21 Spring 2026 to immigrants, and some were unabashedly antisemitic. President Herbert Hoover “toughened the interpretation of the public charge clause,” which State Department officials aggressively applied until President Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to focus on the problem and compel a reluctant State Department bureaucracy to implement a new policy.23 The quotas and the elaborate bureaucratic rules reflected open antisemitism among many members of Congress and growing social, cultural, and political antisemitism in the general public. But the quotas were based on the national origins of people in the United States. Even as members of Congress used antisemitic arguments (among others) to limit immigration, the quotas were based on nationality rather than religion. Nationality could be a proxy for antisemitism, but with inconsistent results. Poland, with a population of about 37,000,000, including three million Jews, had a quota of 6,525, while Italy, with a population of more than 41,000,000, and a Jewish population of just 50,000, had a quota of 5,802. Poland, with its huge Jewish population, also had a much higher quota than countries like Greece or Albania, which had very few Jews, but had quotas of 100 people per year. Similarly, Germany, with more than half a million Jews, had the second highest quota of 25,957. When Congress adopted the quota system, no one could anticipate the rise of Nazism or the Holocaust. Other aspects of American society also undercut the idea that these quotas were aimed at Jews. From 1900 until the United States entered World War II in 1941, every president appointed at least one Jew to a federal court, starting with U.S. District Judge Jacob Trieber in 1900. In addition to seven Jewish federal judges, three Jews became Supreme Court Justices (Louis D. Brandeis, 1916, Benjamin N. Cardozo, 1932, and Felix Frankfurter, 1939).24 Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, who supported rigid immigration quotas in this period, nevertheless appointed Jews to the federal bench. As the quota numbers show, the 1921 and 1924 laws were most severely aimed at southern Europeans, Asians, and Middle Easterners. The laws had no provisions for refugees and emergencies. These omissions were intentional. The idea of a refugee was well known, but Congress and presidents in the 1920s did not want any such people. As I noted above, in 1882 Congress offered special aid to “Hebrew Refugees from Russia,” and in 1917 Congress specifically provided that Hebrew and Yiddish would fulfill the literacy requirement while entirely waiving the literacy requirement for refugees fleeing religious persecution, which clearly was a benefit to Jews. Reflecting the long-standing absence of a “refugee” category in immigration law, the new quota laws did not mention the word or the concept. Special provisions for refugees in the early 1920s would also have undermined the quota system by allowing more immigrants, when Congress wanted fewer newcomers fleeing starvation and the chaos of post-World War I Europe. Immigration, the Depression, and Fascism In response to the stock market crash of 1929 and the depression, President Hoover tightened financial requirements for immigrants (which dramatically limited Jewish immigration from Germany in the 1930s), and deported about 50,000 people.25 When Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) became president in 1933, nearly 13 million workers — 25% of the work force — were unemployed. About a quarter of all households had no income while millions of Americans lost their savings because of bank failures. In his first term FDR focused on the economic catastrophe he inherited and mostly ignored foreign policy.26 While FDR was settling in as President, Adolf Hitler was remaking Germany, ruthlessly dispossessing Jews of their rights, their property, their livelihoods, and their physical security. Conditions for Germany’s half-million 23. Supra note 18, at 69. 24. By contrast the first Italian American federal judge, Matthew Abruzzo, was appointed in 1936, and the first Italian American supreme court justice, Antonin Scalia, went on the bench in 1986. 25. Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner, supra note 13, at 179; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Immigration to the United States, 1933-41,” HOLOCAUST ENCYCLOPEDIA, available at https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/ article/immigration-to-the-united-states-1933-41 26. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933, available at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_ century/froos1.asp
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