The Jewish Observer

The last session of “Faith, Food, and Friday” featured Brant Copeland, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Tallahassee. Brant is well known in our community as a strong advocate for issues of social justice. He began the session by outlining six issues that he believes the community needs to address. On his list were issues concerning immigrants and immigration.

This prompted a question from a participant asking how we could take 11 million people who were here illegally and just excuse their illegal status. I cannot recall the exact wording of the question, but the gist was to question the fairness of a sort of amnesty for illegal immigrants when others had conformed to the existing laws. While I was perfectly happy to defer to Brant to answer questions on most of the issues he raised (his positions and mine are almost identical), here was one that struck me very personally, so I jumped in with a response. It was a response based on my own family’s history.

All of my family, that is my mother’s and father’s side, are German immigrants. I am a first generation American. All of the family that made it to America were Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. My parents and their families were among the lucky few, and many members of their extended families did not make it out of Europe alive. Just among my grandfather, Walter Romberg’s siblings, three died in either concentration camps or Jewish ghettos organized by the Nazis. My grandfather himself died as a result of exposure to toxic chemicals from working as a slave laborer in a German chemical plant (my father’s parents were divorced when he was an infant which is why his father did not immigrate with him to the United States). The reason many European Jews did not escape the Nazi death machine is directly traceable to American immigration policy of the 1930’s.

During the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, America had pretty much of an “open door” immigration policy. The result was that millions of Eastern Europeans, among them about 3 million Jews, poured into our country. This immigrant wave supplied labor for growing American industries, provided fresh entrepreneurial initiatives, and an influx of intellectual capital. In short, they did what immigrants to the United States have always done – fueled the growth and energy of our country. In the 1920’s under pressure by many lobbying groups including labor unions and groups that just did not like so many outsiders flooding our shores, immigration laws changed to a quota system that allocated how many immigrants would be accepted by the United States from each country in any given year. As could be expected, the quotas for countries most similar to us (Great Britain) were more forgiving than the quotas for Eastern Europe or Asia.

The result was an immigration policy in the 1930’s that prevented many, indeed hundreds of thousands of Jews in particular, from being able to find refuge in America. A great description of the injustice of American policy regarding Jewish immigration is described in Arthur Morse’s excellent book, “While Six Million Died.” One particularly horrifying chapter is the story of the ship, “St. Louis,” which was turned away from the United States and whose passengers were returned to Nazi Europe. All of this informed my answer to the questioner at the “Faith, Food and Friday” session.

Very succinctly I asserted that the law defining the 11 million undocumented residents of the United States as illegal is an unjust law. The fault is with our system, not with people who wish to come to our country to build safe, productive lives for their families. I do not see a change in the law that adjusts their status as “amnesty,” but as a correction to unjust laws born of prejudice against the despised “other” of the day. Decades ago we Jews were among the despised “others.” Now it is Latinos. This cycle just needs to stop.

For we want and need immigrants. We want and need the labor pool, the entrepreneurial spirit and the intellectual capital. I do not suggest we open the doors to criminals and terrorists, nor do I believe entrance to the United States should be an automatic path to citizenship. But we need to change from a policy of exclusion to one that opens our doors to the next round of fresh blood for the American body.

This is a very winnable argument. Not only have 8 Republican and Democratic senators come together to propose changes, but the person asking the question at last Friday’s program approached me afterwards to tell me my response had given her reason to rethink her position. There is always hope.