8 | NOVEMBER 3 • 2022 

guest column
America’s 21st Century – Who 
Will Write Our Next Chapter?
D

uring this year’s High 
Holidays, I sat with 
my family to watch 
Ken Burns’ documentary 
The U.S. and the Holocaust 
and I barely 
got through 
with the first 
episode when 
I found myself 
pulled into 
the parallels 
to the modern 
day. The 
documentary highlights both 
America’s welcoming nature 
as a place of refuge, evident 
in the inspiring words of 
Jewish poet Emma Lazarus 
inscribed on the Statue of 
Liberty, and the restrictive 
nature of early 20th-century 
U.S. immigration laws 
built on some of the same 
antisemitic foundations that 
led to the rise of Nazism.
As the grandchild of 
Eastern European Jews 
who fled antisemitism (and 
gratefully escaped tragic 
death at the hands of the 
Nazis — a fate that awaited 
my grandparents’ siblings 
and parents who did not 
leave Europe), I was taught 
that America was the land 
of freedom and opportunity. 
Postwar history has, in many 
ways, undergirded that belief. 
In my lifetime, the U.S. has 
welcomed more refugees 
than any other nation.
But Ken Burns’ 
documentary provides 
an honest and disturbing 
recollection of American 
immigration in late 19th 
and early 20th centuries. 

Far from being the beacon 
of religious tolerance 
and welcoming land of 
freedom, the U.S. was 
gripped by rising populism 
that demonized various 
southern and eastern 
European groups. Many 
Americans embraced the 
same antisemitic tropes that 
fueled Adolf Hitler’s rise. 
Far from opening the gates 
of freedom, the U.S. rejected 
hundreds of thousands of 
Jewish immigration requests, 
leaving countless European 
Jews, like Anne Frank’s 
family, to suffer tragic, 
unspeakable terrors.
What stunned me during 
my viewing was, that while 
few popular leaders today 
openly express patently 
antisemitic words, the means 
by which U.S. immigration 
laws were tailored to keep 
out those seeking refuge 
in early 20th-century 
America are the same as 
those being promoted by 
anti-immigration politicians 
today. I mean the exact same 

policies. Suddenly during 
the first episode of the Ken 
Burns’ documentary, the 
narrator discusses the use of 
the “public charge” and how 
it was used to deny Jewish 
requests for immigration.

WHAT IS THE 
PUBLIC CHARGE?
For many viewers, the 
reference to the “public 
charge” would not register 
as an important issue in 
America’s story about Jews 
in America or modern-day 
immigration policy. But for 
me, the executive director 
of Global Detroit, a regional 
economic development 
organization that focuses on 
the inclusion of immigrants 
as a strategy to strengthen 
Southeast Michigan’s 
economy, the “public charge” 
issue is important and one 
that very much threatens 
to reenact the immigration 
barriers that, according to 
the Ken Burns’ documentary, 
kept hundreds of thousands 
of Jews from escaping 

tragedy in Europe.
U.S. immigration laws have 
long included provisions 
allowing immigration 
officials the ability to deny 
entry to immigrants if the 
government deems that 
person likely to become a 
“public charge” or dependent 
on government benefits. 
This provision originated 
in 1882, but saw growing use 
during the 1920s and, with 
intensifying anti-immigrant 
attitudes during the Great 
Depression and rising 
antisemitism leading up to 
the Second World War, even 
more common use in the 
critical years during which 
European and German Jews 
sought to flee the Nazis. 
It fell into disuse after the 
Second World War until 
President Donald Trump 
sought to greatly expand its 
meaning and utilization to 
close American borders.
In 2018, President 
Trump and his then-Acting 
Director of U.S. Customs 
and Immigration Services 
(USCIS) Ken Cucinelli 
proposed a new federal rule 
on the “public charge” that, 
in effect, would have created 
a wealth test for entry to the 
United States — a wealth test 
that I am fairly certain my 
own grandfather would have 
failed. Mr. Cucinelli went so 
far as seeking to redefine the 
Statue of Liberty’s inscription 
of “Give me your tired, your 
poor, your huddled masses 
yearning to breathe free,” 
arguing that it only applies 
to those who could “stand 

PURELY COMMENTARY

Steve 
Tobocman

USCIS.GOV