In April 1933, at the beginning of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term, Undersecretary of State William Phillips called Labor Secretary Frances Perkins on the phone, expecting to tell her how immigration policy would work in the new administration. Philips “was almost blown off his end of the telephone.” Perkins told him “in no uncertain terms” that accepting immigrants whose lives were in danger was an American tradition and that “it was up to her department, not the State Department, to decide whether such admission would adversely affect the economic conditions or entail a fight with the AFL [American Federation of Labor].”1
As the first woman cabinet secretary and longest-serving Labor Secretary in American history, Perkins is best remembered as a key architect of the New Deal and Social Security. A lesser-known component of her tenure is her role in U.S. immigration policy, which was largely under her department’s control in the 1930s. From her volunteer work in a Chicago settlement house to her work on industrial safety in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, immigration issues had always been a part of Perkins’ labor activism. In many ways, if you were looking to flee Europe in the 1930s, she may have seemed like the ideal cabinet secretary to oversee immigration to the United States. Yet when she joined the cabinet, the United States did not even have an official definition of refugee, let alone a coherent policy for managing their petitions for entrance to the country.2
Understanding the story of Perkins’ attempt to carve a welcoming refugee policy out of scraps of existing law, from her phone call with Phillips to the complete transfer of INS out of her control in 1940, requires us to follow a series of bureaucratic maneuvers between and among cabinet departments.3 But these maneuvers—and the smaller battles over bureaucratic turf that both precipitated and followed them—were part of fighting a greater war for the spirit and implementation of the nation’s immigration policy. Would the United States cling to its legally-codified hostility towards immigrants—even refugees—or would it open its doors to those fleeing persecution and violence? Perkins’ struggle to open those doors in the 1930s shows us how a culture war can be fought through, and consciously disguised by, bureaucratic battles over policy and implementation.
Barely a month before FDR’s inauguration on March 4, 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Americans had followed Hitler’s rise to power in the news, and now they followed the deteriorating status of Jewish Germans. In March 1933, Nazis smashed windows of Jewish stores, broke streetcars, and assaulted Jewish passersby. The following month, they boycotted Jewish businesses. In mid-April, FDR’s Cabinet convened to discuss a sudden surge in applications for immigration visas from Jewish Germans.4
At this time, immigration to the U.S. was guided by the transformational Immigration Act of 1924. It had barred Asian immigration, minimized immigration from Central and South America, and limited European immigration by instituting a quota system, placing limits on number of people who could emigrate from each European country in a given year.
The section governing these limits—the National Origins Act or “Quota Act”—built on the legal architecture of restrictionism in the Immigration Act of 1917, which had restricted immigration from large swaths of Asia, and barred immigrants who were “likely to become a public charge” or require government resources for survival due to mental or physical disabilities. Taken together, the quota system and the public charge restrictions created barriers and waiting lists that would exclude most of these new applicants.
But Perkins learned from a federal judge about an overlooked provision in the Immigration Act of 1917: the charge bond provision. It stated that the Labor Secretary could use discretion to admit an immigrant who might otherwise become a public charge if—and only if—an American citizen provided a $500 bond to insure the immigrant. When the 1917 legislation passed, an isolationist Congress didn’t anticipate a Labor Secretary as progressive as Perkins, never mind their use of the pronoun “he” in the text of the law.5
Perkins and her Solicitor of Labor, Charles Wyzanski, wanted to use charge bonds to help Jewish Germans escape the Nazis. Perkins disagreed with the notion that immigration was inherently bad for the economy, and furthermore, believed that the U.S. had a humanitarian obligation in this situation. Furthermore, due to the (intentionally) throttling effects of the 1924 act, immigration had slowed to a trickle in the past decade. Perkins worked with Wyzanski as well as federal judge and social reformer Julian Mack to advocate for the use of the charge bond provision to address the refugee crisis.6
For decades prior to this point, oversight of immigration in the United States had been divided between the Treasury, State, and Commerce and Labor departments.7 One thing had long united those people and offices, however: a spirit of xenophobia. William Doak, Perkins’ predecessor under President Hoover, had drawn “a strange satisfaction out of hounding aliens; raiding homes, wedding parties, and other gatherings in which it was suspected that a foreigner illegally in the country might be present.”8
Frances Perkins on the cover of Time Magazine, August 14, 1933.
But in June 1933, Congress established the Immigration and Naturalization Service, placing it solely under the control of Perkins’ department. Armed with her knowledge of the charge bond provision and new power to oversee immigration, Perkins would bring new priorities to the institution. But other departments weren’t as eager to give up control—especially to someone with Perkins’ views on immigration.9
The bureaucratic fight over the use of charge bonds began immediately. The Labor Department argued that Perkins should be able to accept a charge bond before a U.S. consul abroad made any decision to accept or reject an immigrant. This way, Labor could exercise discretionary authority over the admission of refugees. The State Department objected, arguing that Perkins could only accept a charge bond after the consul approved the immigrant in question. Secretary of State Cordell Hull opposed treating political and religious refugees as special cases, maintaining that treating refugees differently contradicted the spirit of American immigration law. But Perkins wanted to use the charge bonds clause precisely to treat refugees differently.10
Both departments agreed that Attorney General Homer Stiles Cummings would decide the fate of charge bonds. They asked Cummings to rule on three specific points of contention. First, could the Secretary of Labor accept a bond before the immigrant in question arrived on American soil? If so, did Perkins need to accept bonds according to the chronological order in which applications were received? Finally, did Perkins possess the legal authority to override the consuls?11
In December 1933, Cummings decided in favor of the Labor Department. He ruled that the Secretary of Labor could accept a bond before an individual arrived in America and could also override consuls’ authority if they decided to reject an application. In response to the second question, Cummings cited the Immigration Act of 1917 to simply clarify the specifics of how the Secretary of Labor could accept a bond. Friends or family of the applicant could offer the required sum of money—a significant one, especially in the middle of a depression—and Perkins would deposit it in the United States Postal Savings Bank. If the immigrant became incapable of supporting themselves, public officials could draw on the sum in lieu of providing public assistance.12
Prior to the ruling, Assistant Secretary of State Wilbur Carr advised the State Department to accept the Attorney General’s decision even “if [he] determines the existing interpretation to be wrong.” After the Attorney General sided with the Labor Department, State Department Division Officer C. Paul Fletcher grumbled that the “sleeping” State Department would now bear responsibility for an influx of Jewish immigrants.13
An optimistic assessment of Cummings’ ruling in the Milwaukee Jewish Chronicle, Feb. 2, 1934: “…it will be possible to admit about 25,000 German refugees instead of a few hundred.”
Though Cummings’ rulings had apparently cleared the way for her to do so, whether Perkins used the charge bonds is a simple question with a complicated answer. The State Department’s consuls abroad needed to receive specific instructions to adjust their policies according to the new legal standard. By August 1934, however, the consuls still had not received any new instructions.14
In early February 1934, Wyzanski had recommended Perkins exercise caution and use moderation in accepting charge bonds in order to avoid agitating and upsetting the AFL and Congress.15 The AFL disapproved of a massive influx of immigration, arguing that immigration exacerbated unemployment. This argument, a common one then and now, not only shaped laws like the National Origins Act but also xenophobic legal and extra-legal actions taken against U.S. citizens. President Hoover, for instance, had deported a million American citizens of Mexican descent to Mexico in 1931 for purportedly “stealing U.S. jobs.” Another related deterrent against using charge bonds, beyond general opposition to immigrants not seen as fully white, was the antisemitism that incoming Jewish immigrants would surely face, given the prevalence of the sentiment in the United States.16
Still, the Labor Department had gained some leverage by prevailing in the legal battle, which Perkins likely used to negotiate off the record with State Department officials. This might explain why State Department consuls overseas accepted three thousand more Jewish immigrants in 1934 than in 1933. To historians’ dismay, such negotiations wouldn’t have left paper trails.17
Perkins sits before a Congressional sub-committee during her impeachment trial
Yet in the years between the charge bonds controversy and the escalation of Nazi atrocities in the late 1930s, Perkins faced sanction for her “favorable” treatment of immigrants. In 1934, Australian immigrant Harry Bridges led a successful longshoremen’s strike in San Francisco. After Perkins refused to deport Bridges, Congress eventually brought a resolution of impeachment against her in 1939 for associating with him—not only an immigrant, but a communist.18
Though unsuccessful, the impeachment attempt further revealed to Perkins the dangers of Washington politics where immigration was concerned, and may have dissuaded her from using charge bonds to their fullest potential.
While facing attacks for her beliefs and decisions on immigration from inside and outside the executive branch, Perkins continued to receive letters from family and friends of refugees, beseeching her to intervene on their behalf—hundreds between 1937 and 1940. Beyond charge bonds, she tried to help refugees use three other narrow avenues for immigration to the United States: non-quota immigration, and quota immigration, and visitors’ visas. She met with only limited success.
While immigration law severely limited immigration outside of the quota system, there were some possible paths for refugees. Under section 19(d) of the National Origins Act, religious officials could qualify as non-quota immigrants, as could professors who had taught for at least two years preceding admission. However, consuls tried to exclude applicants by exercising their discretion over who counted as a “professor.” Norbert Glatzer was an esteemed Hebrew scholar in Europe, yet American consular officials claimed Glatzer did not qualify as a professor because he focused on research. In 1938, the American Jewish Congress wrote to Perkins: “Any person with academic experience knows this is absurd.” Perkins responded: “On the basis of the evidence presented, the Solicitor has reached the conclusion that Dr. Glatzer has been continuously carrying on the vocation of a professor of the past two years and, therefore, falls within the provisions of Sec. 4(d) of the Quota Immigration Act of 1924, as amended.” Glatzer successfully immigrated on a non-quota visa.19
Immigration within the quota system was even more difficult, which is why Perkins had sought alternate approaches like the charge bond in the first place. The story of Endre Varady, who sought refuge in the United States in 1938, demonstrates why simply “following the law” and “waiting in line” was not a workable solution for those fleeing Nazi violence.
According to the National Origins Act, Varady needed a visa from his country of origin, Hungary, to immigrate. At the same time that the legislation favored Europeans over non-Europeans, it favored Western Europeans over Eastern Europeans, and the Hungarian quota was comparatively small. Though he had lived in Austria since he was an infant, he was ineligible for an Austrian visa. As Varady’s case makes clear, these quotas were further complicated by the fact that the map of Europe had changed significantly in recent decades—Austria-Hungary had been one country thirty years earlier.
Varady’s struggles would be lost to time if not for the fact that his first cousin, Eugene Weissmann, “had the honor of ministering to Perkins’s dental needs.” Perkins was moved by the case of her dentist’s cousin, but she reaffirmed that, in these cases, visas from consuls abroad were under the jurisdiction of the State Department, not the Labor Department. She was either unable or unwilling to use the charge bonds that Attorney General Cummings had declared legal three years earlier. After her feud with the Department of State, she could not count on many favors. Still, she “asked the legal division of this Department to explore the immigration statutes to see whether there was any possibility of rendering some assistance to him.”20
Varady entered the Dachau concentration camp immediately after Kristallnacht, barely three weeks after Perkins encountered his case. The Nazis imprisoned him along with thousands of others for the purpose of assessing their assets in order to steal them. When they released him at the end of that year, he no longer had means of supporting his family. There is no record of his immigration to the United States, and it is probable that Varady and his family likely perished.21 At the time, the waiting list to immigrate to the U.S. on a Hungarian visa under the legal quota system was twelve years long.
The contemporary caption for this 1938 image: “Experts on the refugee problem shown leaving the White House today after conferring with President Roosevelt, the group met with the President to go over preliminaries to an international conference to help political refugees form Germany and Austria.”
Varady’s case illuminates many of the obstacles refugees in the 1930s faced when attempting to navigate the quota system for immigration to the United States. Antisemitism alone did not prevent Varady from immigrating, but being Jewish certainly did not help; consuls in areas with Jewish populations were notably strict. Claiming that potential immigrants were too poor was another legal way to prevent them from entering the United States, and remains so to this day. This argument—that immigrants might become a drain on the economy—has often disguised more complex motivations, especially racism. In 1938, Varady and his family faced a twelve-year waiting list because American immigration law saw Eastern European immigrants as less desirable and allotted their countries smaller quotas. Although Varady’s wife and children were born in Austria, the legal privilege given to the husband’s country of origin meant they were all held hostage to the smaller quota of his birthplace. Finally, even a citizen of a country with unfilled quotas, including Austria and Germany, could not obtain a visa in Austria if Nazis had stripped them of their passport—they no longer had “proper documentation.”22
One more path existed for refugees to escape to the United States—visitors’ visas. Although the State Department maintained that it was illegal for aliens to immigrate by entering the country on visitors’ visas and repeatedly extending them, Perkins persuaded FDR to issue a six-month extension for all visitors’ visas of German Jews in the United States in the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht in 1938. But Perkins was unable to secure the extension of visitors’ visas indefinitely. Several visitors died by suicide to avoid deportation to Nazi territory.23
On May 22, 1940, FDR transferred all functions of and authority over the INS from the Secretary of Labor to the Attorney General, ending any ability Perkins had to use her authority to help refugees. Although the move was only a piece of a broader reorganization plan, Perkins’ adversaries, particularly Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, treated the transfer as their victory over her.24
The State Department continued to control consuls overseas, and found their isolationism and rigidity bolstered by the Justice Department’s introduction of a new requirement: the fingerprinting of immigrants. As war escalated in Europe, the fingerprinting system aimed to assuage the fear—held by the administration and members of the general public—that Nazis disguised as immigrants would enter the country. (The FBI had caught a Nazi spy in New York City in 1938, as well as a German American veteran of the U.S. Army who tried to spy on American military intelligence.) It was under the auspices of the Justice Department that INS would oversee the forced relocation and internment of more than 100,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese-American citizens.25
In her 1946 bestselling biography of FDR, The Roosevelt I Knew, Perkins was less than candid. She praised FDR and even the sympathy that he felt for immigrants. She never boasted about her own efforts. In 1933, she had found herself in a position of power over immigration, one from which she could seemingly have aided those fleeing rising Nazi oppression and violence in Europe. Though she attempted to use existing immigration law to find ways to bring refugees into the country, she could not escape the fact that that legal framework was designed precisely to prevent such a thing—nor that the government officials charged with carrying it out, like most Americans at the time, were firmly committed to the restrictionist and xenophobic ideals it embodied.26
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- Barbara McDonald Stewart, United States Government Policy on Refugees from Nazism, 1933–1940 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982), 55.
- For the life and work of Perkins, see Kirstin Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins (New York: Random House, 2009).
- For American immigration policy in the 1930s, focusing on isolationism and restrictionism, see Stewart, United States Government Policy on Refugees from Nazism; Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Focusing on antisemitism, see: David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984); Bat-Ami Zucker, In Search of Refuge: Jews and US Consuls in Nazi Germany, 1938–1941 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2001). For broader context of American immigration law, see Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
- “Nazi Mobs Run Wild in the Heart of Vienna: Shouting Crowds Assault Jews,” New York Times, Mar. 29, 1933; “German Business Protests Boycott,” New York Times, Mar. 31, 1933; Downey, Woman Behind the New Deal, 190.
- The act reads, “Any alien… likely to become a public charge… if otherwise admissible, nevertheless be admitted in the discretion of the Secretary of Labor upon giving of a suitable and proper bond or undertaking, approved by said Secretary, in such amount and containing such conditions as he may prescribe… In lieu of such bond, such alien may deposit in cash with the Secretary of Labor such amount as the Secretary of Labor may require.” Restrictionism had been at the heart of U.S. immigration policy as long as any such policy had existed, beginning in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act.
- Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking, 1946); Breitman and Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 18–21.
- At this time, Commerce and Labor were one department. For the sake of brevity, this essay will refer to it as the Labor Department.
- Louis Adamic, “Aliens and Alien-Baters,” Harpers Monthly Magazine (Nov. 1936), 561.
- Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 83.
- Bat-Ami Zucker, “Frances Perkins and the German-Jewish Refugees 1933-1940,” American Jewish History 89 (Mar. 2001): 35–59 (unpaywalled version here); Breitman and Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 35–36.
- Zucker, “Frances Perkins and the German-Jewish Refugees,” 43. The State Department cited Provision 48 from the National Origins Act of 1924, arguing that Perkins did not have the authority to overturn a consul’s decision: “Consular officials are not authorized either to require or to accept bonds in immigration cases. The question of bonds does not, therefore, arise until after an alien has received a visa and actually arrives at a port of entry to the United States.”
- Homer Stiles Cummings to Frances Perkins, Dec. 26, 1933, Department of Labor Immigration Correspondence, Record Number 174, Stack Area 530, Row 47, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereinafter cited as Labor Dept. Immigration Correspondence, NARA).
- Quoted in Zucker, “Frances Perkins and the German-Jewish Refugees,” 43–44.
- Zucker, “Frances Perkins and the German-Jewish Refugees,” 45.
- Charles Wyzanski, Memorandum to Perkins on the Admission of Refugees from Germany, Feb. 10, 1934, Wyzanski Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.
- Diane Bernard, “The time a president deported 1 million Mexican Americans for supposedly stealing U.S. jobs,” Washington Post, Aug. 13, 2018; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 180; Zucker, “Frances Perkins and the German-Jewish Refugees.”
- Rebecca Brenner Graham, “How to stop President Trump’s latest attack on immigrants,” Washington Post, Aug. 13, 2018; Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 174.
- George Martin, Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976) 407–19; Erik Loomis, “This Day in Labor History: May 9, 1934,” Lawyers, Guns & Money, May 9, 2012.
- American Jewish Congress to Frances Perkins, Nov. 1, 1938, and Frances Perkins to Rabbi Stephen Wise, Nov. 4, 1938, both in Labor Dept. Immigration Correspondence, NARA.
- Eugene Weissmann to Frances Perkins, Oct. 14, 1938, and Frances Perkins to Eugene Wiessmann, Oct. 20, 1938, both in Labor Dept. Immigration Correspondence, NARA.
- US Holocaust Memorial and Museum, ITS Archives, document number 48502421#1.
- Zucker, In Search of Refuge, 177; John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 136. Also see Abigail Hauslohner, Nick Miroff, Maria Sacchetti, and Tracy Jan, “Trump officials move to deny green cards, path to citizenship to poor immigrants,” Washington Post, Aug. 12, 2019.
- Downey, Woman Behind the New Deal, 286–87. For an example of such a suicide, see Commissioner Houghteling to Frances Perkins, Aug. 7, 1939, Labor Dept. Immigration Correspondence, NARA.
- Reorganization Plan No. V of 1940; Downey, Woman Behind the New Deal, 295–96.
- Breitman and Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, 161–62; Breitman and Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 114.
- Breitman and Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 27.
