Papers and Trails

The Holocaust and U.S. Immigration Control

Didi Tal

When the Jewish and political refugees from Nazi Germany and its occupied territories tried to make their way across the Atlantic, they came face to face with an immigration quota system that was put into effect after the First World War. Beyond the quota system, bureaucratic practices on both sides of the Atlantic warranted that not even the available number of visas was allocated. Public concern over immigration had begun to shape policy-making in the United States since the late 1800s, but with the rise of persecuted, displaced persons in Europe, America has to reconsider its own image, legislation, and responsibility. With the standardization of border surveillance and immigration administration, a new social category emerges, that of the paper-bound refugee. 

Every chapter in my dissertation, “Papers and Trails: The Holocaust and U.S. Immigration Control,” is dedicated to a different category of immigration related documents.  Operating in the interdisciplinary fields of German Exile Studies and American legal and cultural history, I analyze immigration-related policy and bureaucracy on the one hand and media and cultural representations of paperwork on the other. Focusing on modern bureaucratic practices of immigration control, I examine paperwork–passports, visas, naturalization applications–and their political and cultural significance in order to uncover their ability to tell and determine narratives and fates.