Sovereign Mercy: The Legalization of the White Russian Refugees and the Politics of Immigration Relief

Abstract At the height of the Great Depression, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) legalized nearly two thousand undocumented Russian immigrants under the Act of June 8, 1934. Based on a random sample of their two thousand case files, “Sovereign Mercy: The Legalization of the White Russian Refugees and the Politics of Immigration Relief” narrates a forgotten moment in the history of undocumented immigration, immigration legalization, and refugee law and policy in the United States. The article specifically argues that even though these Russians were defined as refugees under international law and perceived as such by the public, their American defenders deliberately recast them as undocumented immigrants to halt their deportations to the Soviet Union and give them a pathway to citizenship. This history of the Russian refugees illuminates the conditions under which various forms of immigration relief, such as legalization and the grant of refugee status, emerged in American immigration law. As such, it fills a major gap in the scholarly literature that, to date, has provided few accounts of the history of immigration relief.