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Article Excerpt
On February 11, 1928, the S.S. Iroquois had just completed the short voyage from Havana to Miami when U.S. immigration inspectors detained one of the ship's Jewish passengers. This traveler's documents identified him as thirty-two-year-old Sam Weisstein, born in Poland but now a naturalized citizen of the United States. The inspectors found it suspicious, however, that Weisstein could not explain how he had obtained his papers. After close interrogation, the man confessed that he was not Weisstein but Chaim Josef Listopad, a Jewish carpenter born in Mlawa, Poland. Listopad was not a U.S. citizen and had never even been to the United States. He had bought the papers in Havana just two weeks earlier, paying fifty dollars to a Jewish stranger wearing a white tropical suit and straw hat. Listopad might not have made this purchase had he known that the Immigration Bureau in Washington, D.C., already had a thick file on the real Samuel Weisstein, whom they had long suspected of smuggling Jews from Warsaw to the United States for profit. (1)
In 1921 and 1924, the U.S. Congress passed radically nativist legislation decreeing that most immigration would henceforth be strictly limited according to nation-based quotas. The controversial new laws drastically reduced the number of Europeans allowed to enter the United States legally, especially from southern and eastern Europe, and made permanent an already existing near-total ban on Asian immigration. Consequently, these laws fueled a brisk business in illicit immigration, a phenomenon that has gone largely unexamined in scholarship on the era. (2) Eastern European Jews, many of whom were desperate to escape ongoing postwar economic and political crises and join relatives in the United States, proved an especially lucrative market. More than a decade's worth of records at the National Archives in Washington testify to the ongoing game of cat-and-mouse between the U.S. government and Samuel Weisstein, as well as scores of his colleagues, who were busy during the post-quota years forging papers and smuggling Jewish immigrants through Warsaw, Breslau, Berlin, Paris, Antwerp, Montreal, Havana, Nassau, and Ciudad Juarez.
This article explores the international underworld of Jewish alien smuggling that burgeoned after Congress passed the restrictive immigration legislation of 1921 and 1924. A close look at the Jewish smugglers of the era, and at the experiences of those they smuggled, forces us to reconsider and refine a central narrative of twentieth-century American and Jewish history, a narrative we might call the story of the "closing of the gates" to European immigrants. The complex history of alien smuggling makes it clear that the "gates" did not simply close, and that the effects of the quota laws were not as straightforward as historians have tended to imagine. Although the new legislation did indeed rewrite the rules governing the nation's borders, it did not prove simple to implement. The history of alien smuggling in the era of immigration quotas helps reveal the extent to which the reordering of the nation's boundaries happened unevenly, confusedly, and with much contention.
The quota laws have long served as a dramatic dividing line in the historiography of European ethnics in the United States. The passage of the permanent quota law in 1924 has been seen as the end of the great epic of European mass immigration, inaugurating a time when European ethnics were cut off from homeland cultures and increasingly concerned with their relationship to the nation around them. Historians writing about the post-1924 period have often focused on European ethnics in their American context, as workers, voters, and consumers coming to identify more fully with a national--and white--culture. (3) For the most part, the literature of American Jewish history follows this pattern, taking up the question of immigration and immigration policy again only in connection to how these became matters of public concern after Hitler came to power in 1933. (4)
In part, the use of the quota laws as a historiographical boundary lines reflect the demands of the historical discipline. Historians tell narratives about change over time; they need events that mark the beginnings and ends of these narratives and distinguish one era from another. The quota laws have functioned as just such markers. In many ways, it is true that the quota laws represented a clear historical turning point for European immigration in general and Jewish immigration in particular, as is demonstrated by their undeniable effectiveness. In the twelve months before the passage of the 1921 law, 805, 228 immigrants were recorded as having entered the United States legally, 119,036 of them Jewish. In the year after the 1924 law took effect, 294,314 immigrants entered legally, 10,292 of them Jewish. (5)
Even beyond their statistical impact, the laws were unquestionably revolutionary in the realm of American immigration policy. They represented the U.S. government's unprecedented efforts to control the nation's geographic and demographic borders. The quotas were an attempt to render a precise, nation- and race-based formula for American unity: add only so many from Lithuania, so many from Russia, so many from Italy per year. Designed to stem the influx of poor "racial stock" that nativists argued posed a grave threat to the physical and civic fitness of the nation, the quotas also were intended to keep out dangerous "Bolsheviks" and others who might foment political unrest. The effects of this approach to immigration policy proved enduring. The quota laws remained basically unchanged for four decades, and many of their underlying ideas, including the dangers posed by incoming foreigners and the need to guard the nation against them, have continued to be central to public discourse and government policy to the present day. Certainly, then, these laws fundamentally shifted the nature of international migration and the tenor of domestic immigration policy.
If scholars have long acknowledged the significance of the immigration quotas, however, it is striking how little they have investigated the actual workings of the laws. (6) Historians have, as it were, taken the laws at their word. But the legislation itself does not tell the whole story. Law does not just exist in its codified form, but in lived experience as well. The laws were not nearly as effective as their creators had hoped, since, as immigration officials, smugglers, immigrants and the general public soon discovered, there was a significant gap between how the immigration laws were meant to work in theory and how they actually functioned in practice.
The creation of new laws always opens up realms of noncompliance and criminality. There is, as I demonstrate in the following pages, much to be learned about both the workings of United States jurisprudence and the experiences of Jews during this era by examining this underside of the legal system. The quota laws were predicated on the belief that it was both crucial and possible to control the flow of people over national borders, and to distinguish between desirable and undesirable peoples and between aliens and American citizens. In other words, the laws attempted to define and regulate a new set of relationships between migration, identities, and the state. The alien smuggling system both profited from this new set of, relationships--exploiting immigrants' need to pass through or avoid the U.S. government's scrutiny if they wanted to enter the country--and defied it. Indeed, the immigrant smuggling system existed in the gaps between how these relationships were perceived by the state and the quite different ways they might be lived in reality, where distinctions between legal and illegal routes, immigrants, and documents could be the subject of much confusion. The rise of alien smuggling profoundly challenged not only the practicality of the quotas but also their logical foundation, as smugglers made financial hay out of the fact that the boundaries of geography, identity, and law were far from clear in practice.
The history of Jewish alien smuggling in particular reveals the era's deep confusion regarding the categories of ethnicity and nationality upon which the quotas were based. Because Jews as a group had never quite fit national, ethnic, or linguistic classification schemes, they confounded such categories to an exceptional degree. Thus, the study of alien smuggling helps us understand both the power of legal regimes in defining experiences and identities and the limits of such power.
The history of Jewish alien smuggling networks also illuminates a key stage in the emergence of modern ideas of "illegal alienness." One reason historians have tended not to question the efficacy of the quota laws, I believe, is that they have not tended to think of European immigration to the United States in connection with illegality at all. The widespread defiance of the quota laws by both Jewish and non-Jewish immigrants from Europe, however, helped the very act of immigration come to be increasingly associated with "criminality" during this era, an association that has shaped U.S. policy and public understanding about immigration ever since.
The Rise of Jewish Alien Smuggling
Because both alien smugglers and immigrants entering the nation illegally were necessarily invested in remaining "undercover," few stories of successful alien smuggling ever made it into official archives or were recorded in first-person accounts. Nevertheless, significant traces of the smugglers' activities remain, captured by the government and journalistic investigators who took a particular interest in their doings. The sources make it clear that Jewish smugglers and immigrants played central roles in the new underground world of illegal immigration. In part, this simply reflects the ongoing desires of Jewish immigrants to come to the United States. Only Italians came in greater numbers during the first decades of the twentieth century, and thus the large Jewish immigrant enclaves in the United States remained important destinations for European Jews.
The centrality of Jews to the story of illegal immigration also speaks to the fact that by the time the United States passed its newly restrictive immigration laws, there was already a well-established tradition of Jews crossing national borders illegally, as well as existing smuggling networks that could expand to meet the need created by the U.S. laws. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "ganvenen dem grenets" (Yiddish for "stealing [over] the border") was a common mode of getting from Russia to Germany en route to the ports of Hamburg or Bremen. Immigrants risked the illegal crossing because the Russian official documents required for the journey were prohibitively expensive and difficult to obtain. (7) During and after World War I, when many Jews in eastern Europe were fleeing violence, economic devastation, and political upheaval, they sometimes continued to cross borders without regard to legality. Indeed, national boundaries and regimes in the region changed so often during this period that it was not always clear where those borders were.
Thus, those who sought to migrate to the United States in violation of the U.S. quota laws were in some ways only following an established pattern. Yet even while they fueled an existing smuggling industry, the new U.S. laws reshaped this underground scene in unprecedented ways. Illegal Jewish immigration to the United States was intercontinental in scope, a much bigger, more organized, and more financially complicated business than intra-European smuggling. Moreover, this business now posed a direct challenge to the government of the United States, which by passing the quota laws was making immigration and border control more central to its national sovereignty than ever before.
In the early years of the quota laws, European alien smuggling into the United States appears to have been fairly casual, a matter of immigrants taking the initiative to sneak over laxly guarded Canadian or Mexican...
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