“I Hate to See Human Beings Kicked Around by Fate and by Law:” Edith Lowenstein’s Asylum Advocacy in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

Abstract While most American refugee advocates and organizations were focused on relief oversees and resettlement of vetted refugees in the two decades after World War II, attorney Edith Lowenstein, as the lawyer handling individual casework for the Common Council for American Unity, spent the 1950s and 1960s addressing the persecution claims of “aliens already here” in the United States. This essay discusses how Lowenstein used obscure and understudied provisions of existing American immigration law—the adjustment provisions of the Refugee Relief and Refugee Escapee Acts and the provision in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act suspending deportation on persecution grounds—to push at the boundaries of the definition of refugee dictated by Cold War geopolitics and economic nationalism. Especially in handling cases involving seamen coming from behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains, Lowenstein used two major strategies: one that might be termed “Cold War immigrant rights” and another that was more radical and holistic. The latter challenged the constructed distinction between economic and political migrants and attempts to deport those with meritorious claims simply because they were in illegal status. Lowenstein had mixed success with the INS and in court, but her advocacy influenced the definition of asylum and practices of refugee admissions.