GATEWAY TO SHANGRI-LA

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door,

Statue of Liberty Inscription by Emma Lazarus.

As totalitarianism engulfs new areas and the Nazi myth of racial purity infects even those lands still free from German rule, the world is faced again with the problem of human derelicts. The United States, in accordance with her tradition and as the chief semi-neutral nation, has taken the lead in financing escapes and in finding new homes for the outcasts. But, generous as the financial response has been, American ignorance concerning these refugees has hampered aid programs and offered the Christian Front, the Klu Klux Klan, and the Bund a chance to strike a blow for the swastika here at home. These All Americans with their dupes and colleagues oppose further immigration on the grounds that those already here have increased unemployment. They mutter about our own racial purity and complain that this is a Jewish problem-that Palestine and Madagascar are good enough for the refuse of the Fuhrer.

Actually two out of every five current refugees are "100% Aryan" enough to pass even Herr Hitler's breeding tests. And this proportion is going up as Nazi influence spreads through Vichy's France and Portugal. There are Finns, Poles, Norwegians, Spaniards, Dutch, as well as Frenchmen-seven million of them-who want to leave Marseille and Lisbon before the Storm troopers arrive. All, of course, would prefer to come here, but they will go wherever the door is open from Alaska to South Africa. We have already admitted many, and we will gain by taking as many more as we have room for. Not often since the Mayflower has the scum of a European wave of the future been so rich in human talent and accomplishment. With names like Einstein, Werfel, Undset, Romains, Maurois, and Paderewski, the steerage list of many a tramp steamer begins like a European Roll of Honor. Beyond doubt, these newcomers average as high as if not higher than their hosts in education and intelligence. And economically as well as culturally the exiles can contribute to the American way of life.

Rumors of mass replacement of American workers by refugees have invariably been proved false upon investigation. More than that, a survey of over three hundred firms established by outcast business men found them employing 75% native-born workers, frequently reopening abandoned factories, and bringing to this country formerly exclusively European patents and processes. Most often when refugees do add to our unemployed, it is entirely due to American inertia or unfounded prejudice. Thus nearly three thousand medical men have come here since 1934 and more than half are already successfully resettled after passing State medical board examinations in English. The one thousand men not yet practicing are anxious to fill the more than two thousand opportunities in doctorless communities which the Committee for Resettlement of Foreign Physicians has found and which our own medical men ignore. But forty-four states have refused to make minor alterations in their laws to permit these "furiners" to practice. So unsolicited requests for immigrant doctors from towns in thirty of these states must remain unanswered. The cry of "no more space" comes not from a Cerberus of our standard of living but from a dog in the manager.

Antique federal immigration laws, intended to outlaw importation of contract labor and which today prohibit organizations from paying transportation costs of emigres, should be changed. The old quotas must be revised or abandoned. Uncle Sam's refusal to classify the Spanish Loyalists as refugees so that they are ineligible for even temporary haven is a heartless response to the appeal of those first fighters against fascism who now are ringed by Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini. No All American team sparked by Senator Reynolds should be permitted to pull in the welcome must of Ellis Island. Not even the selfish arguments for walking out Europe's outcasts bold good. In a world of destruction and despair the United States since its founding has been humanity's Shangri-la. There is still no valid cause for bolting shut its golden gate.