Major Jewish Organizations Urge Congress to Amend “anti-semitic” Dp Immigration Law

In letters to President Truman, Governor Thomas E. Dewey and the majority and minority leaders in both houses of Congress, the organizations denounced the law as “restrictive, discriminatory and anti-Semitic” and urged the immediate adoption of 11 amendments. Among the groups signing the messages were the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, HIAS, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Jewish War Veterans, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Synagogue Council of America, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the National Community Relations Advisory Council and 24 local Jewish community councils throughout the country.

The letter to President Truman reads in part:

“The Special Session of the 80th Congress has the opportunity of rectifying major injustices which the regular session permitted to be embodied in the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. Members of both parties, in both Houses of Congress, voted for the measure reluctantly, while vigorously condemning its restrictive and discriminatory provisions, only because they felt it was better than no bill at all. You signed the measure into law, Mr. President, with very great reluctance’, excoriating it as ‘flagrantly discriminatory’ and ‘anti-Semitic’, and expressing ‘the hope that its injustices will be rectified by the Congress at the first opportunity.

“To re-write this discriminatory and exclusionist bill into a genuine displaced persons hill, worthy of our great democratic nation and its traditions as a haven for the oppressed–a bill that will make it possible for us to welcome to our land the energies and skills and drives of people whose only faults were that they could not live under totalitarianism, eleven amendments to the present measure are required. We urge the Congress to enact them. They are:

“1. Section 2(c) should be revised so as to make eligible those displaced persons who entered Germany, Austria or Italy on or after Sept. 1, 1939, and on or before April 21, 1947.

“2. Section 2 (c) and 2 (d) should be amended to eliminate those passages which require that a displaced person to be eligible for admission will be suitably employed without displacing some other person from employment … and will have safe and sanitary housing without displacing some other person from such housing.

“3. Section 3 (a) should be amended to increase the total number of non-quota visas authorized from 202,000 to at least 400,000 and to eliminate the proviso that 40 percent of the visas issued under the act ‘shall be available exclusively to eligible displaced persons whose place of origin or country of nationality has been de facto annexed by a foreign power.’

“4. The act should be amended so as to remove the provisions which require that admissions for permanent residence effected or recorded under the act shall be charged against future quotas of the countries of nationality of the displaced parsons admitted.

“5. Section 4 should be amended to permit displaced persons now lawfully in this country to remain on approval by the Attorney General, unless ordered to be deported by concurrent resolution of Congress.

“6. Section 6 should be amended so as to delete the provision that agriculturists given preference shall be employed in the United States in agricultural pursuits, and to equalize the preferences accorded the several vocational classifications of agricultural, household, construction, clothing and garment workers. Other workers needed in the localities in which they propone to reside, etc.

“7. Section 7 should be amended to equalize the treatment of persons now in DP camps, and former inmates now outside the camps; the letters were assured that their leaving the camps would not prejudice their status as displaced persons.

“8. Section 11 should be amended so as to provide for extension of the President’s directive until March 31, 1949; and making it inapplicable thereafter to persons covered by the displaced persons act (with the amendments proposed here.)

“9. Section 12 should be amended to strike out the German and Austrian quota preferences for the Volksdeutche.

“10. La order to assure equitable treatment of all groups, the act should be amended by adding a provision to admit displaced persons in proportion to the numbers of each group or element in the DP camps.

“11. Section 13 should be amended by adding to the present ‘screening1 provisions, language excluding from admission persons ‘who advocated or assisted in the persecution of any person because of his race, religion, or national origin.'”