#usa was and is stingy with #Jewish immigration #5777

8.27: news.pol/zionism/usa was and is stingy with Jewish immigration:
9.6: summary:
. this is my edit of an article by
tabletmag's Mark Oppenheimer August 27, 2014 
[ with my comments in brackets ];
. this article reminds us that some Jewish people
are not that excited about Zionism
but the usa offers them no place to go but Israel
when things are getting much hotter for Judaism
in Europe, but also soon in Israel .
. it seems obvious that Zionism will lead to WWIII
and that is going to devastate not only Israel,
but major cities in the usa, by Fall 2016 .
. we should invite more of the Jewish gene pool
into rural america .

edited excerpts from Mark Oppenheimer:

I want to point out that the cavalier attitude,
so useful to anti-Zionists,
that the Jews can just "come to America,"
where they "are celebrated, integrated,
and free from rockets,"
is outdated mythology.
The United States was once that country,
but it hasn't been for nearly a hundred years.
. just buy a one-way ticket to Texas
and talk to any one of the thousands of children,
fearing violence in their home countries of Honduras or Guatemala,
who need to get into the United States right now.
In 1920, they all could have come in;
today, we’re imprisoning and interrogating them
and then sending most of them home.
[ just as usa is saying Mesoamericans go to Mesoamerica;
we may find them saying Jewish immigrants go to Israel .]

Stephen Wizner, the former head of
the immigration clinic at Yale Law School
and a visiting professor of law at Tel Aviv University:
" a prospective immigrant to [usa] needs to be a refugee.
A refugee is a person defined as one who has a
well-founded fear of future persecution
by officials of his home country,
or by non-state actors whom the home country's government
is unable or unwilling to control,
on account of political opinion, religion, race, nationality,
or membership in a particular social group,
and is afraid to return to his home country for that reason.
Persecution means stuff like torture, harsh interrogation,
being individually targeted for physical abuse,
arrest, death threats, etc."

The "well-founded fear of persecution"
is language that many countries use,
and it comes from the 1951 Geneva Conventions .
One hundred years ago, many countries in the world
freely accepted refugees -- today, almost none does.

Now, it’s likely that many French or German Jews
would find other ways into the United States,
if things got really bad at home.
those with special skill that is in short supply
can apply for an employment-based visa,
which can eventually ripen into a green card
and eventually citizenship.
Such a candidate needs an actual offer of employment,
with a letter from the employer,
but it's likely that many, many such offers of employment
would appear in the United States
if European Jews were in clear danger.
Jewish employers, and their more numerous
evangelical Christian, Zionist friends, would make sure of it.
[ is that sarcasm?
I thought it common knowledge that
Christian Zionists expect Jewish immigrants
to do their immigrating to Zion (Israel) .]

. in 1924, in the grip of a Red Scare,
the usa stopped being a nation of immigrants .
. writes Roger Daniels in Coming to America,
his comprehensive history of immigration,
"by late 1920, as Congress reassembled,
the nation’s press was filled with scare stories
about the flood of undesirable immigrants
on their way from war-ravaged Europe"
--
and such fears led to the Immigration Act of 1924,
which greatly shrank the number of immigrants allowed in
and tied the nationalities of new immigrants
to the pre-existing ethnic makeup of the United States.
The bill was signed by President Calvin Coolidge,
who believed that intermarriage between “Nordics” and others
damaged the racial stock.

There was, it goes without saying,
no provision made in that law for refugees.
The usa's unreceptiveness to Jews
during the rise of Hitler and during World War II itself
has been well covered elsewhere.
I need not quote again the anguished letters
from American Jews to the State Department,
trying in vain to get visas for their siblings or parents.
I need not rehash the story of the St. Louis,
carrying a thousand Jewish refugees
whose Cuban visas had been canceled,
who were turned away and sent back to Europe,
many of them to die. I don’t have to quote
President Roosevelt’s steely, insincere
private notes to Jewish politicians,
assuring them he was doing all he could.

. with the Displaced Persons Act of 1948,
usa law took notice for the very first time
of the category of refugee;
It was a cynical and imperfect law,
under which more "refugees" admitted to the United States
were from groups favored by Hitler,
like ethnic Germans who lived in
what was becoming the Soviet Union,
than from persecuted groups like Jews or leftists.

. on May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence.
On June 25, 1948, President Harry S. Truman
signed the Displaced Persons Acts into law.
And thus, in the span of six weeks,
the modern West offered up its two solutions to the
threat of a future holocaust against the Jews:
a weak system of refugee asylum in a democratic country,
a system despised then and threatened even now
by populist, racist, anti-immigrant sentiment
-- and a less democratic state that promises,
as one of its founding principles,
to admit any Jew, at any time, no questions asked.

. I could never really wish Israel away
until the United States again became a country that
welcomed immigrants -- something that it has not been
since 1924.