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Admit Refugee Children?
In February 1939, Democratic senator Robert Wagner of New York and Republican congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts introduced legislation in Congress to admit 20,000 German refugee children under the age of 14 over a two-year period. The bill specified that the 10,000 children per year would enter the United States outside the existing restrictive immigration quota laws.
In Favor
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt backed the Wagner-Rogers Bill, the first time that she publicly endorsed any pending legislation as first lady. Despite Mrs. Roosevelt's urging, FDR never officially commented on the proposal to admit refugee children.
Opposed
Senator Robert Reynolds, a Democrat from North Carolina and a vocal opponent of the bill, had recently proposed banning all immigration for ten years or until the nation solved its unemployment problems. His compromise, a five-year total ban on all immigration in exchange for passing the child refugee bill, was rejected.
The American people agreed with Reynolds: 66 percent of Americans polled in January 1939 opposed expanding immigration to aid the refugee children. The Wagner-Rogers Bill never made it to a vote in Congress. |