Prosperity, the Braceros, and Cold War Refugees, 1945–1965

This paper investigated how the American immigration laws affected illegal aliens during the early Cold war period. The study focused on those Chinese seamen who jumped off ships and lived illegally in the US. Their stay triggered the struggle of national security, anti-communist alliance, and refugee humanities between America and China, which just retreated from the mainland to Taiwan after its defeat by the Communist China. In the framework of Cold War, American immigration laws searched for a balance between racial elegances in the society and international politics. While the Chinese government was forced to accept the excluded illegal aliens by the US, it tried to protect the interest of Chinese American communities which needed the workforce of these seamen.As the study showed, both the American and Chinese governments claimed its sovereignty by ways of excluding illegal aliens or protecting overseas populace. The actions, though ostensibly for the sake of national security, contained diplomatic implications. The framework of Cold War offered a good global perspective to understand the forces of migration, specifically the one from nation-state hegemony.Nevertheless, the Chinese government in Taiwan suffered a predicament while asserting its hegemony. On the one hand, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office suggested helping these seamen, as Cold War refugees, staying in the United States to pacify the Chinese American communities. On the other, the Ministry of Transportation insisted on extraditing these seamen back to Taiwan, in order to stop illegally jumping ships. Such predicament was attributed to the unique suffrage and protection conferring to overseas Chinese.

The much overused quote from Nixon’s memoirs captures the popular perception of the two men from different backgrounds — the ‘Odd Couple’ — who jointly engineered some of the most spectacular breakthroughs in US foreign policy during the Cold War era: ‘The combination was unlikely — the grocer’s son from Whittier and the refugee from Hitler’s Germany, the politician and the academic. But our differences helped make the partnership work.’1 Nixon’s point was, it seems, twofold. First, it was to underline that the two men were products of the American dream; neither inherited wealth or position, each worked hard to achieve what they did. This, of course, was the sometimes forgotten but indisputable case. Unlike his 1960 rival, John F. Kennedy, Nixon came from nothing and took immense pride in this fact. Unlike most of his predecessors, Kissinger was not part of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite that had dominated America’s foreign policy-makers in the early part of the Cold War. Second and related, Nixon affirmed that they were both outsiders. Nixon’s was a personality that did not easily fit one’s image of an American politician. He was neither particularly charming up close nor did he have many real friends among America’s political elite. ‘I’m an introvert in an extrovert profession’, Nixon once said of himself.2 Meanwhile, Kissinger’s Jewish background made him an outsider in the higher circles of the US government of the late 1960s. Being a naturalized American helped little; speaking with a German accent was not necessarily an asset. Perhaps because they were outsiders (or at least perceived themselves as such) both were, by most accounts, chronically insecure no matter how much they achieved.

Since the end of the Cold War there has been a growing conceptual shift in the academic and policy communities from the traditional emphasis on state security — military defence of the state and exertion of influence over other states — to human security. The latter emphasizes the security of the individual, at a minimum security against gross human rights violations, and in the broader sense embracing social economic, environmental, and cultural security. This shift has resulted from a number of factors, chief among which are, in the broadest sense, the forces of globalization and the weakness, if not outright collapse, of a number of states over the past 10 years. On one level, the processes of globalization have led to benefits for many. On another level the same processes have led to dramatic dislocations in many poorer countries, comprising well over a third of UN membership, and problems experienced by emerging economies, not always well suited to withstand, let alone benefit from, an intensification of market forces.

During the Cold War, the term “captive nations” should be regarded as a figure of speech, but also as a practical expression of the ideological declaration – anti‑communism. Using it, the government and the Congress of the United States expressed their support for the cause of freedom of the countries behind the Iron Curtain, and the American society, including minority groups from Eastern Europe, expressed its solidarity with the people who were deprived the right to decide about their own fate. Was the promotion of the concept of “captive nations” a deliberate action of the U.S. government calculated to emphasize their interest in the fate of the regions from which many citizens of that country originated (response to bottom‑up pressure)? Or maybe it was a way to gain support for their foreign policy and its promotion at home and abroad (a propaganda tool)? What role did the refugees themselves play in these activities? This text is an attempt to assess the impact that they could have on the Congress, and thereby influence the processes shaping American foreign policy (both in terms of public debate, as well as concrete policy proposals). Undoubtedly, the activity of a number of business organizations, associating both U.S. citizens and immigrants from Eastern Europe, contributed to a significant popularization of the concept of “the captive” and the role of the United States as their spokesperson. However, the analysis suggests that the myth of captivity is not linked only to the American anti‑communism. It has been present in the American tradition since colonial times, and since its redefinition after World War II. Until today it is used by the U.S. authorities in order to justify global involvement.

Maxwell Rabb is remembered as the longest-serving United States Ambassador to Italy, from 1981 to 1989. What is less known, contrary to the popular belief that he was chosen because of his prominence in the Jewish community of New York, is that Rabb’s appointment was in fact due to his deep knowledge of Italian politics. Such knowledge can be traced back to 1953, when Rabb was working as an advisor for the Eisenhower Administration and a shepherd of the Refugee Relief Act through Congress. The aim of this paper is threefold: first, to provide information on Maxwell Rabb, given the lack of specific academic publications on his person; second, to expand on the Eisenhower strategy on immigration in 1952 and 1953, which marked a definite shift away from the restrictionist stance that had characterized the Republican Party up to that point; and last, to sketch the important political capital that Rabb acquired through his work on immigration policies. This paper does not aim at providing an account of bilateral relations between the U.S. and Italy regarding the Refugee Relief Act, nor does it question the independence of Italian foreign policy in those years. The present work will instead demonstrate how Rabb’s work greatly contributed to forging a specific role for Italy in the Republican strategy of deterrence, making immigration a powerful weapon in the Cold War strategies of the United States.

In the postwar world, the problem of refugees, exiles, displaced persons and fugitives – different groups of forced migrants – became one of more important issues. Focusing on just a single aspect of it, which is the fate of the Polish DPs in France and the French occupation zone, we want to show how resignation from returning to their home country influenced this numerous group of people under the pressure of the Yalta policy practiced by particular countries. The hesitation about being repatriated to Poland led to the emergence of highly emotional and uncompromisingly anti-communist attitudes. The manifestation of such a behaviour in the years following the war was incomprehensible for the French, just like the decision to remain in exile. French economy needed hands to work and was eager to see the DPs as economic migrants but not as political refugees. It was not until the 1950s when the progressing Cold War created better conditions for the migrants to settle, to establish their own organizations, and also to gear up for ideological struggle.

The global political divides of the Cold War propelled the dismantling of Asian exclusion in ways that provided greater, if conditional, integration for Asian Americans, in a central aspect of the reworking of racial inequality in the United States after World War II. The forging of strategic alliances with Asian nations and peoples in that conflict mandated at least token gestures of greater acceptance and equity, in the form of changes to immigration and citizenship laws that had previously barred Asians as “aliens ineligible to citizenship.”1 During the Cold War, shared politics and economic considerations continued to trump racial difference as the United States sought leadership of the “free” capitalist world and competed with Soviet-led communism for the affiliation and cooperation of emerging, postcolonial Third World nations. U.S. courtship of once-scorned peoples required the end of Jim Crow systems of segregation through the repeal of discriminatory laws, although actual practices and institutions proved far more resistant to change. Politically and ideologically, culture and values came to dominate explanations for categories and inequalities once attributed to differences in biological race. Mainstream media and cultural productions celebrated America’s newfound embrace of its ethnic populations, even as the liberatory aspirations inflamed by World War II set in motion the civil rights movement and increasingly confrontational mobilizations for greater access and equality. These contestations transformed the character of America as a multiracial democracy, with Asian Americans advancing more than any other racial group to become widely perceived as a “model minority” by the 1980s with the popularization of a racial trope first articulated during the 1960s. Asian American gains were attained in part through the diminishing of barriers in immigration, employment, residence, education, and miscegenation, but also because their successes affirmed U.S. claims regarding its multiracial democracy and because reforms of immigration law admitted growing numbers of Asians who had been screened for family connections, refugee status, and especially their capacity to contribute economically. The 1965 Immigration Act cemented these preferences for educated and skilled Asian workers, with employers assuming great powers as routes to immigration and permanent status. The United States became the chief beneficiary of “brain drain” from Asian countries. Geometric rates of Asian American population growth since 1965, disproportionately screened through this economic preference system, have sharply reduced the ranks of Asian Americans linked to the exclusion era and set them apart from Latino, black, and Native Americans who remain much more entrenched in the systems of inequality rooted in the era of sanctioned racial segregation.

The image is very familiar to us: a scholar overcoming Cold War barriers to study a land where travel, let alone research, is impossible; their diligence paying off by locating materials that allow them to circumvent the obstacles and the propaganda created by the world’s “most isolated” regime; the resulting research offering a never-before-seen view into the inner truths of this nigh-impenetrable land.Or, at least, so we would have it.This is the image we North Korean researchers have often taken for ourselves.1 Playing off of old colonial images of the “hermit kingdom” now transferred to Pyongyang, our work has tended to capitalize on ideas of North Korea as a scholarly terra incognita, as though it was the last blank space on the map in an otherwise globalized world. This tendency, encouraged by the commercial instincts of publishers, has emphasized the solitary scholar working in a challenging environment while downplaying how this self-representation reinforces many of the shibboleths prominent in the media that our own research ostensibly seeks to dispel.In suggesting that this self-representation is, at best, a tad on the dramatic side and, at worst, self-serving, the seven articles in this special issue make one very simple point: the study of North Korea may not be so difficult after all. Ranging from investigations into science fiction literature to explorations of textual exchanges between the North and South, from the uses of quantitative data to ruminations on possible research agendas for anthropologists, and from treatments of Chinese soldier war memoirs to forays into international politics, this special issue shows that just because we cannot go to North Korea does not mean research is impossible. This special issue demonstrates that what might be called the “North Korean archive” is much broader and deeper than normally assumed. Indeed, arguably more sources exist for North Korea than for many other historical periods, including virtually any era leading up to the Chosŏn dynasty. As much as limits exist to these sources, the authors of this special issue ensure that the days of declaiming, “We can’t get there” or lamenting, “There are no sources” should be behind us.So, too, do they ask a wide array of research questions, based on the methodology of each author’s discipline. In so doing, they expand our understanding of what it is possible to ask when it comes to North Korea and cut through some of the Cold War conceptual categories that have boxed in our research. The result is a more varied and diverse understanding. Brought together as part of a workshop sponsored by the Institute for Korean Studies at George Washington University and organized by Professor Gregg Brazinsky and Professor Jisoo Kim, these authors worked together through an online workshop and roundtable to consider the past, current, and future directions of research on North Korea. Everyone present agreed significant shifts were underway. True, there remain questions that cannot be answered, yet there are plenty of materials for new questions with lots of answers. The articles themselves simply get on with the work of doing research, showing that rich research possibilities exist by deploying different sources and asking novel questions.At the heart of this special issue is the question of opening up access, which, however infeasible geopolitically, is certainly possible for scholarship. Degree of access, of course, fluctuates depending on the nationality of the scholar, with many European scholars having more contact with North Korean scholars. Given relations between Seoul and Washington, American scholars have less access than almost all but their South Korean colleagues. Sonia Ryang begins her article with a question directed to colleagues in a field whose research is arguably the most disrupted by North Korea’s barriers to research regardless of their nationality: anthropology. “How could one carry out an anthropological study of North Korea,” she asks, “if one were not able to conduct long-term or even short-term ethnographic fieldwork on the ground?” Ryang’s question is relevant to other disciplines as well. Yet rather than be dissuaded, Ryang moves beyond the question itself, insisting on the possibility of research from a distance. Ryang argues that a text-based approach—“a reading of heterogeneous texts”—can offer a starting point to examine North Korea on its own terms and even, she goes on to argue, be turned back to question anthropological methodology itself.2 In arguing for critical treatment of North Korean texts, Ryang brings her anthropology closer to the methodology of the other social scientists and humanists in the special issue, all of whom confirm that there are, in fact, lots of materials for studying North Korea outside its boundaries.3There is, in short, a more expansive North Korean archive. Two of these types of sources (interviews and the archives of former socialist allies) are more familiar and another (Pyongyang published texts) less so. Each has its own idiosyncratic shortcomings and advantages, but when combined and engaged with critically, this expanded archive offers ways of diversifying possible research subjects and lines of inquiry.It is now an almost hackneyed usage among late twentieth-century scholars to call for an escape from Cold War–era approaches. Yet in the Korean peninsula, where the Cold War has yet to cease, where security problems still dominate the headlines, where in South Korea, National Security Laws still constrain research on North Korea, and where anti-communist rhetoric is still very much alive, the conceptual categories and narrative strategies of the Cold War, however much critiqued in other settings, remain powerful in shaping much writing about North Korea. The contributors represent a growing shift in scholarship that recognizes how studies on North Korea have been shaped by the Cold War at the same time as they have helped maintain the particular peninsular-specific structures of the Cold War—the division system. The significance of diversifying scholarly approaches is not just about North Korea but also about the division system itself.One of the longest-standing modes of research into North Korea has been interviewing people who left the country. From the 1950s to 1980s, these emigrants consisted largely of defectors, whose testimonies were dominated by South Korean intelligence services. With the changes in the Northeast political economy—in particular the rise of the Chinese juggernaut and the interlinked marketization in North Korea—as well as the food insecurity of the early 1990s, the irregular numbers of defectors became a virtual flood of migrants.4 Although defectors formerly consisted mainly of ex-officials and were almost always male, the new emigrants came with more assorted socioeconomic backgrounds. Women were predominant, they held more diverse motivations for leaving, and they originated primarily, though not exclusively, from locations close to the Chinese border.5 That this change in number and origin occurred at the same time as the fall of the Berlin Wall, together with a renewed attention to Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons, ensured that the flow of people out of the North attracted global media attention. A celebrity culture of a sort resulted, with key exiles gaining an international profile through such media as TED Talks. Publishers followed suit, often framing memoirs and biographies as the latest generation of that venerable Cold War genre, escape literature.6 Many NGOs took up the cause, framing the testimony of migrants in the language of liberal human rights—a vocabulary newly acquired and often fitting awkwardly in the speeches of those making tours of university campuses. The formation of the Committee on Human Rights in North Korea led to a flurry of English-language publications on human rights issues.7Academic research soon followed the arrival of North Koreans. Nothing in English rivals the quantity or quality of the long-term, consistent surveys and interviews conducted by various South Korean agencies and NGOs. Yet in English, too, refugee accounts emerged as a dominant mode for investigating not just the lives of North Koreans but also the nature of the regime. For the most part, these works have highlighted human rights issues or have conducted broad surveys framed by the traditional concerns of political science—namely, regime legitimacy and durability.8 Some work has rested exclusively on interviews while others have adopted interdisciplinary approaches, combining interviews with complementary written sources and often moving beyond a human rights or security framework.9 The result has been a mini-industry of interview-based studies, resulting in a boom that in both quantitative and qualitative terms produced much empirical data and analytical insights.These studies have not come without problems, however. Some English-language researchers have been blunt about the perils of interviews, questioning the representativeness of available interviewees who have skewed to the border regions, who, after all, were a self-selected group, and who for whatever personal reasons had left the country.10 In Korea, critiques have arisen concerning the negative side effects of the interview boom.11 Monetary payments to interview subjects who are often living precariously, critics have pointed out, have led some North Koreans to seek out interviews, leading to a cycle of repetition where different researchers often rely on the same subjects. Such repeat interviewees, together with word-of-mouth accounts of their experiences, have led some critics to question whether interviewees respond according to what they perceive to be the needs of researchers. Others have wondered whether stories appealing to human rights–style narratives become privileged in the telling, as interviewees “perform” the status of refugees to the organizations that support them. Such open discussions of methodology have been less thoroughly aired in English, where, as Jay Song points out in her contribution to this special issue, foreign researchers have tended to downplay the effect of their presence or, for many, the effect of the act of translation on the interviewing process.At stake here is how individual interviews are used to make larger claims about North Korean political culture. Lest we forget, for decades the Soviet field faced a similar dilemma. It, too, relied on studies based on information derived from exiles, much in the way we today turn to interviews. Today, scholars are well aware of how the negative assessments of defector testimony received an audience among journalists, intelligence services, and scholars who were primed by Cold War rivalries to see them as evidence testifying to the validity of their own preconceptions of totalitarianism—a type of circular confirmation bias that distorted understanding of the complexities of the Stalin and Khrushchev eras.12 With these challenges in mind, Jay Song’s article calls for more transparency in the interviewing field and for qualitative data derived from migrants to be combined with other types of information, in particular quantitative data now readily available through online databases. Similarly, Sonia Ryang argues for more rigorous and critical methodology while also asking for interviews “faithfully documenting how people live their lives in North Korea without veering into political judgement.”If refugees, exiles, and defectors are a long-standing source of information that have recently been revitalized and offer still greater potential, the same might be said of documents from ex-socialist states. Early studies depended on reports from North Korea’s allies, as did American intelligence services.13 Since the end of the Cold War, the opening of the archives of North Korea’s erstwhile allies has been a boon, especially for studies on political and international history. Reports by diplomats stationed in Pyongyang have been fruitfully used to extend our understanding of the origins of the Korean War, elite politics in the Korean Workers’ Party, and Kim Il Sung’s ascension to power, to name just a few.14 Many of these documents have been conveniently translated into English and Korean from languages as various as Albanian to Romanian in a collaborative project between the Woodrow Wilson Center and Kyungnam University. The former director of this project, James Person, points out in his contribution to the special issue that these translated items consist of only a small fraction of the original declassified documents and fall largely into the diplomatic, political, and military realms. This selection on what to translate reflects the dominant biases of the field and, not unsurprisingly, the security orientation of the agencies funding the translations. There is, in short, much work still to be done in these documents, and as Person shows, when combined with other sources, these archives have the potential to transform some of our foundational conceptions of even seemingly well-worn topics, such as the history of factionalism.Work in these multinational, multilanguage documents has special temptations and dilemmas, however. As many scholars inside and outside the Korean studies community are aware, some research emerging out of these archives has been subject to serious controversy.15 Among the lessons learned is that work in these archives will require scholars to meet demanding linguistic standards that abide no shortcuts and a willingness to collaborate openly and honestly with peers around the world. Wide-ranging discussions have followed, spilling over into such issues as the institutional hierarchies endemic to Korean studies, the hegemony of the English language and the United States on the international stage in a project like Korean studies, the (in)effectiveness of peer review, the stakes of academic publishers in downplaying scholarly transgressions, the ease of e-publishing to erase such transgressions, and the gatekeeping power of mainstream professional institutions such as this journal.In pointing out the possibilities and challenges of this underused assortment of documents, Person raises another dilemma. Until recently the flurry of activity in ex-Soviet sources has been conducted with an eye to extracting information to better examine known yet ill-understood events. Often the results have been more precise knowledge. Yet such searches for more data, however useful, nevertheless tend to use these documents transparently without examining the intellectual and cultural milieus in which the documents were produced. As historians have recently shown, the Soviet Union is best understood as a multinational empire, which ruled by privileging the center over peripheries and establishing hierarchies among the peoples that constituted it.16 Despite Soviet claims to pan-racial solidarity—claims often used in its Cold War rivalry with the United States over human rights and racism—these relations remained mired in chauvinism and structured by racial categories. This dynamic frequently contoured Moscow’s relationship with the Asian reaches of its empire. Other scholarship, especially in reference to East Germany, has shown how race consistently framed “comradely” relations within the socialist world.17 Given we know that deep affinities existed between the domestic, racialized politics of the United States and its diplomatic and cultural policies abroad (an issue that no good history of US-South Korean relations can ignore), it becomes imperative to ask the equivalent question for Soviet and East European politics: How did their racialized and cross-cultural assumptions extend to their treatment of North Korea?18 Or more specifically to our purpose, how did these biases shape the reports of Pyongyang-based diplomats that today are being used by researchers to reconstruct these histories? Race and privilege have all but been left out of consideration in these studies. As Person shows, diplomatic reports were full of dismissive and often smug remarks. Although he is unable to explore within the confines of this single article the extent of these biases or how these fit into broader cross-cultural relations, it is clear that a concern with the historical conditions for the production of these documents—in particular, the politics of racial representation—will be crucial for any future research based on them. As we all know by now, cross-cultural writing reflects not just on the subject but also on the writer—a dynamic to which self-proclaimed socialists, whatever their public claims to the contrary, were not exempt.Several of the articles in the special issue, however, are based on another source base that has been conventionally neglected and only recently taken up by a growing number of researchers. These are texts—newspapers, magazines, and monographs—printed in Pyongyang under the official of the Korean Workers’ and published by various of or These as well as publications of various make up the rich and varied reading culture of North Koreans in their In this special issue, authors these sources, from stories to quantitative data, magazines, and Many more could be to this sources are available to researchers not in archives but in that have been open to the In the United materials as part of a project to publications for intelligence are now at the of Many of its especially remain Moscow’s former now the as a type of for North Korean the including Korean of Soviet texts, and even Other in and the of also offer while the in former socialist in and are more have become available for of through the of in South Korea is more because of National Security Laws that to with North Korea, as Kim in the of her Seoul has more than many other some materials are available in such as the one at the National which more history. Many more sources in A history of how National Security Laws have shaped access to materials and how the Korean produced types of by scholars with special access to intelligence sources, especially in the early to be work like that done by Kim on the early funding in the of North Korean studies needs to be for even as this international field as sources, could into these to a rich array of in fact, than any single could in a These texts, however, have recently remained as more than propaganda without much research much about the dominant of the North Korea With a on and there was that such materials to offer who were more in about and Sonia Ryang called this the of North Korean The for the for the of and the of the of for or the of the name just a not much information relevant to the lines of publications such as the the or the might be into for the of examining the and of yet for the most part these remain This is now lines of become more these sources have shown their for these new the last scholars have more than any others these documents to an assortment of Ranging from the early work of which of changes in and institutions over to treatment of North Korean beyond of and this work has led the even in the of South Korea’s National Security In a of how much is in the by this Kim is a with from these largely Pyongyang-based sources that now numbers in the of as pointed out in her roundtable contribution to the the number of from the to today more than works on from to to of which is available to of the peninsula, a of scholars working in the United States such as Kim, and Kim an article in this special and in such as and have taken up this of a archive to shift from the elite politics and security on this scholarship, the articles in this special issue confirm a future more varied approaches to North Korea that arguably are no within a single that concerns with security and elite politics This is most rather than or see documents published in Pyongyang as the authors in this special issue them as a part of a more expansive North Korea archive. of them would no readily that these published with the of the are of propaganda and the of the regime. Yet their research on reading them and the as Kim it in her to the of Gregg Brazinsky on this point in his treatment of a different yet type of soldier source whose production has been by the official of a to its raises one of the of these sources, relationship between official and the of have tended to he points out, that that reflects the official narrative was written under and or only with official as truths or, as he inner or Brazinsky shows that a of such materials of their scholarly of the of in these texts, which like any other of documents their own idiosyncratic with they can to power of official in shaping the of the in ways more than the Cold War of while also showing the ways the as authors of this and used it to their own have similar in to archives in the In the study of it was these types of published sources that the early accounts of largely by and cultural historians decades and the opening of Soviet Yet do not have to so to such a of a still a time when documents published by the were as virtually no research for what up the was still called the of Korean history. the with which scholars the same documents that a generation is in As the articles in this special issue it is now the turn of sources published in Pyongyang to be taken for more than their propaganda is not to that these sources, like any historical do not have their own are after all by the are often sponsored by or are and by and written in a to have no space in such challenges such just one from just after the Korean with the of might be in the but it to get outside the categories in which the is might that what in their but remain as to the of those let alone their broader political is known about the politics behind these it can be that by the early individual publications the emerging of Kim Il for his others did reasons for this of these mean the early of the was not but by some Or could this be as to on the part of These can be but into the of Other issues by the regime as of new for or not of as to the of the in these As more research is done these sources, more will become clear about not just the possibilities but also the limits of their the those are more varied and than in work that published sources as that North Korean claims about the nature of or that the history and of to a single is also to point out that the articles in this special issue are with more than just sources, written or are also on their sources, both old and with novel questions, in the disciplines of each of the at the North Korea of a in Seoul will the with to for a North Korea Such have produced many yet they on a very that North Korea is best understood through its other a so that it a special methodology all of its Such an to research on an of North Korea’s own propaganda that it is any other in the in of a articles in this special issue work on a that the approaches of our disciplines are up to the of studying North Korea without to In other North Korea as a subject of scholarship no it or critical research, attention to the history of our conceptual the biases of the sources, and the historical of the twentieth-century peninsula, cannot to not always The between the and the particular, from an on North Korea’s to within which any be in this the study of North Korea to and approaches. True, there is no access to formerly of documents to the way it is in East Germany, where now the archive is can interviews be done inside the in the Chinese have been to better the possibilities of the 1950s Yet there is no time for to for North Korean archives to open or to be for

Mario Menéndez, US Immigration Policy and Political Refugees, 1948-1958. Before 1948 American immigration law never tackled the problem of political refugees counting them as simple immigrants. Beginning in 1948 and all through the Cold War period new legislations modifying the status of persons displaced as a result of the European conflict were enacted more as a response to the political situation between East and West than as a real well founded refugee policy. This article analyses and places into historical perspective the different legislations passed between 1948 and 1958: the Displaced Persons Act, the Refugee Relief Act, The Refugee-Escapee Act and the Hungarian Refugee Act as reflections of American foreign policy that slowly modified the entrance and status of refugees in the United States.

Résumé Cet article propose quelques réflexions sur la notion de protection des personnes déplacées à l'intérieur de leur pays dans une situation de conflit armé. Après avoir rappelé le contexte qui a amené la communauté internationale à s'intéresser aux personnes déplacées, l'auteur porte son attention sur le concept de protection et les modes d'action auxquels peuvent se référer les organisations humanitaires, dont le CICR, dans leur activité de protection. Analysant les enjeux liés à cette problématique, en particulier le lien entre la consolidation de la notion de personnes déplacées et la mise en péril du statut de réfugié, elle relève le rôle assigné aux organisations humanitaires par les États. Toutefois, ce n'est pas «l'humanitaire» qui pourra prévenir les déplacements massifs de population ou résoudre les problèmes qu'ils posent, mais bien «le politique»: les États doivent s'employer avec une détermination accrue à créer un ordre politique juste qui contribue à prévenir le phénomène des personnes déplacées dans leur propre pays.

This monograph examines the origin and transformation of a ”pro-KMT” enclave in Hong Kong called Rennie's Mill or Tiu Keng Leng from the 1950s to the 1970s. The narrative is constructed from a large collection of sources including archives of the British Colonial Administration in Hong Kong, publications of Free China Relief Association, magazines published by the Third Force in Hong Kong, and an oral history anthology complied by Academia Historica. There has hitherto been little research on the history of the Rennie's Mill community. Existing studies focus on Cold War international relations, and demonstrate that ”humanitarian” assistance rendered by the KMT to the residents of Rennie's Mill was mediated by anti-communist agenda, and by Taiwan's own security concerns. This study takes an alternative approach by providing an intimate profile of the origin and evolution of Rennie's Mill from a refugee camp in the 1950s to a ”cultural diaspora” of the KMT in Taiwan during the 1970s. The interpretation will add depth and nuance to the current research and debate on diaspora in international migration studies by offering a unique case study. In sum, this monograph constitutes part of a greater effort to re-consider the 1949 exodus from a cross-border/comparative perspective.

US Refugee Policy: Latin America and Cold War Interests

The purpose of this note is to present a schematic narrative and analysis of the development of the international response to refugees by states during the Cold War. The analysis focuses on the period from the statute creating the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Convention on the Status of Refugees, both in 1951, through the end of the Cold War. The note supplements the analysis contained in an earlier theoretical article published in this journal in 1996 entitled “How Nation-States Create and Respond to Refugee Flows” (Keely, 1996). The views differ sharply from conventional wisdom but provide a better understanding of and an explanation for some contemporary difficulties regarding refugee and asylum policy, especially in the industrial countries, but also more generally globally.

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Reviewed by: New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims ed. by Kazim Ali Lopamudra Basu New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims Ed. Kazim Ali Pasadena, California. Red Hen. 2021. 368 pages. IN HIS INTRODUCTION to New Moons, a collection of poetry, fiction, and lyrical memoirs by Muslims in North America, Kazim Ali confesses the difficulty of embarking on an anthology that seeks to represent collective Muslim identity. He declares "it is hard to say what a 'Muslim' is," because there is such an enormous diversity of Muslim religious and cultural practices, ranging not only in fidelity to religious observances but also variations stemming from geographic locations, cultural and linguistic formations, as well as branches within the religion. Ali shares his own heritage as Shia Muslim, a sect that traces its origins from the Prophet's daughter Fatima, his son-in-law, and the imams rather than the more majoritarian Sunni sect that follows the caliphs. For Ali, the heterogeneity of Islam is not a modern phenomenon but something that has co-existed with Islam's very inception. The writings showcased in the anthology bear testimony to this vitality and variety of Muslim life. Although writers come from distinctive geographic areas, they share the experiences of immigration to North America, the loss of their homeland, and feelings of continuing cultural dislocation in their new homeland. Samina Hadi-Tabassum's short story "Maqbool" and Naazish Yar Khan's "Lost in Translation between Delhi and Chicago" represent South Asian Muslim families seeking to belong not only in their new neighborhoods in North America but also struggling to establish intimacy among spouses who have grown up in different milieus. Marital conflict, exacerbated by the pressures of immigration, is at the heart of several narratives, including Nour Naas's "Mother(land)" and Leila Christine Nadir's "Cold War." While many of the works in the anthology highlight tensions arising from the collision of old traditions with the new landscape of North America, many authors recapture earlier mid-twentieth-century movements of partition, violence, and ensuing statelessness. Palestine is a recurrent traumatic wound in the Arab world, and it finds expression in Mandy Fessenden Brauer's essay "Memories of Palestine During the First Intifada" as well as Noor Hindi's "On Language and Mourning." The devastation of the Indian Partition and the Muslim refugees who poured into the newly formed state of Pakistan is a generational trauma that echoes in Faisal Mohyuddin's poems "Ghazal for the Diaspora" and "Song of Myself as a Tomorrow" and in Sham-E-Ali Nayeem's "Partition Story." While the end of British colonial rule in the Middle East and India created cataclysmic impacts on the lives and dislocations of Muslim subjects, a more recent catastrophe that undergirds this volume is 9/11 and its continuing effects on North American Muslim identity. Hilal Isler's "Never Forget," Haroon Moghul's "Quebec Was the Semi-Colon," and Tanzila Ahmed's "Muslimah Fight Club" emphasize the profound shift in Muslim life and identity after the towers fell and the new surveillance mechanisms cast all Muslims as potential terrorists. This regime of surveillance is exacerbated in the Trump era with the Muslim ban prompting protests as depicted in Serena W. Lin's "People Here Love You." Islamophobia and systemic racialization of religion find a parallel in the transformation of secular India into an authoritarian Hindu state with the erosion of protections for minorities. This is poignantly evoked in Zara Chowdhary's "Slow Violence," in the portrayal of the destruction of her father's career in a rapidly Hindu fundamentalist regime of Gujarat. In the face of these geopolitical realities of Islamophobia, the War on Terror in North America, and a resurgent Hindu nationalism in India, this volume also documents the campaigns of ordinary Muslims in North America to claim more personal rights, whether it is the expression of their sexualities in Lamya H's "How to De-queer Your Apartment" or Uzma Aslam Khan's memoir "Stealth Christian, Stealth Muslim," which explores young women's friendships across religious barriers in a Pakistan rapidly losing its secular ethos. The act of drinking vodka in a cathedral becomes a protest against the...