Three metropolitan newspapers, the Herald-Tribune, the Daily News and the Daily Mirror, published editorial comment today on the refugee situation, all three agreeing on the urgency of Congress passing the Wagner-Rogers bill, for admission of 20,000 children from Germany in two years, in unamended form.
Praising the work of the Intergovernmental Refugee Committee, which has just concluded a plenary session in London, the Tribune declared Americans could not affored to talk “too loudly” about the “savagery” of nations responsible for the refugee situation “as long as so simple and innocuous a measure as the Wagner bill. . . still languishes in the Senate, which in the course of weeks has done nothing with it save attach a brutally crippling amendment.”
Expressing the hope that President Roosevelt’s conference with the Evian committee’s directorate in September may coordinate and speed up the refugee work, the News cited the Wagner-Rogers bill as “one swift, concrete and constructive piece of refugee relief work” and urged its passage as “the most important and most urgent piece of legislation before this session of Congress.”
The Mirror listed six ways in which the United States, if it “wished to hear the pitiful call of distress from the persecuted in Europe,” could help the refugees. These included the Wagner-Rogers bill, mortgaging future quotas, utilizing unused quotas of past years, applying the total annual quota to refugees no matter from what country, admitting special groups that would not compete with the native labor market and amending the 1924 Immigration Act to enlarge present quotas. The Mirror pointed out that Congress had set a precedent for special refugee cases when it made special allowances for “White” Russians after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
