Trump is using the same immigration policy that once kept out Jews fleeing Nazi Germany

The Trump administration’s tightening of the public charge exclusion has sparked controversy and legal challenges.  The public charge exclusion has a long, if not illustrious history.  I look at that history in connection with an analysis of California’s Proposition 187, which would have stripped immigrants of all public benefits, including education, in this article.    At the federal level, the public charge exclusion was added by a law passed by Congress in 1882 at the height of a xenophobic outburst against Chinese immigrants.

Laurel Leff on Marketwatch reminds us of another use of the public charge exclusion to block admissions to Jewish persons fleeing Nazi Germany.  During World War II, approximately 300,000 additional Jewish refugees could have gained entry to the United States without exceeding the nation’s existing quotas. The primary mechanism that kept them out: the immigration law’s “likely to become a public charge” clause.

Consular officials with the authority to issue visas denied them to everyone they deemed incapable of supporting themselves in the U.S. It is not possible to say what happened to these refugees. Some immigrated to other countries that remained outside Germany’s grip, such as Great Britain. But many — perhaps most — were forced into hiding, imprisoned in concentration camps and ghettos, and deported to extermination centers.

Leff notes that, “[a] someone who has studied European Jews’ attempts to escape Nazi persecution and immigrate to the U.S., the [Trump] administration’s evocation of the public charge clause is chilling.”

KJ