The Trespassers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  He had read or heard of them all. These and a dozen other pieces of like news he had kept to himself, footnotes to the new document of the twentieth century. Now he had not been quick enough, and Christa had seen this newest story. He forced himself to meet her eyes. Panic stood large in them.

  “If such a thing happened to us,” she cried, “I would—I—oh, Franz, I tell you I would rather—”

  Her voice trailed off. He did not answer at once. The old desires to go to Zurich, to shout, yell, curse at any and every official he could see there flooded into his heart. But he knew—he knew. He had not the freedom for that; anger was a coin no immigrant could spend openly. Now they were so near the end, he counseled himself. Another ten days and the new quota year would begin.

  It was one minute past midnight, on the first of July, 1939. Now again the ones with their dreams centered in the United States could see in their minds the unfilled pages, the empty ledgers, of the quota books at all the consulates.

  Now again, none but the highest officials could know the true ratio between the expectancy and the chance.

  One year before, at this very moment of midnight, the high officials knew that 139,163 Germans and Austrians were registered and waiting for the 27,370 American visas that could be issued in the next twelve months. Now they knew that the number registered and waiting was 309,782, and that the quota was full until 1950—one year before, at this very moment, the officials knew that 18,642, Czechoslovakians were registered and waiting for the 2874 visas that could be issued in any year. Now they knew that 51,271 Czechs waited and that the American quota was full until 1957.

  Twelve months ago, the officials knew that 41,949 Poles were registered and waiting for the 6524 possible visas the United States could issue. Now there were 115,222 Poles waiting and the quota was full until 1956.

  And the Hungarian quota, the quota that Franz Vederle bore so long in his very heart—one year ago 12,262 Hungarians raced for the 869 visas that would go to the first who qualified for them. Now the officials knew that 32,836 Hungarians waited and that the quota was oversubscribed until 1976.

  Full, full, if never another German or Austrian, never another Czech or Pole, should go into an American Consulate in Berlin or Stuttgart, in Prague or Vienna or Warsaw, in the desperate months that lie ahead for Europe, these quotas are hopeless for eleven, seventeen, thirty-seven years…

  From these four countries alone, there were 509,111 Christas and Pauls and Ilses and Franzes and Januçes and Celviks and Esthers and Ottos—over half a million registered and waiting for the precious visa stamp of the United States, land of asylum to the persecuted, to the political or religious outlaws of the world. And for those 509,111, there now opened 37,637 new chances, spaced tidily of course over the next twelve months.

  The high officials knew, and some of them hated the impasse as personally as if they themselves and their own families were blocked by its awful dimensions. But there were also the officials who were aloof, untouched by the clamor, vexed by the endless surge. Damn foreigners, anyway. What makes them want to travel? Why do they have to go rushing toward the United States?

  One moment, official. Look at your ledgers for England, for the year just passed. See the 65,721 American visas that may be issued yearly to Great Britain and North Ireland under the quota? Yes, but only 3604 English and Irish left their homes last year and crossed the great Atlantic to settle in the United States. There’s freedom there at home, there are safety and liberty there for a man’s beliefs, and so 62,117 American visas went begging.

  And look at your lists for Norwegians and Frenchmen, for Danes and Belgians and Hollanders and the citizens of Eire—look at the visas that were never used from last July to this.

  Look, but do not report what you find to the half million frantic ones on the German and Czech waiting lists, on the Hungarian and Polish. And do not tell it either to the 146,242 from other countries who also are already registered and waiting. Do not confide to them that in the year just ending, out of America’s possible grand total of 153,774 quota visas for all the nations, 94,921 were never issued at all.

  No, do not breathe it. For these desperate ones might then plead, pray, curse, implore you in this time of crisis to transfer the unused visas to the packed pages where their names hopelessly stand. They might cry out to you, “But here are nearly a hundred thousand you could shift to us from last year—and what of the unfilled quotas from the years before and this year to come?”

  And then you could not laboriously explain how the quota for each nation was long ago fixed and established, that it could not be held over from year to year, could not be shifted from nation to nation, could not be mortgaged in advance.

  No, you could not undertake to go into all that. All you could say for answer would be, “That cannot be done. It is the law. It is the immigration law.”

  It was not always the law. There was a time when there were no quotas, no visa reservations, no waiting lists. There was a time when the United States, like France, like England, and every other civilized nation, stood open to all who journeyed toward it.

  There was then upon the earth one freedom that has almost vanished from the lives of men, the freedom to leave one soil and set foot upon another, to live where one chose to live and work where one chose to work. Even the poor had this freedom—the potato farmer and the coal miner, the factory hand and the carpenter. Anyone who could scrape passage to some near or distant land once had this profound and ancient freedom.

  In the United States, the first moves to restrict that freedom came in the middle of the last century, came from labor itself. The California Workingmen’s party and the young Knights of Labor agitated against the evils of cheap “coolie labor” and demanded, not equal wages for the Chinese, but exclusion. By 1868, the demand was so strong that the Federal Congress proclaimed the “right of expatriation” to be a “natural and inherent right of all people.” But the agitation spread, and in 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. The restriction of the lesser Japanese immigration came much later.

  Also in 1882 the first law restricting general immigration was enacted. It excluded the disabled, the lunatic and diseased, those likely to become public charges. Even the humane could not quarrel with this law, except for the explosive potential within it.

  The labor unions pressed onward and three years later one more small law was passed. It outlawed immigrant “contract labor,” and again none could quarrel too deeply with its purpose.

  But the first bars had been put up. These first laws taught the nation that men and women could be kept out of free America by those who did not want them. The hard seeds of exclusion swelled and burgeoned; prejudice and bigotry proved mighty fertilizers. Whenever trying times came briefly to the nation, the seeds burst forth into strenuous life. And now the harvest widened beyond the wishes of labor.

  Now others whipped up an appetite for restriction. Now the jingo press and professional chauvinists hungered for new laws; many Americans whose own parents or grandparents had come from Europe cried harshly that the endless streams of foreigners must be dammed up. Aliens lowered American standards; aliens snatched the jobs away. Yesterday it was all right to let them in; there were countless frontier acres to absorb them. But America was glutted now.

  That was the growing theory. The yellow press and the haranguing patriots blazed it about the country. Each passing year, as the tide of immigration gushed through the harbor in New York, the hate-fed theory spread. And on facts or figures could kill or even halt it.

  There were the facts, the large and sinewy facts. From 1890 to 1910, after the frontier days were ended, over 12 millions of Europe’s people crossed the wide sea, the largest number of any equal period in history. Yet with two panics to overcome, the twenty years saw an unparalleled wealth and growth for the country. Far from the unemployment of the theory, the number of employed rose from 23 million to 38 million, a gain of 15 million jobs. Coal production trebled in those twent
y years; steel production increased 700 per cent; copper quadrupled; American railway tonnage nearly trebled and bank clearings did treble. The farms of America, too, had their golden age; the value of farm products advanced from over two billion dollars to over eight billions.

  A hundred separate causes brought this wealth about. The surge of immigration, however, did not cause unemployment. It did not lower wages or standards. Labor’s wages went up, the eight-hour day spread. The immigrants in the coal mines of Pennsylvania won better wages than the native workers in the mines of West Virginia. In the steel mills, on the railroads, in the needle trades, where immigrant labor abounded, the standards of work and pay went steadily up and not down.

  These were the splendid facts. But there were enough theorists to ignore them. The myth and the clamor grew.

  A wave of new demands swept the land; calls for literacy tests reached such volume that in 1897 a bill authorizing them passed both houses of Congress. President Cleveland vetoed it. The calls kept on, and in 1912 another measure was passed, banning illiterates of certain classes. President Taft vetoed it. Three years later, a similar measure passed both houses. President Wilson vetoed it. And in 1917, once again another such bill was passed.

  Then, to the Congress and to the nation, President Wilson protested that a literacy test would serve not as a test of character or fitness but as “a penalty for lack of opportunity in the home country.” Again he vetoed the bill.

  This time, the measure passed above his veto. But even this Immigration Act of 1917 had one proviso that remembered the American purpose of long ago. For it did exempt from the test “all aliens who shall prove…that they are seeking admission …to avoid religious persecution…”

  When the Great War ended in 1918, a fierce, war-born nationalism was left clamped on every land. Everywhere trade barriers went up, tariffs were heightened. And in the same mood, new immigration laws were born. Now in this mood all the nations devised new ways to exclude goods, to exclude people.

  The United States felt the postwar leap of immigration. In 1920, nearly half a million immigrants arrived, and in the next year the number doubled. Many cautious ones remembered the years when the century was young, when a million foreigners arrived each twelvemonth. Again the sensational headlines and speeches fed the fears and hatreds, roused new demands for exclusion and even deportation. The labor unions did their share of the shouting. The literacy test had failed as a padlock on the doors.

  One June 3, 1921, the first numerical limitations were enacted by Congress. The first quotas were set up. The quota for each country was to be three per cent of the number of natives of that country living in the United States in 1910. For the first time the great land of promise measured out its welcome on a clicking turnstile—so much per country per year.

  But the quotas in this temporary measure were large. Some 68,000 Germans could still enter each year, 42,000 Italians, 31,000 Poles—all in all, 357,803 quota immigrants might still make their way to American opportunity. The padlock was still too fragile. The agitation roared on.

  And so the Immigration Act of 1924 came into being. A new set of quotas was authorized, a harsher set, a tighter set. And this number-fraught law provided no soft quota exceptions for the religious or political refugee. From that day forward—apart from certain special treaty visas, diplomatic visas, preference quotas, visitors’ visas, and nonquota visas—from that day forward an immigrant was an immigrant, one digit under the quota. No matter what the need, no matter what the danger that drove him, an immigrant was an immigrant and subject to a numerical destiny.

  The new act contained the “National Origins Clause” for establishing the permanent quotas. By it, the quota for each country was to be proportioned to the number of inhabitants in the continental United States having the same national origin. The Census of 1920 was to be used.

  The new quotas were not put into operation at once. An intermediary set was established, slashing the 1921 quotas to more acceptable figures. These were set at two per cent of the number of natives in 1890. For five years, these intermediary quotas ruled immigration to the United States. In round numbers, the possible Italian immigration was cut from the 42,000 of the first quota to 4000, the Polish from 31,000 to 6000, the German from 68,000 to 51,000, the Czech from 14,000 to 3000, the Norwegian from 12,000 to 6000, the Soviet Union from 24,000 to 2000, the British and North Irish from 77,000 to 34,000, with a separate quota of 29,000 for the Free State, the Swedish from 20,000 to 10,000, the Austrian from 7000 to 800, the Hungarian from 6000 to 500.

  In 1929, the permanent quotas took hold. Some of the intermediary quotas were increased by a few hundred, by one or even two thousand, but some of the largest quotas were slashed once more. Germany’s new quota fell from 51,000 to 26,000, the Free State’s from 29,000 to 18,000, Norway’s from 6000 to 2000, Sweden’s from 10,000 to 3000. The only great jump was for Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That quota rose from 34,000 to 66,000.

  And there the quotas stayed. Tight-lipped and deaf they were to stay through all the crisis years of the 1930’s.

  And still the doors to America were not locked. Still it was possible for 153,774 foreigners to come in from all the nations each year. But in 1930, unemployment and depression laid hands upon the United States. Once again the old blame was pinned, the old cries arose. And President Hoover turned to the State Department to do what might be done.

  There was something to be done. There was, for instance, the old clause about barring those “likely to become a public charge.” In consular slang, “the L.P.C. clause” had applied only to idiots, to the diseased, the unfit and crippled. But now a new interpretation was put upon the clause. Now began the new requirements of personal resources, the stricter demands of pledges to support, the closer rules for financial status of the affiant, the more positive guarantees. Now “an alien desiring to immigrate into the United States” began to find that unless he had a private fortune or relatives already established there, the L.P.C. clause alone could slam the door of a country in his face.

  In the time that followed, immigration to America dropped to the lowest point in a hundred years. The unemployment did not cease, but the immigration very nearly did. From 1933 through 1938, while the unemployed grew in number from eight to ten to fifteen millions, not one alien hater could lay the blame on the continuing American welcome to strangers. For in that period of time, 51,863 more aliens left America’s shores than came toward them.

  And in that period of dark time, with persecution and maniac credo howling across dictator-ruled lands, the number of unissued quota visas to all the countries of the world reached the total of 795,823.

  Almost, not quite but almost, the nation that lay between the two oceans had followed the example of the whole closed or closing earth. In those years of the 1930, the great nation was working toward free trade, making reciprocal trade treaties, tearing down the barriers of high tariffs. But no comparable wisdom yet showed strong enough to batter down the other barriers of the immigration laws. They still stood, to keep out the greatest raw material, the richest natural resource of any nation anywhere—men and women who would love it, who would work in and for it.

  One day it would come, that other wisdom. But as the new American quota year opened with the first minute of July in the year of 1939, that day had not yet dawned.

  When fifteen days of the new quota year had gone by, Franz Vederle knew he could endure the silence no longer. Two or three days without notification from Zurich, yes, of course, one would expect it. Four or five days, perhaps. But after that each delivery of mail became an anguish because the official notice did not come. Letters, telegrams, the long-distance phone—no part of that old technique would answer his need. This could not go on and on and on, until once again their cases were tabled, forgotten, lost under the rush of newer cases.

  There was one new attack on this old and wearing horror. It was a chance to take, a risk, a gamble. Who could tell how the official m
ind would react? But whatever the risk, whatever the gamble—He tossed through half a night looking at it from every angle. It would be a lot to ask of her, it would cause trouble, inconvenience to her. But in the morning he knew he would ask it, anyway.

  He drew out the pocket address book in which he had written down her itinerary as far as she could give it to him. London, July 1–20—the Mayfair Chambers. He waited until Christa had gone to market, and then he went to the telephone and put in the call to London.

  Vee had written several times, postcards and letters that were informed with the new closeness among them all. She seemed well and fit. Whatever her illness had been—it was the one topic she had carefully avoided when she had been with them—she seemed completely over it now. Her last letter had come a few days ago. “I suppose by now you have the visas and are leaving me stranded in Europe. So it’s turn about and you will be on the dock in New York when I get back in September.”

  The call came through. He could hear the London operator announcing that Switzerland was calling.

  “Franz, what’s wrong?” Her voice was good to hear. There was instant readiness in it.

  “Vee, I must bother you once more. We have no visas yet—no word at all.”

  “Damn them,” she said. “I could go and scratch their eyes out.”

  He told her how he had been racking his brains searching for some new thing to do—different from the written request for news, for an interview.

  “I’m going there myself, Vee,” he ended grimly. “No luxuries for me like scratching their eyes out. But I am going without writing first for an appointment. And I was wondering—last night I got the idea, if by some chance—”

  Simultaneously she was saying, “I’ll go, too. I’ll meet you there, Franz. We’ll do it together. It might do some actual good to have me right there—a citizen. Anyway, I want to.”