October 15, 2023
TRADITION!:
Ron DeSantis says U.S. shouldn't take in refugees from Gaza (Alec Hernández, 10/13/23, NBC News)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday that the U.S. should not accept refugees from Gaza as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee from the north to the south, following Israeli government warnings to evacuate before an anticipated ground invasion.
Sounds familiar...
The U.S. Government Turned Away Thousands of Jewish Refugees, Fearing That They Were Nazi Spies: In a long tradition of "persecuting the refugee," the State Department and FDR claimed that Jewish immigrants could threaten national security (Daniel A. Gross, November 18, 2015, Smithsonian)
World War II prompted the largest displacement of human beings the world has ever seen--although today's refugee crisis is starting to approach its unprecedented scale. But even with millions of European Jews displaced from their homes, the United States had a poor track record offering asylum. Most notoriously, in June 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis and its 937 passengers, almost all Jewish, were turned away from the port of Miami, forcing the ship to return to Europe; more than a quarter died in the Holocaust.Government officials from the State Department to the FBI to President Franklin Roosevelt himself argued that refugees posed a serious threat to national security.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 15, 2023 12:00 AM