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Chapter 4 “Reason of Elemental Humanity”: The Urgency of Uniting Families in the Postwar Era on the Road to Immigration Reform On October 11, 1945, nearly one thousand British women from all parts of Great Britain lined up outside Caxton Hall in London, many with babies in their arms, for a meeting organized by the Married Women’s Association . The women had earlier planned to march with some ten thousand participants before the police canceled the scheduled event; their pent-up frustrations only grew over the following days. Finally, on that crisp fall day, the aggrieved women protested the continued delay in their efforts to unite with their U.S. military servicemen husbands who had been returned home. The women eventually made their way to the U.S. embassy, shouting, “We want our husbands!” Standing before the frustrated women, Comm. Herbert Agar, special assistant to John Winant, the U.S. ambassador, tried to calm the women and responded, “A lot is being done.” Commander Agar assured them that the U.S. government had not forgotten them—a message he extended to the British Parliament, which was also clamoring for action on the women’s behalf.1 Indeed, something was being done. The stories of wives and babies left behind captured the public’s imagination and the attention of President Harry Truman’s administration and congressional leaders. As newspapers and popular magazines reported the growing anger and desperation among the wives (and to a lesser extent the husbands) left behind or published stories of stowaways sneaking aboard ships to join their betrothed stateside, members of Congress and President Truman received both personal pleas and official requests from Great Britain for action. There were an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 spouses of American armed forces personnel , with 54,000 from Great Britain alone.2 Specifically, the protesting British wives wanted ship transport to the United States. More generally, foreign wives and husbands wanted assistance in immigrating to the United States. The government had to respond to their demands. Although spouses of American military members lamented the long “REASON OF ELEMENTAL HUMANITY” 75 wait in joining their spouses, many of them nevertheless had avenues for family reunification. The 1924 National Origins Act had curtailed immigration from southern and eastern Europe by instituting a quota policy based on national origins and had made Asians an excludable class by declaring racial ineligibility for citizenship a cause for exclusion (although Congress made exceptions to this during and immediately after the war by passing legislation exempting Chinese, Filipino, and Indian immigrants ).3 However, as the previous chapter showed, even in this draconian , exclusionary policy, an important family unity provision was that the spouses of U.S. citizens did not count against the national origins quotas . Of course, permanent resident immigrants did not have this much latitude. Furthermore, citizens could not bring over spouses who were racially ineligible for citizenship, which included most Asians. Thus, for example, native-born Japanese American citizen husbands could not sponsor their Japanese wives for entry.4 Despite the formal avenues available for reunification for eligible families, given the patchwork nature of the family unity provisions, the applicable quota limits, and the slow speed at which reunifications were granted, Americans who had served in the military during World War II and their spouses grew frustrated and made demands for change. Beginning with a response to their cries, family reunification —as a feature of the official U.S. policy, as a policy objective for immigration reformers, and as the method of entry for thousands of immigrants —became crucial to how U.S. immigration evolved over the period following World War II on the road to reform. Both supporters and opponents of the national origins system laid claims to the meaning of family and family reunification in defending American interests and the nation’s very identity in the aftermath of World War II. Because family as a category of immigration already existed, lawmakers could make piecemeal changes to immigration policy by altering the groups eligible. To this extent, policy legacy shaped some of the policy choices available.5 Nevertheless, for initial reform efforts, policymakers had to identify both the family in a general sense and the affected groups more particularly as deserving of the policy change and attention. Whereas in the exclusion era family reunification was implemented without much expressed thought or consideration of it as a policy—highlighting more the unstated gender and class biases of the era and of the leading political...

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