A Haaretz columnist, Chemi Shalev, complains that Jewish organizations have not been up in arms about Donald Trump’s proposed immigration policy. The reason Jewish organizations must act is because over 90 years ago the US passed an immigration restriction bill that shut off the flow of Eastern European Jews to America.
The basic logic here is that the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the Original Sin of White America. The attempt on the part of Americans to fashion their immigration policy to retain an ethnic status quo as of 1890 was so horrifically evil that Jewish organizations have a duty to once again bring all the pressure they can muster to allow in every last immigrant who wants to come to America. Needless to say, Israel’s immigration policy — clearly engineered to retain Jewish ethnic dominance — is not at issue for Shalev.
I won’t dispute Shalev’s point that the main concern of White America in 1924 was the influx of Jews, but of course he fails to contextualize this concern properly. As I noted elsewhere, there was an
explicit concern about lack of assimilability. Although the bias toward Northern Europeans did indeed discriminate against Southern and Eastern Europeans, it was obvious from the debates that the main concern was Eastern European Jewish immigrants, large percentages of whom were radicals (see here, p. 271 ff) and none of whom identified with the people or culture of Christian, Northern European America.
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http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/08/chemi-shalev-american-jews-must-oppose-trumps-immigration-policy/
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