Not-Quite-Closed Gates: Jewish Alien Smuggling in the Post-Quota Years (Essay)

On February 11, 1928, the S.S. Iroquois had just completed the short voyage from Havana to Miami when U.S. immigration inspectors detained one of the ship's Jewish passengers. This traveler's documents identified him as thirty-two-year-old Sam Weisstein, born in Poland but now a naturalized citizen of the United States. The inspectors found it suspicious, however, that Weisstein could not explain how he had obtained his papers. After close interrogation, the man confessed that he was not Weisstein but Chaim Josef Listopad, a Jewish carpenter born in Mlawa, Poland. Listopad was not a U.S. citizen and had never even been to the United States. He had bought the papers in Havana just two weeks earlier, paying fifty dollars to a Jewish stranger wearing a white tropical suit and straw hat. Listopad might not have made this purchase had he known that the Immigration Bureau in Washington, D.C., already had a thick file on the real Samuel Weisstein, whom they had long suspected of smuggling Jews from Warsaw to the United States for profit. (1) In 1921 and 1924, the U.S. Congress passed radically nativist legislation decreeing that most immigration would henceforth be strictly limited according to nation-based quotas. The controversial new laws drastically reduced the number of Europeans allowed to enter the United States legally, especially from southern and eastern Europe, and made permanent an already existing near-total ban on Asian immigration. Consequently, these laws fueled a brisk business in illicit immigration, a phenomenon that has gone largely unexamined in scholarship on the era. (2) Eastern European Jews, many of whom were desperate to escape ongoing postwar economic and political crises and join relatives in the United States, proved an especially lucrative market. More than a decade's worth of records at the National Archives in Washington testify to the ongoing game of cat-and-mouse between the U.S. government and Samuel Weisstein, as well as scores of his colleagues, who were busy during the post-quota years forging papers and smuggling Jewish immigrants through Warsaw, Breslau, Berlin, Paris, Antwerp, Montreal, Havana, Nassau, and Ciudad Juarez.