Immigration Law and Improvised Policy in the Making of International Adoption, 1948–1961

In 1953, Congress passed a bill oft en seen as inconsequential in immigration history, sandwiched between the 1952 McCarren-Walter Act and the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act. The Refugee Relief Act (RRA) offered four thousand nonquota visas for overseas orphans regardless of origin country, setting it apart from the 1948 Displaced Person’s Act intended primarily for European orphans. This legislation provokes a question central to the institution of international adoption: Why did orphans become classified as de facto refugees? ¹

The changes in immigration, refugee, and proxy adoption legislation from 1948 to 1961 shed important light on the transformation of international adoption policy from an informal, emergency provision to a permanent social policy. As intercountry adoptions increased steadily over the postwar period, the act of family creation became the subject of many public debates among legislators, social workers, and religious humanitarians—especially about countries embroiled in Cold War military struggles, such as Korea. Mixed-race Korean adoptees, children of Korean mothers, and white or black U.S. GIs, became salient visual symbols of America’s growing political interest in Asia, concerns over refugee and immigration policy, and attempts to minimize racial difference. Rift s within the public/private welfare state over issues of jurisdiction further complicated these tensions. ²

This article examines how the Holt Adoption Program competed with professional organizations to control and reform refugee policy in response to American families’ increasing interest in adopting both GI babies and indigenous orphans from Korea. Harry and Bertha Holt, an evangelical couple from rural Oregon, drew national attention to intercountry adoption in 1955 by adopting eight Korean GI orphans through a special act of Congress. In the following year, hundreds of families bombarded the Holts with requests to help them adopt GI orphans as well, leading the couple to open an adoption agency in 1956. The key to their success was the 1953 Refugee Relief Act. Using a provision of this act permitting Americans to adopt orphans by proxy—adoptions completed abroad by a third party without the parents’ presence—the Holts rapidly processed adoptions and sent planeloads of children to U.S. families. They bypassed the long-established social welfare procedures that ensured domestic orphans’ protection and used the refugee measures to avoid racially restrictive immigration quotas. Although the proxy process was legal, social-work organizations believed that the Holts’ interpretation of the law endangered children, offering them limited recourse from risky placements.

This article argues that from 1948 to 1961 immigration law became the chief vehicle for an improvised international adoption policy because conflicting state laws and a lack of federal or international adoption legislation created a policy vacuum. Policy vacuums can emerge when legislation fails to provide adequate coverage, when legislators do not provide enough official oversight, or when agencies unevenly implement laws or regulations. Because policy vacuums are products of temporary and unstable situations, in adoption law they allowed for the creation of black markets, where babies were sold like commodities, or even “gray” markets, where well-meaning individuals oft en took the place of professional social welfare workers. ³ The Holts acted as informal policymakers who took advantage of this policy vacuum in adoption law to fashion their own child placement standards that served their adoption philosophies and religious worldview.

In many respects, this policy vacuum existed because legislators questioned what, if any, federal intervention was needed. Indeed, the Senate black-market adoption hearings throughout the 1950s revealed lawmakers’ reluctance to intervene in adoptions across state and national borders since states had jurisdiction over child welfare policy. ⁴ Federal agencies, such as the U.S. Children’s Bureau (USCB), historically served state-run Departments of Public Welfare. While the USCB occasionally acted as a liaison between states and the federal government for international adoptions from Canada and Europe, this was not its primary role. Mass international adoptions, like the Holts’ “babylifts,” complicated this fragile system because they overwhelmed existing structures, requiring significant legislation and federal oversight from the Senate Judiciary committee, the State Department, and the INS. Through the visa process, the federal...