Europeans who actively participated in persecution of Jews should be barred from immigration to the United States, it was recommended today by Sen. Alexander Wiley when he announced an amendment to revise the cut-off date in the present DP Act.
The new measure would move up the eligibility date from December 22, 1945, to January 1, 1949, thus including 135,000 refugees classified as DP’s by the International Refugee Organization but barred from the United States under present statutes. Sen. Wiley said his amendment covers 40,000 to 45,000 DP’s, mostly Jews, who entered Allied occupied zones of Germany from Poland and other countries between April, 1947, and December, 1948.
Although he did not introduce the recommendation as a proposed amendment, the Senator called for screening out “not only those individuals who might favor overthrow of the American form of government but those individuals who actively participated in political, racial, or religious persecution.” Sen. Wiley’s office explained that definition of the phrase, “active participation in persecution,” would be left to the State Department.
Approval of the amendment has been publicly expressed by the Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons and other groups which have been striving to revise the cut-off date. The revision favors Polish Jews who fled Poland after the war to the American and British zones in order to escape postwar Polish pogroms.
Other recommendations made by Sen. Wiley, which will later be made as amendments, his office said, are to: 1. Increase the number of DP’s to be admitted to the U.S. to 400,000 over a four-year period; 2. Repeal the provision mortgaging future Immigration quotas; 3. Eliminate the requirement for Jobs and housing assurances and substitute provision that the DP’s will not become public charges; 4. Eliminate all discrimination because of race, religion, or national origin in the current DP law; 5. Repeal the rigid 30 percent priority for agricultural workers.
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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.
