An Enemy Hath Done This

I've seen several articles recently about different family members of Iranian elites living in the U.S. while expressing their hatred for the "Great Satan". For instance, a recent piece at Powerline Blog--"Why Are They Here?"--focuses on the sluttily dressed niece of slain Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani who enjoyed the high life in America. But more interesting to me was this observation in the opening line of the article: 

It seems that one can best explain America’s immigration policies with the supposition that they were crafted by our enemies to do as much harm as possible. 

   Our current immigration policy is the result of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (aka Hart-Celler Act). As Wikipedia notes, "[t]he law abolished the National Origins Formula, which had been the basis of U.S. immigration policy since the 1920s." "The National Origins Formula had been established in the 1920s to preserve American homogeneity by promoting immigration from Western and Northern Europe" by admitting new immigrants in proportion to their proportion of the population and prohibiting immigration from certain countries. 

    Naturally there were politicians who sponsored the bill that became the Act and those that voted for it. But politicians rarely act on their own initiative. Major bills like that are generally the result of careful planning and years of work by organizations and bodies wanting the change. So who were those organizations? I can't say who were all the organizations and groups behind the 1965 Act, but there is one group that claims primary responsibility--revels in it, even. In their own words from a Jewish Telegraph Agency's 2014 piece by Raffi Wineburg, entitled "From the Archive: Jews welcome the stranger":

    In the 1920s, after decades of relatively loose immigration laws had enabled more than 2 million Eastern European Jews to settle in the U.S., Jews fought an effort to close the gates to the “goldene medina.” The Immigration Act of 1924, a bill advanced by a notoriously racist Republican congressman named Albert Johnson, enacted a quota system that would severely limit Jewish immigration and totally exclude immigrants from Asia.

    Jewish leaders staunchly opposed the bill, with JTA reporting “militant action against” it. The United Hebrew Trades, an association of Jewish labor unions in New York, brought together 136 Jewish organizations in order to “wage a nationwide campaign to defeat” the bill.

    Jewish efforts concerned Johnson, who responding to an inquiry by a JTA correspondent replied coldly: “If the Jewish people combine to defeat the immigration bill as reported by the [Immigration Committee of the House of Representatives], their children will regret it.”

    Nonetheless, the bill passed with ease, and its devastating effects — reducing Jewish immigration from hundreds of thousands annually to less than 15,000 per year — were fully on display in 1939 when refugees, most notably a group of 907 German Jews aboard the S.S. St. Louis, were refused entry.

    The law remained largely intact until the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which sought to uphold the previous quota system. The measure was deemed racist and exclusionary.

    Jewish groups condemned the bill. JTA reported that “all major Jewish groups” spoke out against the act, warning that it would “abandon our country’s finest traditions by dropping an iron curtain around our shores.” Despite an executive veto from President Harry Truman, the measure passed overwhelmingly in Congress.

    In 1965, an immigration bill arrived that Jewish groups could support. The Hart-Cellar Act sought to dismantle the quota system in place since 1924 and finally opened the doors to Asian, African and Middle Eastern populations. Although Jews, with Israel available, no longer needed the open doors, major Jewish groups still rushed to support the bill. In a joint statement, seven national Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Congress and the Conservative movement’s United Synagogue of America, called the bill a “long overdue” change to the quota system that had “defaced our immigration policy and mocked our national protestations of equality.”

    Perhaps the most impassioned plea, however, came from a Jewish New York congressman named Leonard Farbstein, who told the House that the act would come too late for the Jews “buried in mass graves at Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen” who were denied U.S. visas.

    But, Farbstein said, the new law would allow those murdered Jews to “rest easier in their graves” because America may now provide an easier haven to refugees. 

And, in this 2019 article from Jewish Currents with the title, "The Jewish Case for Open Borders" author Greg Afinogenov writes:

The policies that Trump supports draw on the same logic as the closed-borders isolationism that led the United States to reject Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust. After World War II, this profound moral crime was addressed with the creation of the refugee asylum system—the very system that Central American migrants invoke as they seek refuge in the United States. 

There is a certain irony that the warning given by Albert Johnson has come to pass as the country is seeing a flood of refugees and immigrants that have brought with them the antisemitism of which the Jews were so afraid.