They see this ship and say, “We get that this is a desperate situation, but you don’t have the right visas, so we do have to turn you away.” There were people on board who were threatening to commit suicide, they were so desperate. The ship had to go back.
DR: When they went back, several hundred passengers were ultimately killed by the Nazis.
President Truman wanted to change the law, but he couldn’t get it done. In fact, the law actually probably got worse in some respects, because there were some constraints imposed that he did not support. Eisenhower didn’t do very much.
Then you write about a young man running for Congress named John Kennedy, a man who’d never really worried about immigration before. He’s Irish, but an Irish Brahmin, you could say. Why does he care about immigration in his first congressional election? Why does he take this up as an issue?
JLY: We sometimes associate Kennedy with immigration because he wrote this very slim book called A Nation of Immigrants that became quite popular in schools. Many people know that, when he runs for Congress, he’s faced with a demographic challenge, which is that the district he wants to win in Boston is filled with immigrants.
Massachusetts at this point has probably one of the highest percentages of foreign-born of any state in the country. So if you want to be successful politically in Massachusetts, you’ve got to be able to speak to immigrants.
When Kennedy’s father is ambassador to England, they don’t even go to Ireland. They’re really not super in touch with their Irish roots. Yet he does find a way to get in touch with his roots, because he’s got to relate to these working-class immigrants and children of immigrants he’s trying to win over and get their votes.
He begins to invoke the memory of his mother’s father, Honey Fitz [Fitzgerald]. He was a very successful Irish politician in Boston who became the mayor of the city, in the vanguard of Irish Catholics and political power in America. Kennedy plays up this part of his heritage and begins to build a body of work politically, when he gets to the Hill, on immigration reform in particular.
DR: When he gets to Congress, he’s supportive of changing the existing law but doesn’t have the power to get anything done, and nothing really is done. But when he runs for president, he does talk about this a bit. When he’s elected, he says, “I’m going to do something about it.” What did he try to do in the early years of his presidency?
JLY: By this time, in the late ’50s, early ’60s, there’s a bipartisan feeling that maybe the quotas aren’t so great. This is the Cold War, and there’s a sense that these quotas are pretty indefensible at this point. They’re based on race science, discredited by Nazi Germany. They are discriminatory, and they are making it hard in this war with the Soviet Union over ideology and moral purity. It’s hard to defend them.
By the time JFK arrives in the White House, there’s a general agreement that they should go. He gets the Department of Justice and the State Department to begin to figure out what kind of legislation they can send to Congress saying, “Here’s how to abolish these quotas, and here’s what you can replace them with.”
DR: He does propose legislation, but it doesn’t really go anywhere because many of the key people in Congress are dead-set against it. When Lyndon Johnson succeeds him as president, Johnson took up much of the Kennedy agenda. Why did he care about immigration? There weren’t a lot of immigrants in his district in Texas, presumably, when he was a congressman or even a senator.
JLY: There were some who came through the Galveston port. He spoke a lot about teaching these young Mexican American children in schools as a young man, so he’d have had some exposure. When he was an aide to a congressman on the Hill during World War II, he made some efforts to help rescue Jewish refugees. So he had some passing knowledge.
When he’s in the Senate, it’s not one of his big issues. When he gets to the White House and he’s looking at how to try to heal the country and take what JFK left unfinished and make it a reality, we think a lot about the civil rights legislation.
He does that with immigration too. He picks it up, I think, because he sees it as being of a piece with the civil rights fight. Like the fight against Jim Crow, this too is about discriminatory laws that are all about treating people differently just because of their race.
So when his aides say to him, “We should really go for this,” it clicks for him that this is an important moral fight. He’s not really a technocrat. He’s not all about those deep technocratic details and policymaking.
Once he decides that he wants something done and there’s a moral sweep to the argument—as we saw, unfortunately, with the Vietnam War—he gets really behind it. Unlike JFK, he is a genius at working the levers of Congress. Once he injects that interest and attention, the legislation really does have a chance, after forty years, to pass.
DR: The legislation goes to the judiciary committees in both the House and the Senate. In the Senate, in those days, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee is Senator James Eastland from Mississippi, not famous for an interest in civil rights or in immigration by people who are Jewish. How did he get persuaded to do this?
JLY: He sees the writing on the wall. He’s a practical person. He’s deeply prejudiced, one of the hard-core segregationists during this period, and so powerful because he’s running the Judiciary Committee. All of this important legislation runs through him, all the judicial appointments.
But he sees that the votes are there. There’s momentum for this. It doesn’t really make sense to stand in the way of it.
Interestingly, he has taken Ted Kennedy, who’s just joined the Senate, under his wing, and he sees that Teddy Kennedy is really interested in this too. So, after standing up against it for many years, he realizes, “I can’t keep fighting this.” He basically let Teddy Kennedy run the show on the Senate floor to get this legislation passed.
DR: Manny Celler was a congressman who was then, I think, in his fiftieth year as a member of the House. He was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, from Brooklyn and with a big Jewish constituency. Was he the leading advocate in the House for getting this done?
JLY: He was probably the fifth-longest-serving member of Congress ever in American history. He joins in the ’20s and he’s there all the way up to when Nixon is president.
So he sees it all. The quotas that we’ve been talking about are passed right after he joins Congress, and he really has been at the center of fighting against them for a long time. By the time we get to the ’60s, he’s a truly liberal congressman who’s behind every liberal cause you can imagine.
He’s a very powerful figure as chair of the House Judiciary Committee on all the civil rights legislation that’s being passed. The Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, all of it has his fingerprints all over it. But probably nothing was closer to his heart than this immigration law, which bears his name, the Hart-Celler Act, I think because he sees the very beginning of the fight, through World War II and the Holocaust, through the Cold War and Truman, through JFK up to this point in 1965.
It’s also personal. He’s the grandson of German Jews. His constituents are Jews and Italians. He really takes personally this idea that the U.S. has a bedrock system of immigration that openly discriminates against people like him and his constituents.
DR: So the legislation is called the Hart-Celler Act. Phil Hart is the senator for Michigan who introduced the legislation. What is in the legislation that changes the way our immigration system now operates?
JLY: There was kind of a funny moment when Kennedy is still alive and his aides are trying to figure out what to put in the legislation. Everyone is like, “We get rid of these quotas, but what do we replace them with?” No one really knows. Everyone’s been fighting so hard to eliminate them, but then you have this very difficult question: If you’re not going to judge people based on their ethnicity, what is your system?
People don’t want to go back to open borders at that time. They want some kind of numerical limit,
but they’re not sure how to begin to establish preferences. The 1965 act is fascinating because they’re debating what to put in place of these ethnic quotas. They come down to a couple of criteria that should sound familiar to all of us because they’re still with us now.
One is family reunification, meaning if you have immediate family already in the U.S., you get priority over somebody else. This preference is so interesting because the people who wanted it as the number-one thing that would help you get in were trying to keep America stable racially. Their thinking was: “If we get rid of these quotas, we still have to have some kind of mechanism to keep America white, more or less. We can’t allow things to get out of control. The people who are here are already white, so if their immediate family members get preference, that shouldn’t change things very much.” So that was number one, the highest preference, in the ’65 act.
Number two is people with special skills—people with technical skills, people with graduate degrees, people who were scientists, people with some special thing that the U.S. government felt like it needed more of. That second preference is actually what my parents, my mom in particular, benefited from to be able to come here.
DR: What about where you came from in the Western Hemisphere? Was there a concern about people coming from, let’s say, Latin America, and how was that dealt with?
JLY: This part really surprised me when I was doing my research. When these ethnic quotas were passed, there was a huge carve-out for the Western Hemisphere. This is so different from how it is now, but it was thought for a very long time that it didn’t make sense to restrict immigration from places like Mexico, because these countries in Latin America are our neighbors and we have to treat them with some deference.
So even in these ’20s quotas, the Western Hemisphere was basically carved out of all of it. There were no quotas, no limits. Now, you get to 1965 and people are saying, “Why do we have this weird system where the Western Hemisphere has no limits and yet the rest of the world does?” And so in ’65, oddly enough, the Western Hemisphere loses that kind of limitless immigration system and becomes part of this overall numerical cap.
For some scholars, this is a really pivotal moment, because the U.S.-Mexico border, which, again, had no numerical limits before—there were some guest-worker programs, but it was very much an open-border situation, aside from the literacy test—suddenly there’s a numerical limit and many more people could be considered illegal.
This is the root, in a way. The law is trying to loosen the immigration laws a bit, but then it almost inadvertently introduces this other factor, which is that Western Hemisphere immigration has these numerical caps, which transforms how we see immigrants from Latin America.
DR: The Hart-Celler Act passed in 1965 is still the law of the land?
JLY: It’s pretty much the bedrock of our immigration system. We have gone back to it and changed things and added things. But when you talk about the modern infrastructure, it’s really this law.
DR: Right now, what percentage of the population in the United States is immigrants, and is that much different than it was before the Hart-Celler Act?
JLY: It’s in the low teens, somewhere around 12 or 14 percent. More than one in four Americans now is either an immigrant or a child of immigrants. We have not been at this kind of peak of foreign-born since that earlier historic wave of Jews and Italians showing up at the turn of the twentieth century.
Immigration has fallen off pretty dramatically under the Trump administration for lots of different reasons, but when we think about our society and the percentage of foreign-born, we are at a relative historic high—the difference being that now the people who are here are not only from Europe, they’re from all over the world.
DR: If you want to be a U.S. resident now, you have to meet one of the quotas. How many people a year are permitted to come into the United States?
JLY: It’s a couple of hundred thousand. It changes year to year, that number. The Trump administration was always reducing that number. On net, I think right now we have about two hundred thousand immigrants coming in a year. Again, that number has been dropping. The trend is downward.
And, for those who want to become citizens, there are requirements, as we’ve been talking about. You have to have been a permanent resident with a green card for at least five years. You have to pass a civics test. You have to pass the basic English proficiency test. About half of the immigrants in the U.S. now are naturalized, the rest are not.
DR: I think it’s about eight hundred thousand people a year are now sworn in through naturalization ceremonies in the United States. If you could summarize it in one paragraph, what would you want somebody to take away from your book?
JLY: We don’t have some kind of inherent right to be here that was guaranteed by the founders. These are laws that are fought over, that have been fought over, that are being fought over very fiercely right now. We, as a nation, are always tussling over who gets to count as an American and what requirements you have to have.
Sometimes we’ve said we want immigrants here, sometimes we don’t, but these are knobs that we’re always turning. These questions of who’s allowed here, who’s not, they determine the fates of entire families. They can feel completely arbitrary.
You can talk to anyone who’s gone through the system. It can feel like a fluke, like this one line in the law lets me in, but this one doesn’t. We have to look at it as kind of a legalistic structure that we’ve built together, and that one day it can change. Just as it’s changed before, it can change again.
MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT on Being an Immigrant
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; former U.S. Secretary of State
“My mantra has always been and is that the U.S. needs to be involved, and that is what made me grateful to be an American.”
There are many reasons why more individuals in the world by far want to immigrate every year to the United States than to any other country. Among those reasons is that immigrants have shown that they can rise to the highest levels of American companies, cultural organizations, and society.
The only exception is the U.S. presidency—that position is reserved, under the Constitution, for natural-born Americans. But two immigrants have risen to the highest level of a president’s cabinet: secretary of state. The first was Henry Kissinger, a German refugee in the 1930s who, following a sterling academic career at Harvard, became secretary of state under Richard Nixon, and then continued under Gerald Ford.
The second was Madeleine Albright, a refugee from communist Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s. She became the first woman to serve as secretary of state, during President Bill Clinton’s second term, after having acted as his ambassador to the United Nations during his first term.
Secretary Albright’s father was a distinguished Czech diplomat and academic who recognized that his country was, following World War II, going to be effectively controlled by the Soviet Union. So he left with his wife and three children, and ultimately became a professor of international affairs at the University of Denver. (His prize student there was a young woman who would also become secretary of state a few decades down the road—Condoleezza Rice.)
After graduating from Wellesley College and getting her master’s and PhD in public law and government from Columbia University in New York, Madeleine Albright became a foreign policy advisor to a number of Democratic policymakers and presidential candidates. However, it was a former professor at Columbia, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who first brought Madeleine Albright into the executive branch as a congressional liaison for him during part of his tenure as national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter.
That is when I first met Madeleine, at a staff lunch table in the White House Mess during the Carter years. I empathized with her—she told me of the constant challenges of keeping the peace between her current boss and her former boss, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, who became Carter’s second secretary of state.
At the
time, I did not imagine that this young staffer would herself one day become secretary of state. I suspect she did not see me as a budding capitalist—in those days, the furthest thing from my mind. I have interviewed Madeleine over the years about her life and views on international affairs. But for this book I asked her to do a special virtual interview in December 2020 about her life as an immigrant—the challenges and the opportunities.
* * *
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): You were born in what was then Czechoslovakia. Your name was not actually Madeleine?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT (MA): It was Marie Jana, which is basically Mary Jane in Czech.
DR: Your father, Josef Korbel, was an official with the Czech government. Then, when the Nazis invaded, your father and your family escaped to London?
MA: When I was born, my father was actually the Czechoslovak press attaché in Belgrade. My mother wanted me born in Prague, where her mother was. So I was born in Czechoslovakia. But my father at the time was a diplomat. Then he was recalled and was in Prague in March 1939 when the Nazis marched in. I was two years old.
DR: Your father was able to get the right to go to London. Was it hard to get passage to London?
MA: They just had to escape. According to something my mother wrote, they managed to bribe some officials, and they got out with me. We went out via Yugoslavia and ended up in London, where my father was with the Czechoslovak government in exile.
DR: Do you remember the bombings of London during that time? That was when the Nazis were bombing London during the Battle of Britain.
MA: I do. We had an apartment in London in Notting Hill Gate. Before it got fancy, there were these big buildings that had a lot of refugees in them. We spent every night in the cellar, and that I remember very well.
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