War Refugees And Public Opinion: Some Historical Perspective

November 17, 2015

Comments

In the context of the ongoing discussions about Syrian refugees, a look at some past polling about refugees from a different time and a different conflict are instructive. These tweets come from the Twitter Account Historical Opinion, which curates poll results on issues of interest from the past:

US Dec 12 ’38: College students: Should the US offer haven in this country for Jewish refugees from Central Europe? pic.twitter.com/KD0c53mKhn

— Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) November 16, 2015

US Jan 20 ’39: Should the US government permit 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children to come in from Germany? pic.twitter.com/5cFs5RabQn

— Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) November 17, 2015

US Apr ’39: If in Congress, would you support a bill to open US to larger number of European refugees? By Religion. pic.twitter.com/pWsqyRXZoW — Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) November 17, 2015

Of course, we know what happened to the vast majority of the people seeking to escape Europe on the eve or war.

4 responses to “War Refugees And Public Opinion: Some Historical Perspective”

bookdragon

November 17, 2015 at 11:55 am

This.

Also our reaction to Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees after the Vietnam War. In fact, in those cases, in addition to objections based on outright racism and xenophobia, there was the suggestion of communist infiltrators hiding among the refugees.
Bill Lefrak

November 17, 2015 at 1:36 pm

This entire problem for obvious reasons would be solved right quick if it were announced that all of the refugees would be resettled in Beverly Hills, SoHo, Tribeca, New Canaan, Greenwich, Cambridge and Georgetown.
Hal_10000

November 17, 2015 at 2:34 pm

There’s a great book on this subject called While Six Million Died. The US was in one of its period waves of anti-immigrant hysteria (much as we are now). Even the immigrations slots that were available to Jews went unfilled. The State Department had them in a Catch-22. They couldn’t come here if they didn’t have a job (because they would become a drain on welfare). They couldn’t come over here if they did have a job (because they were taking one away from an American). They couldn’t come over here if they had a wealthy relative who said they would take care of them (because that relative was under no legal obligation). The only way they could come over here was to have a lot of their own wealth. But, of course, the Nazis would only let Jews leave the country with a couple of hundred marks at most, so they couldn’t even do that.
SKI

November 17, 2015 at 8:13 pm

“Never Again” is not just about Germans and Jews. We cannot allow bigotry, xenophobia and intolerance reign again in this country.