FOIA Update

Just a quick update -

I actually received some of the FOIA requests I put in! Granted they only declassified two documents from all of what I requested, but still. I'm actually somewhat shocked, considering how quickly they processed the request (not exactly in 30 days, but still within reason.) I received a letter explaining that the documents had been declassified, and actual copies of two memos in question (which turned out to be pretty interesting...)

I'm guessing when the de-classify the 119 boxes of materials I requested they will NOT send me copies. Just saying...

Goodbyes of a Sort

My time in D.C. has come to an end, and I'm honestly a bit sad to leave. Two months isn't a lot of time to spend in one place, especially a place like this one. Thankfully I've found a lot of great sources, though every door I opened led me to three more that I'll need to follow up on later on.

To recap the archival materials I used this summer:
NARA I
- Basic INS records, though these never went anywhere
- Congressional Records, especially House and Senate Judiciary Committee Records. Particularly useful here were the Special Subcommittee on Emigration and Refugees, 1955-1959.

NARA II
- Department of State Records. Vexing at times, and I'm sure I've only scratched the surface, but incredibly useful.
- Secretary of Agriculture Records. Not useful at all.

Library of Congress
- Emanuel Celler Papers. (Boxes relating to Immigration and Refugee issues.)

I spent the first few days of this week going through my notes and putting everything onto a time line in excel, so that I could sort by date, keywords, etc. I'm still going through what I have, but I already know that the 1955-1959 period, and especially the Refugee Relief Act, is much more important than what scholars have given it credit for. I also am getting more and more interested in the issue of Military Brides, and how so much of our immigration rules about what constitutes "family" migration emerged from wartime exigencies.

I'm also playing around with a few ideas about governmental institutions, and trying to place together how State fits in with the rest of federal immigration/refugee policy. Daniel Tichenor has already posited the congressional lag thesis of postwar immigration policy, where the Executive Branch led the way toward immigration liberalization, but I wonder if it's even more nuanced than that, with State leading the way, and other agencies following. I need to think about this more.

Anyways, for now this will be my last post, until I spend some more time going through my research, or until I hit my next archive!

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more posts from Emily and Sam.

Phil

Secretary of Agriculture Correspondence Records

(The Secretary of Agriculture, or at least where they used to be...)

I’ve spent the last few days going through the records of the Secretary of Agriculture (RG16), and have been pretty disappointed at what’s there. Before coming to D.C. I had found a number of records in the online catalog that referred to “Foreign Relations – Immigration.” I figured these probably dealt with Mexican immigration / labor relations, so I was pretty excited by the prospect. Thankfully I put them off until the end of my time in D.C., since I didn’t really find much useful in the records.

I will say that the finding aides for this collection are well organized and kept-up, much easier to use than just about any of the other collections I’ve looked at this summer. Each year is divided into a number of boxes with the same keywords. You find the boxes you need, and it lists the necessary stack locations for the call slips. Finding the boxes was the easy part though. Once I got them, I found that the file for immigration was pretty slim in the best of years, and almost nonexistent in the others. For one thing, most of the papers in these files are copies of “continuity forms” – basically cross-references to other files. Trying to track down all of these other files and boxes would be an entire research project in itself. As far as what was left in the folders, most of the correspondence was personal letters from people attempting to immigrate to the U.S. The response from the Secretary of Agriculture typically stated something to the effect of, “Apologies, but we don’t have any control over immigration, or responsibilities under the Immigration Act, try State, Justice, or INS.” After looking through about ten years of these types of letters, I gave up.

But hey, I came to D.C. to figure out what collections would work, and which wouldn’t, so it’s good to know that I’ll need to look to the Dept. of Labor (among other places) for records about Mexican labor immigration, rather than Agriculture…

...or so I thought

Well, I got to the Library of Congress this morning thinking that I still had four boxes of materials to look through in the Celler Papers. I've been working my way backwards through the collection (don't ask...it's what I usually do,) and thought that these last four would take me two days to get through. Now here I am about two hours after I started, and I'm finished. 2 of the boxes contained nothing but pamphelts from outside organizations, many of which I've already seen, and Congressional hearings, records, etc., which I've also already seen. The remaining two boxes contained general correspondence coming into Celler's office, but unlike a lot of the later records in the collection, don't seem to have any of his responses or outgoing letters.

I have to think that the disparity between earlier and later records has something to do with when the collections were donated to the Library. Celler donated all of his records through about 1956 in 1967, while he was still a Congressman. The remaider of the collection was donated in 1972 and 1977, at the end and after he left the House. Possibly once out of Congress he felt that he didn't need to hold on to quite as much?

Hitting the Homestretch

My time in D.C. is rapidly winding down (for now), but I think I’ve just about gotten through what I came to do. I have a few more days of research in NARA II to finish up some State Department and Secretary of Agriculture Records, and a couple more days at the Library of Congress to finish up with the Celler Papers. All in all I’ve found a lot of really great stuff, have learned to use the collections, and have a good sense of what other collections I’ll need to look at.

For one, if I do continue to pursue the labor angle (both skilled and unskilled visa categories/admissions,) I’ll need to look through the Department of Labor files. I also might need to look through the Department of Education for the student issue, but again, only if I go down that road. I also didn’t have a chance to look through the Office of the Budget files, which should be a good way to get around the dearth of INS files, and I might try to take another stab at finding the relevant INS records (not likely though.)

I’ll also need to head to Boston to look at the Abba Schwartz Papers, as well as Princeton for the Michael Feighan Papers, and possibly even Reno for the Pat McCarran Papers. Stopping by the Johnson Library wouldn’t be a bad idea either…

In my next post I’ll have some thoughts on the Secretary of Agriculture files, but for now, I’ve only just begun working with them.

The Importance of International Affairs in Immigration Policy, Part 2.

Continuing from my last post, today I’d like to talk about a series of documents prepared by Congressman Emanuel Celler’s office c.1954. Celler chaired the House Committee on the Judiciary, and these cases were prepared as part of testimony highlighting the extreme restrictiveness of the McCarran-Walter Act (Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952.) Celler led the fight to replace the Act, culminating in 1965 with the passage of the Hart-Celler Act (Immigration and Naturalization Act.)

Celler’s staff most probably picked this series of cases for their representativeness as the most innocent victims of the immigration system they could find, those excluded from the country because of minor crimes in their past. Here are two examples:

(1) Anneliese Else Hermine Neumann, a German girl, stole two bags of coal while working in a railway coal yard in Berlin in Jan. 1947. In 1951 she married a Sergeant Ware, and applied for an immigrant visa. Her application was denied on the grounds that she had committed a “crime involving moral turpitude.”

“Sergeant Ware pleaded in behalf of his wife, stressing that in 1947, her father was still a British prisoner of war and her mother was incapacitated due to the fact that she had been wounded in both legs during the bombing of Berlin. There were at that time six younger children in the Neumann family, and the only reason Anneliese stole the coal was to keep the family warm.”
“There was no relief possible under the law, and Sergeant Ware had to resort to a private bill.”

(2) “Edith Ruth Smith (nee Kunick) married Sergeant Smith of the US Army in Germany in 1952. Their marriage had the prior approval of the American military authorities, but when it came to issuing an immigration visa to Mrs. Smith, it was discovered that Mrs. Smith, while 18 years old, committed “a crime involving moral turpitude”. Here are the facts as reflected in officials reports.”
“During an outing in 1948 in Stuttgart, Germany, Edith’s sister, 16 years old, climbed a walnut tree and while shaking the nuts from the tree, fell and fractured both arms. She was subsequently notified to appear at police headquarters for questioning. Edith, although not summoned, accompanied her sister because of the latter’s injuries. At police headquarters, both of them were charged with stealing walnuts from a tree, which was the property of the city of Stuttgart. The two girls paid a fine (roughly equivalent to 10 cents) but Edith Kunick, now Mrs. Paul William Smith, has been refused a visa.”

I find these cases extremely interesting. In both, the protagonists are wives of servicemen, whose husbands attempted to bring them over to the United States, only to find them excluded on a technicality. This admission of military brides had by this point already become a contentious topic in immigration policy, and I think it is telling that instead of using any other type of migrant (laborers, noncitizen military personnel, male immigrants from Europe, etc.,) Celler’s staff chose the spouses of servicemen. Whether this was simply to highlight the plight of “our boys overseas” who couldn’t bring in their wives, or whether it had more to do with the gendered nature of the migrants is unclear, but interesting nonetheless.

Each case references crimes committed in postwar West Germany, which seems to me to be as much of a criticism of the rule of law in West Germany (and the sorry state of its postwar society) as in the U.S. – i.e. although we refuse to allow these women in on technicalities, conditions in West Germany forced them to commit these petty crimes in the first place.

The case of Anneliese Neumann also states that Congress had to resort to a privately sponsored bill to admit her. The report implies that the McCarran-Walter Act not only discriminates unnecessarily, but also creates more work for Congress, since private bills are now required to correct its injustices.

Lastly, in the case of Edith Smith, the report goes out of its way to mention that the military had already approved the marriage, (which on policy they would do only if the spouse would be eligible to enter the U.S.,) while the consular officials, acting under the McCarran-Walter Act, denied them entry. This clash between military and civilian agencies, coming in the post-WWII and Korean War era seems to me a good way to draw on pro-military sentiment, especially overseas, to push for immigration reform. In this light this line of argument can be viewed as showing the superiority and inherent “rightness” of military authority over consular/legislative.

I’m not convinced, as Celler’s staff seemed to be, that these cases represent a failure of law rather than a failure in the interpretation of law, but the interplay between gender (military brides,) foreign diplomacy (U.S.-West German relations,) and the rule of law makes these cases an ideal window into the complexities of immigration policy after WWII, and an excellent find.

The Importance of International Affairs in Immigration Policy, Part 1

I’ve been spending more time in the Library of Congress lately, and have found a couple of really interesting documents. One in particular I’d like to talk about today:

The first is a document entitled “Refugee Problems, World Survey,” a State Department report from 1958. The document outlines U.S. refugee policy throughout the world, and U.S. interests in various refugee crises. Of interest to my work are the sections on Hong Kong. The document states

It is a basic policy of the United States to seek to promote friendship for the United States among the captive populations and to bolster their hope and faith in ultimate freedom. As long as the Chinese refugees in Hong Kong, having rejected Communism, were willfully enduring unexampled misery and hopelessness rather than return to their Communist-dominated homeland, the United States could not remain unidentified with efforts to meet the problem.

State then lists three possible courses of action – to “remain indifferent”; to offer substantial aid; or “to begin a program of limited and selective assistance.” State recommends the latter.

On the surface this decision isn’t surprising – while supporting Chinese refugees in Hong Kong was seen as an important part of the fight against Communist China, by discrediting the regime and by giving hope to others still inside the “Bamboo Curtain,” in practice, the U.S. focused their refugee efforts much more on eastern Europe, and on escapees from the Iron Curtain. Legislators designing refugee legislation spoke of “token numbers” of refugees from China, and shied away from any effort that would admit great numbers of Asians.

But by viewing only the domestic picture, or the legislative debates, a rather one-sided picture emerges – whatever their motivations, legislators did not want to resettle large groups of Chinese refugees. But, going back to State’s report, the reason given for advocating only limited intervention is illuminating. After discounting the first proposition (doing nothing,) on principle, the report states

The second alternative was not practicable, since it constituted a virtual assumption of responsibility at vast cost to the United States for a matter that properly rested with the sovereign British authorities in Hong Kong. Moreover, such a program would have been in conflict with the British political position and would have contained a threat to British prestige in the Far East.

While we can’t simply take the report’s word on face value, the added element of U.S.-British diplomacy incorporates another dimension to the pros and cons of refugee intervention. I need to play with this idea more, but I think the Colonial, and specifically British, interests in Hong Kong need to be considered, when analyzing East Asian refugee policy. (I’ve also found a number of other documents referring to Britain’s interests in Hong Kong, to the point where one State Department dispatch writes that Britain most probably recognized the government of Communist China to protect it’s own business interests in the territory.)

In my next post I’m going to talk about a series of cases prepared by Congressman Celler’s staff, to highlight the restrictiveness of the McCarran-Walter Act (Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952.)