NOBODY HATES JUST MEXICANS:

An Egyptian-born French Jewish scholar was held for hours and nearly deported from the United States after he landed in Houston to attend a conference at a Texas university.

"I have been detained 10 hours at Houston International Airport about to be deported. The officer who arrested me was 'inexperienced'," Henry Rousso, a historian who specialises on the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation of France, wrote Saturday on Twitter.

[I]n mid-May 1939, the St. Louis, part of the Hamburg-American line (known as Hapag), departed Hamburg, Germany. After a stop in Cherbourg, France, the ship headed for Havana, Cuba, with 937 passengers. Most travelers were German Jewish émigrés who held landing permits issued by the Cuban government. Seven-hundred-forty-three of them were on a waiting list to receive visas to enter the United States and had arranged to stay in Cuba until their documents would arrive. For some time, Cuba had served as a temporary refuge for German Jews awaiting their entry into the United States via an immigration-quota system that had been in place since 1924. According to the law, the number of persons arriving from any particular country was fixed and--reflecting the racist intentions of the 1924 law--varied according to the perceived "whiteness" of the country's inhabitants, with Western European countries allotted higher quotas than Eastern or Southern European ones. Under the quota for Germany, which President Roosevelt had unilaterally combined with Austria's following its 1938 annexation by Germany, the number of available immigration was visas was 27,370. By the time of the St. Louis' departure, the wait for visas under the German quota was many years long and included more than 300,000 names. For Jews desperate to get out of Germany, Cuba served as a convenient place to reside until they were permitted to enter the United States via the quota system.

However, in the days just prior to the ship's departure, tensions in Cuba over the growing number of European Jews escalated, and internal feuds within the Cuban government prompted President Federico Laredo Brú to tighten the rules for new arrivals, requiring them to procure additional approvals to land in Cuba. Although Hapag officials were notified of the change, the St. Louis left Hamburg on the optimistic assumption that the new rules did not apply to its passengers, because they had already received permission to enter Cuba. Upon landing in Havana two weeks later on May 27, however, the passengers discovered that most of them would not be permitted to enter on account of the new regulations. Twenty-eight had papers that allowed them to disembark, and the rest were confined to the ship.

Even as the ship was en route to Cuba, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (a relief organization popularly known as "the Joint"), working closely with officials from the State Department in Washington, began to advocate on behalf of the passengers. Its representatives in the United States had warned the Hapag line that its passengers might not be granted entry to Cuba. Its agent in Havana entered into negotiations with the Cuban government, but they were unable to reach a settlement. The story of the refugees' increasingly desperate plight was picked up in the press, and reporters were sympathetic to the passengers. On June 2, the New York Times reported that the anxiety of the refugees was palpable:

Late this afternoon the St. Louis was surrounded by boats filled with relatives and friends of those on board. Police patrolled the liner's docks and forbade any except government officials to approach too closely or to step on the floating dock alongside the ship. Huge spotlights attached to the vessel's sides lighted the surrounding waters tonight.

The St. Louis's passengers, many sobbing despairingly, lined the rail and talked with those in the surrounding boats, some of whom remained several hours.

One passenger was quoted as saying, " 'If we are returned to Germany,' he lamented, 'it will mean the concentration camp for most of us.' " Another, a Breslau attorney named Max Loewe, cut his wrists and jumped overboard out of desperation for his wife and children, who were also aboard the ship.

In spite of thousands of telegrams in support of the refugees sent to President Brú by concerned Americans, the ship left the port of Havana on June 2. While the ship sailed in the waters of the Caribbean, advocates for the passengers sought a wide range of alternatives to returning the ship and its passengers to Germany. Plans to post a $500 bond for each passenger (approximately $450,000, or nearly $7.86 million in today's dollars) or to allow the passengers to disembark into Santo Domingo came to no avail. Others suggested allowing the refugees to enter the United States either outside of or ahead of their place on the waiting list, but this was deemed untenable both by State Department officials who were opposed to any relaxing of immigration laws (and had no authority to change them even if they wanted to) and the president's own advisers, who did not want to threaten his good-neighbor policy of nonintervention in Latin American countries' internal affairs. Popular sentiment in the country was decidedly opposed to any relaxation of immigration laws. Furthermore, permitting such a move would have forced those who had waited for their quota number to come up to wait even longer for their turn to enter the country. Among the more callous proposals was one to encourage the United States to request that the German government not permit refugees to leave unless they had certainty of the passengers' destinations. 

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