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in an inundation of the U.S. by “persecuted and jobless” European refugees and feared
that there would be “little or no reciprocal action on the part of the other countries
involved.” He also declared that the “first duty “of the American Government was to the
American people, especially the unemployed and “overburdened taxpayers.” Admitted
aliens would either displace Americans from the workforce or would have to be
maintained on the public dole. Consequently, he supported the use of private funds to
promote resettlement in the underdeveloped and less inhabited regions of South
America. 42
Representative Thomas J. Jenkins criticized Roosevelt for attempting to “embroil
us in European entanglements [by] asking the people of the United States to make a
haven here for those who are undesirable to European dictators.” He warned that any
refugee plan would “provide an opening for a more liberal immigration policy” and
represented a presidential “visionary excursion into the warm fields of altruism” while
ignoring the “cold winds of poverty and penury” that affect the “ill-clothed, ill-housed,
and ill-fed” American citizens. He proposed that the European nations use the funds
owed to the United States as war debt as the financial means of resettling refugees in
“some uncontested section of the world.” Entry of such aliens into the United States
42 “Relief of Political Refugees,” Rep. Martin Dies, Congressional Record Appendix, March 28, 1938,
Seventy-Fifth Congress, 3 rd sess., vol. 10, March 28, 1938 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1938), 1207.
European restrictions on employment of aliens would result, he believed, in the further impoverishment of
refugees who would seek admission into the U.S. Consequently, they needed to be diverted away from
America and Dies called for re-settlement in Paraguay and other under populated South American
countries.
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