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The Displaced Persons
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11402 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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11 / 1986 |
3,816 Words |
| Author
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John Lukacs
John Lukacs, professor of history at Chestnut Hill College,
Philadelphia, is the author of many books, including
Historical Consciousness. |
In the history of American immigration - a history not yet told by a truly first-rate historian - the story of the displaced persons forms a unique, and still unwritten, chapter. In 1945, at the end of World War II in Europe, the United States Army found millions of homeless people in its occupation zones in Germany and Austria. They were survivors of the death camps, of concentration camps, and, for the most part, refugees of all kinds from the Soviet occupied portions of Europe. At the urging of President Truman himself, the administration proposed a bill that, for the first time in the history of American immigration laws, created a special category for some of these people to qualify as immigrants. The Displaced Persons Act (Public Law 774, 80th Congress) became law in June 1948 and was amended (Public Law 555, 8lst Congress) in June 1950. The passage of these laws was beset by controversies. The arrival of the displaced coincided with the beginning of the Cold War, which had something to do with the original inspiration for the act itself. The act was an attempt at restitution: a willingness to do something for people whose homelands had fallen under a Soviet occupation that the United States condemned but was unwilling to challenge in a definite way. This tendency repeated itself later when, after the Hungarian Rising of 1956, a special order by President Eisenhower arranged for the swift admittance of Hungarian refugees after a revolution that his administration had welcomed, and to some extent inspired, but about which it chose to do nothing. And when the United States abandoned its goal-which was never clear-of liberating Cuba or Indochina, from communist domination, other immigration directives and acts were passed for the sake of Cuban and Indochinese refugees. The Displaced Persons Act was the first of this pattern.
From 1948 to 1952, some 341,000 displaced persons entered the United States. This was a political migration comparable to the "intellectual migration" of the 1930s, the latter consisting of refugees-mostly German-Jewish -from Nazism. (This immigration process was facilitated by different administrative measures, yet President Roosevelt chose not to ask for a revision of the immigration law at the time, since he knew that Congress and public opinion would not support it.) Much has been written about these so often brilliantly successful immigrants of the 1930s and early 1940s, but little is said about the displaced of the late 1940s, even though they had much in common. Of course, there were great differences as well. Both groups were a mixed bag. Among the refugees from Nazi Germany there were some communists. Among the displaced there were some Nazi collaborators. Their record was known to some of their former victims in this country, and yet it is only recently -more than thirty
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