Lessons of the Hungarian Immigration
Escape from Fear.
by Martin A. Bursten.
Syracuse University Press. 224 pp. $3.50.
When the Hungarian Revolt erupted in October 1956, Martin A. Bursten was among the first to reach the Austro-Hungarian border; there he had an opportunity to observe the westward migration of some 200,000 refugees—that “terrible outpouring of human tragedy”—from beginning to end. Public Relations Director of United HIAS Service and a veteran journalist, the author of Escape from Fear was able to study all aspects of this social explosion: flight; European reception; transportation overseas; and reception, resettlement, and integration in the United States.
Of the total number of Hungarians who fled Communism, approximately 168,000 have gone on to some 42 countries for resettlement. The United States gave haven to some 22 per cent of the Freedom Fighters who were resettled, the largest number received by any one country; we admitted a total of 38,000, of which 6,130 came with visas on a permanent basis, the remainder on parole (thus needing legislative adjustment). According to the Commissioner of Immigration’s Final Report on the Hungarian Escapee Program, the United States also admitted 300 tubercular aliens to accompany their families—also contrary to our present law. Something like 24,000 of the 200,000 who fled still remain in Austria, Yugoslavia, and Italy, the countries of first asylum.
To cope with future such emergencies, Bursten recommends the establishment of a permanent international agency and major liberalization of American immigration laws. Certain themes recur in the book: The U.S.’s wisdom in admitting the Hungarian refugees; the extraordinary job done by American voluntary agencies, whose employees worked “from eight to exhaustion”; the need for professional social workers and immigration experts to accomplish resettlement and avoid maladjustment and exploitation; the inevitability of another “blow-up behind the Iron Curtain. . . . sooner or later”; and the need for basic amendments to our immigration laws, in particular the elimination of national origins as the criteria for selecting aliens who are to be admitted.
A good deal of little known information is disclosed in the chapter describing the development of American policy toward the Hungarian revolt, and again in the author’s sketch of how American colleges and universities met the challenge by providing facilities for the new immigrants. Another well-documented chapter deals with the question of whether the United States, Radio Free Europe, or the Voice of America “fomented” the revolution, as alleged by the Communists. The evidence, some of it revealed for the first time, leads Bursten to conclude that, although there were careless words used in the very highest circles of the U. S. government, the charge is a “canard.”
Bursten is generous in praise. But he is also realistic as to the ignoble motives, abroad no less than here, behind some grand gestures. He condemns our own government’s short-lived religious quotas for visas; he expresses skepticism about the appropriateness of Madison Avenue’s “powerhouse drive techniques” for “selling the Hungarian refugee”; he bluntly disapproves of “special preference” for cases espoused by Congressmen and other VIP’s; and he gives a strictly factual account of Congressman Walter’s inconsistencies on the parole program.
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Perhaps it is captious to wish for more. This reviewer would not have been so continuously laudatory of the various American government officials named by the author as involved in the program. And perhaps, too, one might have voiced some regret that the great majority of American voluntary agencies have been so reticent about what their experience incontrovertibly shows to be necessary, a frontal attack on our un-American immigration law. On this latter score, in an introduction, Scott McLeod, now U. S. Ambassador to Ireland and formerly administrator of the Refugee Relief Program, says that “the story of the Hungarian migration . . . is a perfect example of why we should seek to devise a revision of our immigration policy,” in line with the President’s suggestions.
The evidence of the need for fundamental revision of our present immigration law is overwhelming. A law couched in terms of the national origins system is obviously interested in a prospective alien’s place of birth, not in his potential worth to this country. Our present immigration quota for Hungary is 865 persons annually. The inflexibility of such a quota would obviously have condemned the United States to impotent frustration in dealing with the Hungarian situation if the quota law had not been ignored, in one way or another. And such has been the history of the quota law since its adoption—it has had to be ignored, evaded, or otherwise circumvented whenever any major international crisis called for decisive action by the United States. When World War II ended with over one million displaced persons in Western Europe, Congress had to enact the Displaced Persons Act and evade the quotas by the patent device of “mortgaging” future quotas, some as far ahead as 300 years. (The device was repealed in 1957.) When the DP Act ran out and the Refugee Relief Act was passed in 1953, all refugees and others to whom it applied were admitted non-quota. When other special problems arose, such as the admission of the foreign war-brides of our servicemen, special laws again had to be enacted. The postwar history of immigration consists of a series of Congressional admissions of the inability of our national origins quota immigration law to serve our national interests and welfare. The absurdity of the national origins quota of 865 persons for Hungary, in the face of 38,000 Hungarians welcomed to the United States, appears in the comment of the Final Report of the Commissioner of Immigration, that the facts “establish beyond a doubt the potential value to the United States of the Hungarians who came to this country since the October 1956 revolt.”
Escape from Fear not only helps us to understand one of the most important events of the decade; it is also useful as a basis for future private and governmental planning. It is a significant contribution to the literature on immigration and foreign affairs.
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