You Were Once Aliens

My wife and I recently watched the Ken Burns PBS documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust. The three-part series tells the story of how Americans have long held conflicted attitudes when it comes to immigration. Even though America is a land of immigrants, or aliens, we have struggled with opening our doors to people from foreign countries.

To help make his case, Burns takes us back to the rise of Adolph Hitler and the National Socialist Party in Germany. The coming to power of the Nazi party in the 1930s created one of the greatest humanitarian crisis of the 20th century, especially for Jewish people. Desperate to leave German controlled lands, Jewish people were denied access to other countries, including the United States. Burns points out that in 1933 there were nine million Jews living in Europe, but by the end of the war in 1945 there were only about three million Jewish people left alive on the continent. The Death Camp crematoriums at places like Treblinka, Birkenau, and Auschwitz will forever mark the tragic consequences of what happened to those who were unable to find a safe haven.

One of the better known tragic stories is of Ann Frank, a young girl who recorded in her diary the ordeal of living under Nazi tyranny. Her family tried to immigrate to America but encountered one roadblock after another that prevented them from leaving Europe. The Frank family discovered that most Americans didn’t want their kind. When the Frank family’s hiding place was betrayed, they were captured and transported to a Death Camp where they were later murdered by the Nazis.

Their story is only one of countless stories where Jewish families were denied visas to the United States, primarily because they were Jewish. Tragically, some officials in the U.S. State Department were complicit in blocking entry of Jews to America by finding every conceivable legal loophole to keep them out. The words of Emma Lazarus’s famous poem “Give me your tired, your poor/your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” were maligned by other writers, politicians, and ordinary citizens who feared that immigration would pollute American culture. The vast majority of Americans agreed with these exclusionists.

Burns’ narrative intends to show that inhumane and thoughtless immigration policies can have deadly effects for those seeking refuge. Many of the people on our southern border that we hear so much about have fled countries where their lives were endangered. The people are from countries all over the world where totalitarian regimes put countless lives at hazard—places like Russia, China, Iran, and some parts of Central America.

I understand that immigration is a difficult and complicated problem and parties from both sides of the aisle are struggling with what to do. It is important to remember, however, that people who have immigrated to our country have contributed in significant ways to the overall health of America. Without the influx of people from other cultures and religions our nation would stagnate and slowly decline. Contrary to much popular opinion, diversity strengthens, not weakens, the fabric of our society.

With thousands of migrants seeking asylum on our southern border, desperately trying to get in, immigration is a hot topic among Americans. Too often fear and misinformation guide our attitudes instead of reasoned and informed facts. My concern is that our country doesn’t repeat what it did in the 1930s when those who were refused admission became victims of a murderous regime. If we can’t legislate policies that permit entry for those who are at grave risk, then the hopeful vision of America as a refuge for the endangered people of the world will be only a mirage. As we face this crisis, the words of Franklin Roosevelt, spoken during his inaugural address in 1933, are worth remembering today: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

During World War II there were people who faced their fear and did not buckle, even though they put their lives at risk. Their love for humanity transcended their fears and prejudices. I read recently in the New York Times of the death of Adolfo Kaminsky who lived and worked in France during the turbulent time of the Second World War. He learned how to forge papers in the 1930s and his story of courage and daring reads like a spy thriller. He put his life on the line by forging thousands of documents and, in the process, saved countless lives. His forged papers allowed Jewish people, especially children, to escape Nazi deportations to the Death Camps. During that period, Jewish people were often despised and even vilified as evil, but Kaminsky believed that “All humans are equal, whatever their origins, their beliefs, their skin color. There are no superiors, no inferiors. That is not acceptable to me.”

I don’t know if Kaminsky was a religious man or not, but what I do know is that his attitude toward other human beings depicts what it means to be a person of faith. If we believe that human beings are created in the image of God, with some spark of divine spirit, then how can we not value every individual human life?

As a nation of aliens, the words of God to Israel are as relevant today as they were 3,000 years ago, “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him,” God instructs us, “for you were once aliens” (Exod. 22:21). “For you were once aliens.” And so we were.

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