December 16, 2025: Refugee Stories: WWII Refugees

[On December 14^th, 1950, the United Nations adopted its Statute on the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. So for the 75^th anniversary of that important moment, this week I’ll AmericanStudy the UNHCR and other refugee stories, leading up to a weekend post on that fraught and crucial issue in 2025.]

On two federal actions that reflect the worst and best of our reactions to WWII refugees, and why we have to engage with precisely that duality.

In recent years, the story of the German ocean liner St. Louis and its ill-fated May 1939 attempt to help nearly 1000 Jewish refugees escape the deepening Holocaust has become more familiar to American audiences. As is too often the case, it has been a significantly over-simplified version of that history which has achieved that level of collective awareness, one for example that leaves out the ship’s original destination of and extended attempt to unload passengers in Havana, Cuba entirely. But nevertheless, one essential series of interconnected facts about the St. Louis that has been accurately highlighted is this: the U.S. government had the opportunity to welcome the refugees once they had been denied entry to Cuba and the ship sailed to Miami; the Roosevelt administration chose not to allow any of them to enter the U.S., due at least in part to blatant anti-semitism; and after they returned to Europe, more than 250 of the passengers ended up dying in the Holocaust. That’s a painful and shameful story for all concerned, including without question the United States.

As the war continued to unfold, the U.S. government took small but meaningful steps to revise a different such shameful history. There’s no topic from American history about which I’ve written and talked more than the Chinese Exclusion era; while my work has focused on the last couple decades of the 19^th century, those exclusionary laws and policies toward both Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans also continued throughout the first few decades of the 20^th. Indeed, the first federal law of any kind that began to change that exclusionary trend was the Magnuson Act of 1943, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act. Proposed by Washington Representative (soon-to-be Senator) Warren G. Magnuson, this law both permitted some Chinese immigration to the U.S. and allowed some Chinese Americans to naturalized citizens. Both of those provisions were directly related to China’s newfound status as a wartime ally of the United States, in direct opposition to the unfolding war with Japan that had begun after Pearl Harbor and was at its height in December 1943 when Roosevelt signed the Magnuson Act into law.

Wartime alliances and adversaries are a straightforward, and not at all inaccurate, way to link these two World War II-era histories. Not only to differentiate two communities (Jewish Europeans and the Chinese), but also and even more relevantly because in 1939 the U.S. was not at war with any nation, and so the St. Louis decision can’t be separated from the official policy of neutrality in that moment. But even when we include those necessary (if still complicated) contexts in the mix, these two federal actions (or rather inaction and action respectively) nonetheless help us make a very clear and very crucial point, one I’ve tried to make for at least the 13 years since my Chinese Exclusion Act book: immigration laws and policies are incredibly haphazard, targeting communities and nations based on specific prejudices, shifting toward those same communities based on other practicalities or trends, finding new targets in new eras with no apparent lessons learned from the prior experiences, and so on. Anyone who seeks to make the case for immigration restrictions or exclusions based on concepts like “fairness” or “the rules” needs to engage with just how absent those concepts have been from the entire history of these laws and debates, as illustrated concisely by these WWII moments.  

Next story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?