Opening Our Minds to Refugees
In the summer of 1941, as the Nazi noose around Western Europe tightened, a man, named Otto Frank, was fervently writing letters to the U.S. State Department. Otto Frank was a Jew living in Holland, where Jews, quickly being forced into ghettos, were soon to be sent to concentration camps.
Yet, just as the Nazis’ grip on Jews tightened, America’s restrictions on Jews tightened too. The year before, America had made its refugee policies much stricter: shutting out entry to hundreds of thousands of European refugees on her waiting list.
Otto Frank wrote again and again to U.S. consulates and the State Department, but every request was denied. The Franks went into hiding. Two years later, the Franks were betrayed and sent to the concentration camps, which Otto would survive. Yet, his daughter—Anne Frank—was killed.
The Franks and thousands of others who perished in the Holocaust were denied visas into the U.S. for eerily familiar reasons. Americans held deep prejudices against their religion in the form of anti-semitism. Many American workers feared an influx of new laborers, competing for jobs and housing. Other Americans—citizens and politicians alike—believed European Jews could never assimilate into American life.
Today, there are more refugees than at any point since the years Anne and Otto Frank were alive. We all know of the atrocities inflicted on these refugees: massacres carried out by ISIS, chemical weapons dropped by the Syrian government, famines, suffering and death. Yet just as we saw during the Holocaust, we have tried to close our eyes and turn those refugees away.
Today, some Americans fear the economic strain of accepting refugees. Yes, absorbing a large population can be hard in the short term. Yet, we forget that through the decades, refugees have helped build the America we know and love. We often picture refugees as terrorists and economic burdens, but we forget their tremendous contributions: Refugees throughout history include Albert Einstein, Madeleine Albright, Sergey Brin, Henry Kissinger, Regina Spektor and many more.
Others fear that refugees will perpetrate terror on American soil. To be fair, it’s extremely difficult to screen or vet most refugees, and today’s terrorist groups have global ambitions. Yet, it’s worth pointing out that since the Refugee Act of 1980, not a single one of the three million refugees resettled in the U.S. has committed a fatal terrorist attack (a tiny number have been convicted on other terror charges.) This should be intuitive: after all, citizens of countries like Syria and Afghanistan are far more likely to be victims of terror than to be terrorists themselves.
It’s easy to let fear take control of our reasoning. In fact, something similar happened during World War II, just as the Franks went into hiding. Americans were paralyzed by fear of German spies, disguised as refugees, slipping into America.
In 1940, American Ambassador to Cuba George S. Messersmith wrote, “Among the so-called refugees in our country is a fair number who can be depended upon to act as agents of their government and who will violate in any way the hospitality which they are enjoying among us.” This fear practically shut down the U.S. refugee program. When Otto Frank desperately tried to gain a visa one year later, he found the gates barred shut.
If we shut those same gates today, we let fear of a few attacks outweigh the suffering of millions left behind. And perhaps, another 75 years from now, we might look back and wonder why America could still turn its back on men like Otto Frank.