Asylum.. the beginning.
Last week I had a call with a pastor in Florida and swapped emails with a pastor in Michigan. Asylum seekers had come to their churches and they were not sure what to do and what was next. Can they stay legally? How can the church help? What could I tell them? Today as I was finalizing this piece, I was introduced over email and had a subsequent phone call from a man on the other side of my state trying to help a long time friend he knew from missions trips to her country. She came through the southern border and has a court date with an immigration judge in a year. He had a lot of questions. As do you. What is happening at the border? Why are so many people coming? Is this man’s friend here illegally? Can migrants/asylum seekers work? Do we have open borders? I will tackle all of this starting slowly this week and in the coming weeks.
Thank you to all of your kind engagement with my first substack of Becoming U.S. I was hoping it would be useful as we think of that wonderful and tricky work of “E Pluribus Unum,” that quintessentially American motto, “out of many one” that would engage the immigration and cultural and related faith questions of our time. I was not prepared for how many of you would read and subscribe so quickly. Thank you. The next few weeks I am going to talk about asylum and the U.S./Mexico border. It’s such a confusing subject. But first, let’s talk about Henry Ford.
Yes, the car guy.
My family has a lot for which to thank Henry Ford. Founder of Ford Motor Company, Ford’s invention of the assembly line, and his subsequent company changed a lot for my family's futures. Family Staats’ opportunities changed drastically because of him.
My grandfather had an 8th grade education because he had to quit school to work the family farm in the Depression much to his forever shame. My father got a skilled trade right out of high school and worked at Ford Motor Company for 40 years as a millwright. My family had a comfortable middle class life in a generation. Overtime pay at Ford and my dad’s hard work ethic paid for a good majority of my college degree leaving me a rare millennial who has no college debt right now.
I learned to drive on a manual Ford Ranger truck in high school thanks to my dad’s insistence (and stress as I rolled down hills backwards in Northeast Ohio while he yanked the parking brake and shouted, “STOP!!”). Learning stick shift immediately on entering the driving world made me fall in love with how a car can move. It was a great skill to have for my years abroad where automatic cars are less common. I will someday only drive 50 year old cars because I refuse to drive an automatic. You can keep your silly push button cars. Give me a manual thank you very much.
The Ford truck looked like a bit like this:
While we experienced a changed family trajectory because of Henry Ford, Henry was not all roses.
Henry Ford was deeply anti-semitic. Deeply.
His hatred for Jewish people was so virulent he peddled his prejudice and conspiracy theories around the country in ads taken out in papers nationwide. He bought the Dearborn Independent newspaper and had 91 stories published that peddled prejudice, lies, and conspiracy theories about the recent Jewish immigrants that had come to the US in the late 19th and early 20th century as well as Jewish people abroad. Every Ford Motor company dealership was required to carry the paper. Ford’s hatred was exported around the country.
Anti-immigrant sentiments were high a century ago. The Ellis island days that we wax nostalgically for angered the country back then and old fashioned influencers like Henry Ford had a lot to say. The Jews, Italians, Polish people and other eastern european immigrants “would never become American,” according to popular anxieties. They would “dirty our bloodlines.” They would “bring disease.” They would be a “competition for jobs.” They were a danger to the country with their foreign religions (remember Catholics were hated for a looonnnng time as well as Jewish people).
And in Henry Ford’s mind, all problems could be blamed on Jewish people. These lies have not gone away as you can hear in the Sharon McMahon Here’s Where It Gets Interesting podcast I heard this week (after I started writing this).
In 1924 an anti immigrant piece of legislation passed called the Reed-Johnson Amendment. Its goal was to stop this “terrible” flow of migration and so they said only 2% of every ethnicity present could immigrate to the US (excluding anyone African and Asian- the Chinese Exclusion Act was still having effects.) One more thing. The 2%? They dialed back the date on this 30 years. The 1890 census. Only 2% of the ethnicities in the country in 1890 would be allowed in. Now the crafters of the amendment could purify the country and stop those Italians, Jewish, and Polish people from invading us.
It worked. And it had seriously terrible consequences.
U.S. Immigration basically halted for forty years. But it wasn’t that it just slowed immigration to a grind. It was that when people desperately needed to flee danger they couldn’t. Post World War II we rejected many people fleeing the Soviets with fears they would be Communist and referenced our 1924 nationality quotas.
The worst story that has always stuck in my mind though was in 1939. The St. Louis, a German ocean liner, fled to Cuba and then our shores from Hamburg Germany with over 900 people on board, most of them Jewish. Cuba and the U.S. both refused them entry. We referenced our immigration nationality quotas and turned the ship around back to Europe because they didn’t have visas. The visas were hard to come by because of our 1924 law and this was a dire emergency with Hitler in power. 254 of those passengers died in the Holocaust.
So why did I go on this long history lesson about good old Henry? I told you this would be a substack about complicating the narrative. Henry Ford significantly helped my family with his auto company. Yet his anti semitism and influence cost our nation and peoples lives by the public campaign of fear and its consequences on our public policies.
Understanding what is happening at our border and what we need to do to fix it must be taken in the context of what has happened the last 100 years.
The U.S. eventually, in a redemptive move after 1924, helped craft the world’s definitions of refugees and eventually asylum laws on the international scene and for the U.S.
“The core principle of the 1951 (Refugee) Convention is non-refoulement, which asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.”
Asylum is only able to be pursued by crossing an international border.
World War II produced loads of people displaced from their countries. While we did not dial back the quota system or open more doors for immigration until 1965, we began to see the displacement of people as something that needed to be addressed in 1951 for Europeans, and then later creating a humanitarian parole program to bring displaced Hungarians to the U.S.
“Following the rapid and violent 1956 Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet Union, thousands of Hungarians fled their homeland and sought refuge in Austria, which soon became overwhelmed by the influx of refugees. As a result, 36 nations, including the U.S., offered to help resettle the displaced Hungarians. The U.S. admitted 6,130 Hungarian refugees under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953.
Additionally, over 30,000 Hungarians entered the U.S. under the attorney general’s parole authority (section 212[d][5] of the INA). INS officers examined these applicants in Austria and again when they arrived in the U.S., where they were temporarily held at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.
Two years later, on July 25, 1958, Congress passed a law allowing Hungarian parolees to become lawful permanent residents of the United States.
This program set the precedent for using the attorney general’s parole authority to admit refugees to the U.S. and for Congress to later pass special legislation allowing the parolees to become lawful permanent residents. This process would be repeated on several occasions during the following decades.”
So what does this all mean about our southern border? Next time I will look at the complications of who is coming? Can they stay? We can’t take everyone so what now? Are people being deported? What’s broken about our asylum system and what could fix it?
But a few final thoughts as I land today.
We once refused refugees and sent them to their deaths because asylum wasn’t a possibility..
We have always been both a proud nation of immigrants and a nation that has anxieties about the new immigrants that arrive.
The U.S. was the leader developing global refugee and asylum laws and definitions in 1951, 1967, 1980 etc.
Asylum is only accessed by crossing an international border.
Not everyone who asks for asylum is granted it.
I got this amazing text about a week ago from an Afghan friend. She was evacuated in 2021 and was given the temporary humanitarian parole with the rest of the evacuees. Parole has no clear pathway towards green cards so they have to navigate our backlogged asylum system to be granted to stay (unless Congress acts and allocates them a pathway to permanent status.) Husna has been working to support her family, studying full time, and hopes to go to medical school. She’s in her early twenties and has a lot of weight on her shoulders. I am so grateful for her asylum claim going through. However, it would be much easier for her and all of our other allies if Congress would pass an Afghan Adjustment Act much like Hungarian Americans were given a pathway to permanency in the 50s. The AAA means our allies don’t have to navigate our complex asylum system but can have a clear pathway to green cards. Rejoice with me over Husna’s good news and if you would, send your elected officials a message today asking them to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act. Our Afghan allies shouldn’t have to live in immigration uncertainty and legal limbo.