![]() The leaders of American Jewish organizations rarely lobbied for the bill publicly, perhaps because they were concerned that any attempt to prioritize aid for Jewish refugee children might spark increased antisemitism in the United States. Roosevelt’s urging, President Roosevelt never publicly commented on the Wagner-Rogers Bill. Referring to the ongoing Kindertransports, which brought German refugee children to Great Britain and western Europe, the First Lady said: “England, France, and the Scandinavian countries are taking their share of these children and I think we should.” She also referred to the bill as a “wise way to do a humanitarian act.” Despite Mrs. The Non-Sectarian Committee for German Refugee Children, headed by Pickett, promised that the children would be supported with private donations.įor the first time in her six years as first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt allowed reporters to directly quote her in support of pending legislation. The Children’s Bureau, an agency within the US Department of Labor, agreed to supervise the placement and care of the children. The American Federation of Labor supported the bill, claiming that the children would not add to the nation’s existing unemployment problem. The Wagner-Rogers Bill’s authors tried to anticipate and address criticism by enlisting powerful allies. The bill specified that when the refugee children reached the age of eighteen, they would either be counted against that year’s German immigration quota or would return to Europe. Although the bill did not indicate that the “German refugee children” would mostly be Jewish children, the realities of the refugee crisis in Europe made this an obvious and understood fact. The bills, written by Pickett and his interfaith colleagues, specified that 10,000 children each fiscal year (19) would enter the United States and not be counted against the existing immigration quota laws. ![]() On February 9, 1939, Democratic senator Robert Wagner of New York and Republican congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts sponsored identical bills in the US Senate and House of Representatives to admit 20,000 German refugee children under the age of fourteen over a two-year period. Roosevelt ’s administration to support a child immigration bill, and succeeded in convincing Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. ![]() Pickett immediately began to lobby members of President Franklin D. In December 1938, prominent child psychologist Marion Kenworthy asked Clarence Pickett, the director of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker relief organization, to help lead an interfaith, non-sectarian effort to support legislation allowing refugee children from Europe to immigrate. At that point, the State Department would have had to issue the maximum number of visas allowable each year for more than 11 years to admit all the refugees on Germany’s waiting list. Even as the State Department maximized the number of visas issued, some 309,782 German-born remained on the waiting list for German-quota visas by mid-1939. Between Jand June 30, 1939, the US State Department granted the maximum number of immigration visas allowable (27,370) to German-born individuals, filling the German quota for the first time during the era of Nazi rule. This nationwide attack on Jews, known as Kristallnacht, saw the arrest of thirty thousand Jewish men and boys who were released from concentration camps only after agreeing to leave Germany as soon as possible.īy 1938, hundreds of thousands of European Jews looked to the United States for refuge. On November 9 and 10, 1938, the Nazi regime unleashed a wave of violent anti-Jewish pogroms throughout Germany. This crisis for European Jews and others seeking to escape the Nazi regime’s persecution intensified considerably in 1938, after Germany annexed Austria ( Anschluss ) in March and the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia in September. Anti-immigrant sentiment, xenophobia, and antisemitism remained pervasive in the 1930s, influencing the political, economic, and social climate as Americans responded to the refugee crisis caused by the Nazi regime. A series of restrictive legislative measures culminated in 1924 with the Johnson Reed Act, which set quotas, or limits, on the number of immigrants from particular countries who could be admitted to the United States each year. ![]() ![]() US Immigration Laws and the Refugee Crisisĭuring the 1920s, the US Congress passed laws that severely limited the number of immigrants who could enter the country each year. ![]()
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