On May 13, 1939, a ship called the St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany to Cuba with 935 Jews on board most of whom hoping to ultimately get to the United States. The plan was to move from Cuba to the U.S. once the visas for which they had applied before sailing became available for them.

They were hoping to escape what the Nazis were doing to the Jews in Germany.

U.S. immigration laws were strict on quotas that limited immigration, especially from southern and Eastern Europe, so handing out visas to German emigrants was slow and limited. There were plenty of visas available for these people since from 1933 to 1938 only about 30,000 German Jews had been able to emigrate to the U.S. because the government only gave out 30 percent of the visas it had available for Germans.

Just before the St. Louis sailed, Cuba changed its visa policy and declared that any old admissions documents people had would not be accepted. Of the 935 people who had obtained the earlier papers, only a few of the passengers on the St. Louis had managed to get new visas before the ship sailed, and only 26 passengers were allowed to get off when the ship arrived in Cuba.

The choice was then to fight with Cuba to have the original papers honored, find another place to go, or return to Germany and face concentration camps.

The U.S. itself considered the situation a “specific and internal matter of Cuba,” and didn’t feel any need to intercede on the refugees’ behalf when a Jewish organization asked it to. The State Department’s Visa Division declared the US wouldn’t pressure Cuba to accept the refugees.

A month after arriving, the St. Louis was ordered to leave Cuban waters, and as it did, it turned toward Miami.

When the St. Louis got within a few miles of Miami’s harbor, the Coast Guard started tailing the ship to prevent it from landing.

The 900 German Jews on the ship could have been allowed to wait in the United States while their visas were being processed, but they weren’t.

With no progress being made with Cuba and no help from the U.S. the ship started back across the Atlantic Ocean after having sailed in circles off Miami for a few days.

When the ship got back, the refugees were divided up and sent to various European countries.

The ones sent to England were the luckiest as all but one of them survived the war there. The rest went to the Netherlands, Belgium and France, countries later invaded by the Nazis with their Jews sent to the camps.

Of the original 935 Jewish passengers, 254 died in the Holocaust.

Four months before the St. Louis Senator Robert Wagner, a Democrat from New York, and Representative Edith Rogers, a Republican from Massachusetts, introduced a bill that would allow 20,000 German Jewish children to come to the US in addition to the visas already available in accordance with the existing quota.

By the time the Senate and House immigration subcommittees held joint hearings on the Wagner-Rogers bill that April, 1,400 Americans had written unsolicited letters to Congress offering to adopt a refugee child.

The bill may have passed out of the subcommittees unanimously, but to get to the floor of either the Senate or House, it had to pass the chambers’ full Judiciary Committees whose members were mostly from the southern and western states.

They had no interest in taking in refugees.
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Representative Emmanuel Celler intended to introduce a bill that would have allowed unused visa slots to be given to refugees fleeing Germany, but he was warned that if he were to introduce this bill, members of congress from the South and West would come up with new ways to restrict immigration even more.

Promoting “America-first” those opposed to the child refugee bill said that the country should put its attention to helping its own needy and homeless citizens rather than taking in anyone new.

The Senate Judiciary Committee chair Richard Russell, a Southerner, amended the Wagner-Rogers bill so that the 20,000 Jewish refugee children would count against the German immigrant quota for the year.

The bill died.

Considering the number of Jews who died in concentration camps as a result of the St. Louis and the anti-children refugee actions that killed the Wagner-Rogers bill, after the war the international community recognized the importance of helping refugees, the United Nations  established the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees in 1950, the Refugee Convention was passed the next year, and the US started believing it had a moral obligation to help people fleeing persecution.

We had the room and available visas, so it is painfully obvious that the people on the St. Louis and the children we could have taken on lost their lives solely because of bigotry.

And, so, since then the United States has done what is right when it came to refugees

Until now.

And for the same reason.

President Trump has declared that the United States is “full” and that the asylum system is “a scam,” tying his push to close the country’s borders to undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers from Central America to an entreaty for Jewish voters to support his re-election campaign.

Speaking to imaginary asylum seekers in his Las Vegas speech, he announced,

“Our system’s full; our country’s full. You can’t come in. Our country is full. What can we do? We can’t handle any more. Our country’s full. You can’t come in, I’m sorry.”

And he explained to his present audience,

“The asylum program is a scam.”

He described people fleeing from what could kill them and/or their children as people “who look like they should be fighting for the U.F.C.,” with large muscles and face tattoos. “Some of the roughest people you’ve ever seen.”

These statements and those he made about turning away refugees from Central America were met with loud applause and cheers from his audience, the Republican Jewish Coalition to whom he was speaking in Las Vegas.

And as these people know from their own history, no one fleeing persecution and death will be met with either if they are just sent back to the countries and regimes they are fleeing.

So much for never forgetting.