Americans at the Gate by Carl J. Bon Tempo

Author:Carl J. Bon Tempo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

HUMAN RIGHTS AND REFUGEES: SOVIET JEWS AND CHILEANS

The two most prominent refugee crises of the early 1970s—Jews fleeing the Soviet Union and Chileans hoping to escape the Pinochet government—illustrate the ascendancy of human rights concerns in refugee affairs. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Kremlin toughened its long-standing policies restricting the rights of Jews to emigrate. The Soviet government denied departure to so many Jews—and so many others were discriminated against by other Soviet citizens just for wanting to leave—that they earned their own moniker, the refuseniks. American Jews—well organized in a variety of interest groups, growing in political power, and increasingly concerned about maintaining Jewish identity—deemed such discrimination unacceptable and worked tirelessly to expose it and push for change. Moreover, because Jews were a key part of the Democratic party’s electoral coalition, they instantly gained the attention of certain politicians and policymakers. Though their protests had little political impact in the late 1960s, by the early 1970s, a growing number of politicians from across the ideological and partisan spectrum picked up the cause. Jewish groups and their political allies urged the Nixon administration to forcefully pressure the Soviets to ease Jewish emigration and to facilitate entry of the refuseniks to the United States. Democratic representative Ed Koch stated in 1971 that the United States “should extend the same kind of humanitarian compassion and opportunity to these Jews” as it did for Hungarians and Cubans in previous decades, revealing that the Jewish emigration issue was conceived as a refugee problem. The Nixon administration instead utilized quiet diplomacy to encourage the Soviet Union to relax its emigration stance, a tactic that may have contributed to the Soviet decision in 1972 to allow 35,000 Jews to depart. But the Administration’s efforts were muted; it clearly wanted to avoid risking its carefully crafted détente with the Soviets by publicly getting behind Jewish emigration.11

Discreet diplomacy became more difficult to pursue in late 1972 after the Soviets imposed further restrictions on Jewish emigration. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a conservative Democrat from Washington with an eye on a 1976 presidential run, responded by attempting to link Soviet emigration policies to pending legislation that formally embodied the trade agreements reached at the May 1972 American-Soviet summit. Specifically, Jackson crafted an amendment that tied Soviet access to American trade credits to the liberalization of the Soviet Union’s emigration policies. If Jackson had his way, neither the Soviets nor Nixon would get their trade agreement unless the Kremlin allowed Jews to emigrate. Jackson’s gambit quickly picked up major congressional support—and equal amounts of disdain from the Nixon administration. In 1973 the trade bill, complete with Jackson’s amendment, passed the House by overwhelming numbers, forcing both the Soviets and the Nixon White House to accommodate the senator. In 1974 Jackson, the Nixon (and then Ford) administrations, and the Soviet government engaged in complex negotiations that resulted in the Soviet Union’s offering a general endorsement of its citizens’ right to emigrate. Jackson boisterously declared victory and announced that sixty thousand Jews

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