Americans at the gate: The politics of American refugee policy, 1952--1980

Few scholars have examined in-depth the development of the United States' commitment to refugees in the decades following World War II. As a result, no thorough description exists of how these refugee policies, laws, and programs—which brought millions of persons to the United States—were formulated, administered and implemented. Nor is there a satisfactory answer as to why the United States decided to admit these refugees. The standard explanation—that foreign policy concerns guided American refugee policies—leaves too many questions unanswered.; This dissertation, then, has two main goals. First, it seeks more solid understandings of both how refugee policies and laws were made and how these refugee programs ran “on the ground.” Second, it looks to explain the course of American refugee affairs through a different lens than U.S. foreign policy. The answers to these questions can be found, this dissertation asserts, by contextualizing American refugee affairs within American domestic political culture, and specifically evolving notions of national identity.; This study argues that post-World War II era American refugee polices and laws, and the contentious deliberations that produced them, mirrored larger debates about national identity occurring during that same period. When Americans—politicians, bureaucrats, refugee experts, and the American public—discussed refugee polices and laws, they also discussed definitions of “American.” Likewise officials charged with the “on the ground” implementation of refugee programs, and specifically admitting (or not admitting) refugees to the United States, measured refugees against benchmarks of “American.”; Between 1952 and 1980, the political discourse surrounding national identity changed dramatically. The definition of “American” moved away from ethnic or racial characteristics during the late 1940s and early 1950s towards a definition that stressed political and ideological traits, mainly anti-communism, beginning in the early 1950s and fully emerging in the early 1960s. This politicized definition of “American” evolved too, moving by the 1970s to one grounded in supposedly universal, individual rights. American refugee affairs—and the policy and political battles at its heart—were fought on the contested ground of national identity and largely followed this trajectory.