Refugees in America: Moral Impulses and Public Policy
BY DAVID W. HAINES
In 1939, as the St. Louis sailed first to Cuba and then along the east coast of the United States, the U.S. government refused to land the Jewish refugees on board—even though some 700 already had affidavits of support. They and many other Jews over the next several years would be effectively consigned to death by the United States’ unwillingness to admit them to safety. In the years immediately following World War II, a retrospective horror at having abandoned these Jews to the Holocaust was matched by a prospective fear of abandoning other people to an encroaching Soviet menace. The result was a more active U.S. engagement with refugees. That engagement included the willingness to provide refugee relief overseas, and also to resettle refugees in the United States. Refugees thus became a noticeable component of otherwise restricted general immigration. Even as general immigration expanded after the 1965 amendments to the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, refugees remained distinct and visible.
A look back over this half-century of refugee resettlement yields some useful insights on America’s relation to the world. In particular, refugees represent an axis of globalization that has led the United States outward into the international arena, but has also let the rest of the world move inward across U.S. borders. This historical consideration of refugees in America suggests the frequent predominance of political expedience in program decisions. Yet it also suggests some durable moral impulses that have guided the United States in its relationship with the rest of the world.
Since the end of World War II, the United States has resettled nearly four million refugees. Although the precise legal statuses have varied —and the counts of refugees thus also vary—the major components of that number include 416,000 displaced persons (DPs) in the late 1940s and early 1950s; nearly a million Cubans since Castro’s rise to power in 1959; 1.3 million from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam following the collapse of U.S.-supported governments in 1975; some 600,000 from the Soviet Union and its successor countries; and, especially since the early 1990s, broad representation from many other countries as well, including at least 10,000 each from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, Liberia, Poland, Rumania, Somalia, and Sudan.
Underlying the acceptance of all these refugees have been several distinct moral impulses. One of these has been the simple humanitarian notion of aiding the dispossessed. However, that has not always been the most important factor affecting refugee resettlement. Indeed, the specifically humanitarian definition of refugee as seen in international law was not incorporated into U.S. law until 1980. Yet this basic humanitarian commitment has always been at least a part of U.S. refugee resettlement. It is seen particularly in the broad support for refugees by both religious and secular organizations, including those on opposing sides of the political spectrum. That humanitarian commitment has been fortified by the memory of the denial of Jewish refugees. The determination to never again leave refugees to their death has been a recurrent theme in U.S. refugee resettlement efforts.
This general humanitarian impulse has been accompanied by several other impulses that have been, at least in part, moral ones. One of these is the anticommunist basis of almost all U.S. refugee admissions until the 1990s. In retrospect, such anticommunism might now be construed as a political rather than moral consideration. However, it is important to remember how strong and fiercely moral was the commitment in the postwar period—certainly of former presidents Truman and Eisenhower—to the notion of a free world that stood in contrast to the tyranny of the communist one. In the late 1940s, for example, there were attempts to repatriate people in European refugee camps back to countries that had become communist. The U.S. willingness to accept these DPs for resettlement was a reaction to this potential loss of freedom. Thus, this was a moral stand for freedom, and for the kind of political and economic system that would foster it.
Another moral impulse has involved the recognition of particular connections with people around the world who have been placed in harm’s way by U.S. action. The two largest groups of refugees to the United States—Cubans and Vietnamese—are not simply refugees from communism but refugees from two communist nations with which the United States has had particularly bitter relations. For both, it was U.S. action that placed many of the refugees directly at risk. Again, in retrospect, this might seem more political than moral. Yet the outpouring of support from concerned citizens and private-sector organizations reflects a more personal sense of responsibility for U.S. actions that is distinctly moral and shared by the people who supported those actions as well as the people who did not.
A final moral impulse has been the commitment to undertake a fair share of effort in solving international problems. Indeed “fair share” is a frequent term in discussions of refugee policy. In the postwar period, for example, the United States was quite slow to begin accepting DPs for resettlement. One argument that it do so was that other countries were already accepting these people from the refugee camps, and the United States ought to make a matching commitment.
That commitment to taking a fair share of the burden was also quite explicit in the crisis caused by refugee flight from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in the 1970s. The 1979 United Nations conference on Southeast Asian refugees, for example, resulted in explicit promises of resettlement slots in many countries, with the United States inevitably committing to the largest number of those slots as part of its contribution to the international effort.
These different moral impulses guiding U.S. refugee resettlement raise a vital question about the overall role of morality in public policy; specifically, whether the crucial issue is the depth of moral commitment per se or the existence of multiple kinds of moral commitment that can coalesce around a particular issue. The history of the U.S. refugee resettlement program suggests that the program was most expansive when all these different kinds of commitment were present: when the humanitarian need was clearest, the home country situation of refugees was most unacceptable in terms of lack of freedom (political, economic, and religious), the plight of refugees was understood to be the result of U.S. action and thus required U.S. responsibility, and when U.S. efforts could be seen as a fair share participation in international action.
It is a powerful combination, indeed, when humanitarianism, defense of freedom, national responsibility, and internationalism are bound together. In the contemporary United States, the more common situation often appears to be the reverse—a kind of disarray among competing moral impulses and premises. The current U.S. refugee program, for example, is impressive in its adherence to international humanitarian values and attention to different world regions, yet the currently reduced size of the refugee program may reflect the lack of clear American connection to the particular refugees who are coming to the United States. For example, the wording of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004 represents a resurgence of the kinds of attacks on communist totalitarianism and atheism that were common forty or fifty years ago. However, the lack of an international component leaves the bill in many ways a hindrance, and possibly a danger, to a closely allied South Korea that is attempting reconciliation with North Korea—and doing so with some impressive success.
When there is this kind of disarray among moral commitments, there is an even greater, more overarching danger. By their very fragmentation, unlinked and isolated moral impulses leave the world of policy more firmly in the hands of political and economic interests. Moral goals are replaced by practical ones. Political democracy, for example, is replaced by raw capitalism; freedom by free trade; and the plight of refugees by the allure of low-cost, undocumented labor.
The history of the U.S. refugee resettlement program suggests that it is the binding of diverse moral impulses that can bring morality most forcefully back into these public policy discussions—if not in triumph, then at least as a counterweight to cruder impulses of political and economic self-interest.
David W. Haines (dhaines1@gmu.edu) is associate professor of anthropology (http://sociology.gmu.edu) and an affiliate of the Center for Global Studies. He is the editor of several books on refugees and immigrants in the United States. For a fuller discussion of the issues raised here, see his contributions in The New Americans, edited by Mary Waters and Reed Ueda for Harvard University Press; and Borders, Boundaries, and Bonds, edited by Elliott Barkan, Hasia Diner, and Alan Kraut for NYU Press.
