A deadly visa ploy returns

Eighty-two years ago, on January 16, 1944, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. walked into the Oval Office and handed President Franklin D. Roosevelt a report that greatly disturbed FDR.

That event has much relevance for us today. Here is why: Had Morgenthau still been alive and mentally active this past April 27, he would have been all over the media condemning new rules just issued by the State Department to its consular officials worldwide. Effective immediately, they may not begin their formal interviews with visa applicants seeking to visit the United States until two specific questions are asked and answered verbally:

• “Have you experienced harm or mistreatment in your country of nationality or last habitual residence?”

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• “Do you fear harm or mistreatment in returning to your country of nationality or permanent residence?”

The questions are designed to weed out non-immigrant visa applicants who actually have no intention of ever returning home.

A “yes” answer to either question, or an ambiguous one, immediately terminates the interview, and the visa must be denied.

In other words, what the State Department did on April 27 was to effectively shut our doors to virtually everyone fleeing oppression today.

That would have infuriated Morgenthau because the State Department had resurrected a mechanism it first used beginning in late 1940, and Morgenthau knew where it could lead. That mechanism, in fact, was one of the main reasons Morgenthau had his staff prepare the report that he handed to FDR that day. It was a very detailed and well documented indictment of the State Department, and it bore this title: “On the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.”

In 1939, on FDR’s orders, the U.S. joined Cuba and Canada in forcing the MS St. Louis and its 937 mostly Jewish refugees to return to Europe, sending more than a quarter of them to their deaths in the Shoah. This later became known as the “Voyage of the Damned.”

This time was different. When FDR finished reading Morgenthau’s report, he ordered his staff to find a way to save as many Jews as possible. The result was Executive Order 9417, which FDR signed six days later. It established the War Refugee Board, which did manage to rescue around 200,000 Jews before the war ended, but was too little too late for the millions who already had been killed.

One government official who resented EO 9417 was Breckenridge Long, the assistant secretary of state in charge of the visa division and an outspoken antisemite. He had originated that evil mechanism with the support of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, also no friend of the Jews.

Long had only one objective: to keep the Jews in harm’s way by locking them out of the United States at a time that the State Department knew with reasonable certainty — a certainty it kept secret from everyone outside of Foggy Bottom — what Hitler’s intentions for them were.

To do so, Long weaponized two somewhat contradictory federal immigration laws, one enacted in 1917 and the other in 1924. The 1917 law prohibited granting visas to anyone “likely to become a public charge.” The 1924 statute, among other things, set drastically reduced immigrant quotas for Eastern and Southern Europe.

Based on these laws, Long issued two rules that had to be followed in evaluating visa applications.

Rule #1 denied visas to applicants who were then employed in Europe, on the spurious ground that no one with a job could possibly be a refugee. Rule #2 denied visas to unemployed applicants who did not have jobs waiting for them in the States, because they were “likely to become a public charge.”

This mechanism was so effective that in some years, the State Department failed to fill 90 percent of its already sharply reduced European immigration quotas.

I don’t know how many Jews could have been saved if things had been different, but I do know we would be mourning fewer than six million Jews. I don’t know how many asylum seekers today would be saved if things were different now, but I do know many of them could be saved.

But that’s just the beginning. The State Department back then habitually lied to everyone about what it knew with reasonable certainty was happening in Europe. In our day, from the president on down, our current government has been lying to justify its aggressive approach to immigration.

Lie No. 1: The people coming across our borders are rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. If we let them in, crime rates will soar.

That’s a lie. Multiple studies funded by the Justice Department’s own science-based research arm, the National Institute of Justice, including studies done in 2024 and 2025, prove that it’s a lie. So do the numerous independent studies the NIJ has evaluated. All these studies confirm that immigrants — both legal and illegal — commit fewer crimes than native‑born Americans.

One NIJ-evaluated study in particular stands out. It was conducted between 2018 and 2021 by the Department of Public Safety in Texas, no less, which is both a border state and a state that Donald Trump won in 2016 by more than nine percentage points. It found that native-born citizens were more than twice as likely as undocumented aliens to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and more than four times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.

Lie No. 2: These new immigrants are all lazy good-for-nothings who will “drain our resources,” “cost taxpayers billions,” and be “a massive economic burden,” to use Trump’s own words.

Not so, say the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Congressional Budget Office, and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The latest data comes from 2024. According to the NBER, these “lazy good-for-nothings” represent around 28 percent of all entrepreneurs here, even though they are only 15 percent of the general population. They also make up more than 40 percent of the founders of high‑growth, new technology, or venture‑backed firms here, and those firms produce more patents per worker than any other group.

As for the immigration surge being “a massive economic burden,” the CBO projects that by 2034 these immigrants are very likely to have added $1.2 trillion in federal revenues, added almost 3 percent to our Gross Domestic Product, and reduced the federal deficit by nearly a trillion dollars.

Jewish history is a prime example of how the U.S. benefits from new immigrants and also tells us what it can lose by shutting its doors.

Between 1880 and 1924, approximately two million Jews fled here to escape the pogroms in Europe and the poverty imposed on them by restrictive laws. They spoke Yiddish, not English. They came with almost nothing, including money. They were exactly the kind of people our government today considers undesirable, yet what they and their descendants gave to America is beyond measure.

• Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin developed the vaccines that conquered polio. Selman Abraham Waksman discovered streptomycin, which was the first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis.

• Irving Berlin shaped the Great American Songbook, transformed Broadway and Hollywood, and wrote the patriotic and popular songs that are part of this country’s cultural identity.

• Emma Goldman was one of the most influential political thinkers and activists in modern American history. “For more than 30 years, she defined the limits of dissent and free speech in Progressive Era America,” in the words of a PBS documentary.

• Sidney Hillman founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and was a major architect of New Deal labor policy.

• The words of Emma Lazarus, the daughter of Sephardi immigrants, are engraved on the Statue of Liberty.

• And let us not forget Albert Einstein, arguably the most consequential scientist of the 20th century, who fled here from Nazi Germany in 1933, before the doors shut.

At the lower end of every immigrant chain are the people who do the work most of us want no part of — and many of them are undocumented. Among them are more than half of the hired farm workers who pick our fruits and vegetables, according to the Department of Agriculture. It estimates that without these people, domestic food production would collapse and the cost of feeding the nation would skyrocket.

I don’t know whether a turned-away victim of the Shoah would have found a cure for cancer, or what other benefits to humankind were lost because of the State Department’s wartime policy. I don’t know what many asylum seekers would bring to us today if they were allowed to come in.

But I do know what history tells me, just as I know how Henry Morgenthau Jr. would have reacted to what the State Department did on April 27 if he were alive and alert today.

The Torah and the Jewish law that flows from it demand that we treat the stranger the same way as we would treat our neighbor. That commandment appears in the Torah 36 times — more than any other commandment. The Torah in Deuteronomy 23:16-17 specifically demands that we see to the well-being of anyone fleeing from oppression. In Leviticus 19 and elsewhere the Torah requires us to stand up for what is just and right.

In other words, we must actively oppose this country’s unconscionable immigration policies, so that never again will someone walk into the Oval Office and hand its occupant a report titled “On the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of” fill in the blank.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.