Through closed gates: Jews and illegal immigration to the United States, 1921--1933.

Abstract

This dissertation is a history of the illegal immigration of Eastern European Jews to the United States that burgeoned after the passage of highly restrictive, nation-based immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924. I argue that the history of this illicit flow of people forces us to re-examine a central narrative of twentieth-century U.S. history, namely that 1924 saw the closing of the gates to European immigrants, and thus the end of an era in which European immigration was a matter of national urgency. I contend that the quota legislation escalated rather than settled struggles over questions of national inclusion and exclusion, and created new gray areas between alienness and belonging. The history of illegal immigration illuminates how the laws actually functioned on the ground, something we have as yet learned little about. The laws did reorder the rules governing the nation's literal and metaphorical borders, but this reordering happened unevenly, confusedly, and with much contention. Strategies Jewish migrants employed to enter the United States despite the quotas---forgeries, disguise, and surreptitious entry---challenged the laws' premise that it was possible to secure national borders against undesirables, or to sort desirable immigrants from undesirable ones, and aliens from citizens. Jewish migrants, as a heterogeneous group coming from many countries and speaking many languages, particularly confounded the categories of ethnicity and nationality upon which the quota laws were based. Chapter One examines the genesis of the quota laws, focusing on the U.S. government's interest in counting and classifying, as well as the challenges Jews posed to such a project. Chapter Two considers U.S. Jewish leaders' responses to the illegal immigration of Jews over the Mexico-Texas border and to the plight of Jews stranded abroad with U.S. visas rendered defunct by the 1924 law. Chapter Three investigates Jewish alien smuggling and the criminalization of migration during the era. Chapter Four examines individual migrants' experiences of illegal immigration, especially their uses of disguises and forged documents. Chapter Five explores controversies over proposals for alien registration, arguing that Jews escaped the specter of illegal alienness in part through their own political efforts.