brahim, after the raid belonged to the third, to the royal palace, it was Morocco
blew himself up in the attacks, XQLGHQWL¿HGSHUVRQ
that gave the French information
could be back on French territory.
Meanwhile in Brussels, Euro- about Abaaoud’s whereabouts.
The
suspected
ringleader, pean interior and justice ministers France has only said it got the
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was killed vowed to tighten border controls information from a country outside
in a pre-dawn raid Wednesday on to make it easier to track the move- Europe.
an apartment in the Paris suburb ments of jihadis with European
On Friday French President
of Saint-Denis, along with Hasna passports traveling to and from Francois Hollande met Jordan’s
Aitboulahcen, a 26-year-old woman warzones in Syria.
King Mohammed VI and thanked
the monarch for “Morocco’s assis-
tance in the wake of last Friday’s
attacks.”
Marking a week since the
carnage, some Parisians lit candles
and paid tribute to the victims with
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“I’m still reeling, because these
are the neighborhoods where we
young people go out a lot, places
we know well,” said student Sophie
Garcon as she looked at tributes
left outside the Le Carillon bar,
where gunmen sprayed automatic
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Others decided that enjoying
themselves was the best way to
defy the extremists. They sang and
danced on Place de la Republique,
in the heart of a trendy neighbor-
hood where scores of people were
killed, most of them in the attack on
the Bataclan concert hall.
Demonstrations have been
banned in the city since the attacks,
but Parisians have been sponta-
neously gathering all week outside
the restaurants, cafes and concert
hall hit in the attacks to leave
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vigils.
France’s Senate on Friday voted
to extend for three months a state of
emergency, which expands police
powers to carry out arrests and
searches and allows authorities to
forbid the movement of persons
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places. France’s lower chamber has
already approved the measure.