20 No. 77 JUSTICE their American-born children were beginning to attract attention for their role in organized crime and bootlegging during prohibition. Such issues were equally important in setting the 1924 quotas. In the end the quotas favored the British Isles, Germany, and the Nordic countries. Great Britain, the newly created Irish Republic (Eire), and Germany had a combined annual quota of 113,000, nearly 70 per cent of all immigration. The Protestant Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland), with a combined population of about 15 million people, had an annual quota of about 18,500 people, while Catholic Italy, with a population of about 36.5 million people, was allowed only 3,800 immigrants a year. Denmark, an overwhelmingly Protestant country of about three million people had a quota 2,789, while the Soviet Union with a population of about 137,000,000 people, who were mostly Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims, had a quota of only 2,248. Most of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Soviet Union — the heart of Jewish Europe — had a combined quota of about 11,000. Turkey, Albania, Greece, British Mandate Palestine, Egypt, Persia, Iraq, and Syria — each had a quota of 100 persons a year. China, Japan, Siam (modern Thailand), and India had nominal quotas of 100, but only “White” people born in those places could immigrate to the United States.19 Immigration Quotas and the Coming Holocaust The quotas illustrate the complexity of understanding Jewish immigration to the United States from January 30, 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, until September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. While conditions for the approximately 533,000 Jews in Germany became increasingly perilous and the safety of Jews elsewhere in Europe grew more problematic, immigration to the United States was difficult or impossible. Had all the Jews in Germany attempted to move to the United States they could not have done so, because in the five years and eight months between Hitler’s takeover and the beginning of the War, the total quota for Germany was only about 259,000.20 Some rabbis and Jewish academics came in outside the quota limitations as a “minister of any religious denomination, or professor of a college, academy, seminary, or university.”21 The 1924 law also created a lengthy bureaucratic process, as immigrants had to provide birth certificates, military records, any prison records, photographs, and other documents. This paperwork “amounted to real obstacles for many would-be immigrants, especially from eastern Europe” where borders and governments had changed after the war.22 About a quarter of all European Jews lived in Poland, which had been created after World War I out of territory previously controlled by the Austo-Hungarian Empire, Germany, and Russia. Russia had an entirely new system of government, and records were often inaccessible or destroyed. The former Austo-Hungarian Empire had been carved up into various new nations, and sections of pre-war Germany were now part of France, Belgium, Poland, Danzig, and Czechoslovakia. The new law required immigrants to demonstrate that they would not become a financial burden on the United States. Sponsors of immigrants (including relatives) had to prove they had the resources to prevent the new immigrants from becoming a “public charge.” Some Jewish Americans refused to commit to supporting distant relatives whom they perhaps did not even know. Embassy personnel who made these financial determinations were often hostile 19. Proclamation of President Calvin Coolidge (June 13, 1924), available at https://coolidgefoundation.org/wp-content/ uploads/2020/11/Proclamation1703.pdf; Table of Quota System Targeting Specific Immigrant Groups, available at https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1230 20. See https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/germany-jewish-population-in-1933. About 130,000 of the Jews in Germany were immigrants from Poland, and they would have had to come to the United States under the annual quota for Poland, which was 5,982. Fewer than 30,000 of those Jews could have come to the United States, assuming that no one else from Poland also came. 21. Act of May 26, 1924, Pub. L. No. 68–139, § 4 (c) and (d) 43 Stat. 153. Under these subsections a fair number of rabbis and Jewish college professors came into the United States in the 1930s. Among others, Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, his nephew Menachem Mendel Schneerson, their families and a number of other Hasidic rabbis were able to come to the United States through the intercession of the Roosevelt Administration in 1940 and 1941. 22. Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner, supra note 13, at 176.
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