If you want to understand how and why most Jews, using their hugely disproportionate cultural influence, oppose immigration restriction, this piece in Slate by Jacob Weisberg (chairman and editor-in-chief of Slate) is representative (“Trump Is Deaf to the Echoes of History”):
Going through my mother’s papers after she died last year, I found a folder marked “1940 immigration—Jewish relatives.” The pleading letters and desperate cables it contained told a story I knew only in broad outline, about how my grandparents helped a family of distant relations escape the Nazis at the last possible moment.
After Kristallnacht in 1938, those relatives—Sol and Fruma Teitelmann, and their two young daughters Hanna and Mali—were desperate to “leave Germany in any way possible as quickly as possible,” as they wrote to my grandparents. As Lithuanian nationals stranded in Frankfurt, their only hope was to obtain one of the limited number of U.S. immigrant visas. My grandfather, Mortimer Porges, wrote a stack of letters to anyone he thought might be able to help: congressional aides, the State Department, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. He filled out forms and affidavits promising to provide for the Teitelmanns in Chicago…
Der Trumpenfuhrer
Those letters were the first thing I thought of Friday, when President Trump issued his executive order banning refugees from seven Middle Eastern countries for 120 days, and visitors of all kinds from those countries for 90 days. Here again was the heartlessness and bureaucratic caprice that doomed so many European Jews…
For American Jews, the scenes of refugees detained in transit hold a particular resonance. We know that most of us exist today only because our ancestors, like the Teitelmanns, finagled their way into a country where they weren’t entirely welcome. That experience explains why several Syrian refugees trying to clear immigration before the deadline were being met by groups from synagogues that were sponsoring their resettlement. Jews witnessing the exodus from Aleppo or ISIS’s atrocities against the Yazidis can’t but see ourselves in parallel….
Bottom Line: Any attempt to place restrictions on immigration into the United States is Hitlerian.
The size and scope of Jewish influence on this topic is briefly touched upon by Weisberg’s Silicon Valley references:
And so it is a Jewish-flavored reaction that may finally break down the wall of silence and fear around Trump’s vicious policies. “My great grandparents came from Germany, Austria and Poland,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook wall on Friday night. “Priscilla’s parents were refugees from China and Vietnam. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and we should be proud of that. … We should also keep our doors open to refugees and those who need help.” On Saturday, Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder who comes from a family of Soviet refuseniks, was photographed at a protest at San Francisco International Airport, one of many that occurred spontaneously across the country.
To learn more about the significant role Jewish interest groups played in getting the 1965 Immigration Act passed, read the works of Kevin MacDonald on the subject.
