Must we rely only on rare heroes to help desperate immigrants?

The anti-immigrant rhetoric we're hearing in this presidential election time is nothing new in American history. It is, however, mystifyingly paradoxical coming from citizens who make up a nation of immigrants (excepting, of course, for Indigenous residents who, just 100 years ago this year, finally were made legal citizens of the U.S.).

Daniel Greene (pictured here), who teaches history at Northwestern University and who is what's called a "Subject Matter Expert" at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., was in Kansas City last week to speak about all of this and more at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence. His appearance was sponsored by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education (on the board of which I serve).

Greene first focused on 1930s America, which was struggling through the Great Depression just as Adolf Hitler was seizing and abusing power in Germany.

It was a fraught time everywhere and when careers and lives hang in the balance, sometimes people of faith abandon what the great world religions have tried to teach them. In this case, the idea -- rooted in Judaism and re-emphasized in Christianity -- of protecting the weak, the homeless, the immigrant, the hungry, often got shelved. (Islam, by the way, teaches that all human beings are immigrants.)

The result of that abandonment of principle was a strong wave of anti-immigration sentiment just when Germany's and all of Europe's Jews were facing an existential threat from Hitler's Nazis.

Greene said that he often gets asked this question from people who don't have a good grasp of history: "Why didn't the Jews just leave?" Well, early in the period, some Jews did just that, finding at least temporary refuge in some western European countries, in what later would become the new state of Israel and in several North and South American countries, including the United States.

But, Greene said, "the question should not have been 'Why didn't the Jews leave Nazi Germany?'" Instead, "we want them to ask, 'Why did the United States make it so difficult for immigrants to enter?'"

One answer, he said, was that public opinion polling in the '30s made it clear that a large majority of Americans opposed allowing more immigrants to enter the U.S. And given the Depression and the accompanying high rate of unemployment, that opposition makes at least economic sense even if it violates religious teachings. Elected officials knew that if they adopted a strong pro-immigrant stance, they'd likely be voted out of office.

But the problem is that once you begin to see certain people as undesirable, that attitude can quickly escalate to raw racism, to hatred of "those people," to the kind of bizarre language of bitterness that, as a child, I'd occasionally hear from my maternal grandfather, himself an immigrant from Sweden. He simply had no room for people he called "the Slavs," including a family who lived across from my grandparents' home on East 12th Street in Streator, Ill. My mother was not allowed to play with the children of that family.

I had to ask my older sisters and my parents what that was all about, but I never got a full or satisfying answer, though they found Grandpa's anti-Slav views distasteful and made that clear to me.

So today we again find anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed about by some people seeking political office, including former President Donald Trump. I'm not going to repeat his pet-eating lies and other hateful nonsense here. But if you want an analysis of his thoughts about that, here's one source.

Greene, however, said he did not want to leave the impression that Americans in the 1930s and their government did nothing but evil things when it came to immigration or that somehow America was as bad or worse than the Nazis. He then told several stories of heroic Americans who went way out of their way to save a few Jewish people from Europe. They were thrilling, inspiring stories of heroic citizens who, like so many of their neighbors, could have done nothing -- or worse. (They reminded me of the people Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn and I wrote about in our 2009 book, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust.)

The world is in a different place almost 100 years later. And yet immigration and the existence of refugees remain difficult matters to resolve in generative ways. Our elected officials for years and years have failed to create fair and equitable immigration policies, and if there is no major reshuffling of power in Washington in the next election, that is likely to continue.

But my question is why so many current American citizens -- many of them people of faith -- seem so willing to ignore or reverse what their religions historically have taught them about how to treat immigrants, the homeless, the stateless, the people who are fleeing for their lives.

I'll wait for your answers.

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AFTER 20 YEARS, CHINA FINALLY FREES A PASTOR

If you needed more evidence of how horrifically the government of China treats people of faith, you need only to read this Associated Press story about an American pastor who was just finally released after 20 years in prison there for helping a church that was not authorized by Chinese officials. The Chinese communist government is among the world's worst offenders when it comes to suppressing religious liberty. Our government should be doing everything it can to call China on this and to make sure the world knows of China's continuing efforts to obliterate freedom.

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P.S.: Speaking of the Holocaust, as I was above, in early 2021, I wrote here about a new book co-authored by D.Z. Stone and by a former German teacher who helped his students uncover a brutal Nazi-era story in their town. The news now is that Germany has awarded the teacher, Dieter Vaupel, the "Merit on Ribbon of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic" of Germany for his work in that regard. You can read about that award here. Vaupel was a true patriot willing to tell a bitter story about his own country, and Germany has done the right thing by honoring that work.