Click button below to see sample letters used
in the process for obtaining a visa.
No one has more succinctly or aptly
described the process a person had to go through in order to come to the United
States than journalist Peter Wyden did in 1987, when he explained his family's
determination to flee Germany in the 1930s:
"the language in the house changed.
Our future had come to depend on three new guideposts: 'the quota' -- [which
was] the total number of German refugees permitted to enter the United States
under the miserly immigration laws; 'the affidavit' -- the document from
an umpteenth cousin . . . guaranteeing that he would support us if we became
destitute; and 'the visa' -- which would be our stamped admission ticket
into the promised land."
Those "stamped admission tickets,"
the visas, were woefully hard to get. In 1930, as the financial depression
deepened, President Herbert Hoover ordered the Department of State to to provide
him with a report concerning the impact of immigration on the ongoing Great
Depression. In this report, given to Hoover in September, 1930, the State
Department recommended that immigration visas be restricted more severely.
The report argued:
where there is not any reasonable prospect
of prompt employment for an alien laborer or artisan who comes hoping to
get a job or live by it, the particular consular officer in the field to
whom application for a visa is made (upon whom the responsibility for examination
of the applicant rests) will before issuing a visa have to pass judgment
with particular care on whether the applicant may become a public charge.
The report urged the president to permit
consular officers to refuse to issue visas in such cases.
After receiving this report, Hoover issued
an executive order to all consulates that "if the consular officer [in
any country] believes that an applicant [for a visa] may probably be[come]
a public charge at any time, even … a considerable period [after] his
arrival [in the United States] he must refuse the visa." The directive
offered no guidelines for making a distinction between applicants who wanted
to come to America "hoping to get a job" and those who could be
fleeing political or religious persecution.
Within months of this order, the number
of visas issued for immigration to American dropped to about one-fourth of
the number that had been issued in previous years. The order was maintained
during the Roosevelt administration, and throughout the 1930s. American consuls
also rejected thousands of visa applications because of technical flaws in
the applications, procedural difficulties, minor details, any number of excuses.
This tendency was almost certainly compounded
by the kind of foreign service officer who worked in the consulates in the
1930s and made the decisions regarding visa applications. They were invariably
men who came from middle-class or upper middle-class families and had attended
well-respected universities, primarily in the eastern part of the United States
(a degree from an ivy league school was almost the norm). Their family history
in America usually extended back four or five generations, or longer. Many
of them had belonged to societies in college and clubs in private life that
routinely excluded Jews from possible membership. Many scholars since the
Holocaust have believed that with this type of background, at least some consular
officials rejected visa applications out of prejudice.
Breckinridge Long, Assistant Secretary
of State, supervised the process through which consulates issued immigration
visas. He probably had more influence on the process than any other single
individual. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Long was part of distinguished
families in the history of North Carolina and Kentucky. He was part of the
conservative wing of the Democratic Party, especially so where immigration
was concerned; as he noted in his diary in September 1941: "I believe
that nobody, anywhere has a right to enter the United States
unless the United States desires." He was also convinced that many of
the immigrants from Germany were in fact spies for the German government,
which used "visitor's visas to send agents and [subversive] documents
through the United States." Knowing this attitude of their boss, it is
a small wonder that many of the consulate personnel refused visas for any
number of specious reasons.
In was in this atmosphere that relatives
of Herman Stern began in 1935 to seek refuge the United States. For an example
of
Sources: Henry L. Feingold, The Politics
of Rescue (1970); Martin Weil, A Pretty Good Club: The Founding Fathers
of the U.S. Foreign Service (1978); Peter Wyden, Stella (1992);
David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis (1968); Public
Papers of the Presidents: Herbert Hoover, 1930 (1976); The War Diary
of Breckinridge Long (1966).
Documents from the "Goldschmidt"
file, Herman Stern Papers, Libby Manuscript Collections, University of North
Dakota.