US Cold War Immigration Policy, Human Rights, and the Soviet Jewry Movement: Reflections on William Korey’s “The Right to Leave for Soviet Jews – Legal and Moral Aspects.”

Abstract

Is immigration – the right to leave one’s place of birth and find refuge in another nation – a basic human right? Indeed, the United States government has told thousands of Central Americans since 2017 that it will refuse to recognize their right to claim asylum at the United States border despite this being, considered by international law a basic human right. The US government under Donald Trump also embraced a policy of family separation in which children were ripped from their parents, some never to be returned. As the United States rejects its commitment to protecting human rights and challenges the broader international system of asylum, it is interesting to reflect back on the work William Korey penned fifty years ago for this journal. Korey sought through his activism and writing to make the plight of Soviet Jewry central to the Cold War. By establishing in “The Right to Leave for Soviet Jews – Legal and Moral Aspects” that “Soviet Jewry’s right to emigration was a basic human right,” he enlisted the United States in powerful ways to fight the Jewish community’s war against the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Jews. Indeed, reading this article fifty years after it was penned demonstrates not only the many inconsistencies in United States policy, which had long denied other groups fleeing persecution and Communism entry into the United States. It shows how the work and writings of American Jewish activists like Korey through publications like this, Korey helped make the fight to “free Soviet Jewry” central to the United States arsenal in the Cold War by linking human rights and open immigration as key weapons that could defeat the Soviet Union. In general, the embrace of human rights in US immigration policy was never a US imperative; indeed, Korey’s other life project – getting the United States government to sign the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights – suggests one should question the United States broader commitment to human rights. Rereading this piece lays bare not only Korey’s astute insight about how to coopt American power for Jewish interests. He appreciated that “US Immigration policy has always intersected with more global concerns about the status, extension, and maintenance of the United States power in the world,” to use the words of historian Paul Kramer. The success in Korey’s emphatic call “ to establish Soviet Jewry’s right to emigration as a basic human right, which the United States should fight for in the international arena,” illustrates how he understood that during the Cold War “immigration policy was an instrument of United States’ global power.” Indeed, from the vantage point of 2020, we see clearly that basic