The Foreign Policy Legacy Of Emanuel Celler

To remember Emanuel Celler only as the congressman behind landmark immigration reform is to miss the wider program he pursued for much of his career. The Jewish congressman was a forceful proponent of foreign intervention, international institutions, refugee admissions, and a more deeply entrenched American commitment to the State of Israel. Those commitments stood behind the scene on October 3, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act in a ceremony staged deliberately at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. The setting was a piece of political theater: Johnson’s administration believed the location announced the law’s symbolic meaning before a word was read aloud.

That achievement placed Celler among the most consequential lawmakers of the 20th century. The law abolished the national origins quota system that had governed American immigration since the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924—a regime that allocated visas based on the ethnic composition of the U.S. population as counted in the 1890 census, effectively reserving roughly 70 percent of all slots for immigrants from Britain, Ireland, and Germany and sharply restricting entry from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In its place, Hart-Celler erected a preference hierarchy that dedicated 75 percent of visas to family reunification, 20 percent to employment skills, and 5 percent to refugees. Celler and other supporters presented it primarily as a civil rights measure—an answer to discrimination encoded in the quota regime rather than a fundamental reordering of who would come to America. Johnson himself was so dismissive of the law’s demographic implications that he called it “not a revolutionary bill” at the signing—a common platitude among those favoring the bill.

He was wrong. The family reunification provisions created precisely the chain migration dynamic that immigration researcher Mae Ngai identified as the law’s defining and least predicted consequence: each admitted immigrant could sponsor relatives, who could sponsor their own, compounding across decades into a transformation of American demographic life that no supporter of the bill had publicly forecast.

The law did not stand apart from Celler’s foreign policy beliefs. It reflected a conviction he had articulated at the start of his career, when he ran for Congress in 1922 on a platform stressing “the evils of Prohibition and the virtues of the League of Nations.” He ended up winning the 10th Congressional District of Brooklyn by 3,000 votes in a seat his party had never previously held. At a time when many Americans wanted to distance themselves from European conflicts after World War I, Celler advocated for the United States to take a more internalist posture on the world stage.

That instinct led him to oppose isolationism as the National Socialists consolidated power in Germany. During the 1930s, Celler pushed for an American boycott of the Berlin Olympics and called for economic measures to make German goods harder to sell in the United States. His objections centered on the Nazi government’s campaign to eliminate Jewish influence from German public life—a campaign defined by the exclusion of Jewish athletes from Germany’s Olympic team and Joseph Goebbels’s unabashed direction of the anti-Jewish propaganda effort. In a cable to International Olympic Committee member General Charles Sherrill, Celler stated: “Any government that abets Jewish persecutions and which threatens daily through Dr. Goebbels to intensify anti-Jewish atrocities cannot be trusted to keep its promise not to discriminate against Jewish athletes.” His argument did not rest on sports alone. He wanted economic and diplomatic isolation of a government conducting what he regarded as a systematic assault on one of the world’s most influential Jewish communities.

Celler carried that anti-isolationist conviction into World War II, repeatedly condemning Washington’s restrictive immigration policies that made it nearly impossible for Jewish refugees to leave war-torn Europe. His most direct target was the State Department, specifically Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who blocked resettlement measures. Speaking at the New York County Council of the Jewish War Veterans on April 5, 1943, Celler charged: “The State Department must revise its modus operandi with reference to passing upon admission of refugees. The present method is both cold and cruel. It lacks color and humanity. Even though reputable agencies endorse an applicant, it still carries no weight. I intend to fight this until I break it wide open.” When Long testified before Congress in December 1943, Celler leaked certain sections of the testimony to reporters and denounced Long’s professed sympathy as “crocodile tears,” warning: “If men of the temperament and philosophy of Long continue in control of immigration admission, we might as well take down that plaque from the Statue of Liberty.”

He rejected the argument that Allied victory should take precedence over immediate rescue. “Victory, the spokesmen say, is the only solution. … After victory, the disembodied spirits will not present so difficult a problem; the dead no longer need food, drink and asylum,” Celler said in a speech. Celler’s sustained pressure, in addition to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s internal exposure of State Department obstruction, contributed to President Roosevelt’s creation of the War Refugee Board in January 1944.

His Zionism reflected the same outlook. Celler became a Zionist after reading Theodor Herzl during World War I and spent the following decades pressing that conviction into policy. He lobbied President Truman persistently to recognize the new Jewish state, including a 1946 letter complaining about U.S. absence from London conferences on Palestine’s future. He argued that “Palestine is not ‘an extraneous issue'” but an urgent international humanitarian question, and wore down Truman’s resistance despite warnings from military advisers that recognition would antagonize Arab oil-exporting nations.

When Truman recognized Israel on May 14, 1948, Celler did not pause to celebrate. He immediately demanded the U.S. go further, calling for the arms embargo to be lifted: “President Truman is entitled to fulsome praise for his example of statesmanship in recognizing the State of Israel. It is now essential for the United States to go the full way. … The ridiculous arms embargo should now be lifted for the benefit of the State of Israel.” In 1958 he went further still, urging the United States to conclude a defense pact with Israel and admit Israel to NATO: “The omission of Israel from NATO is a serious gap in the free world’s peace insurance,” he declared, arguing that such an alliance “would release much of the understandable tension in Israel, would build the Middle East’s balance of power and would deter any act of aggression by the Arabs.”

Celler also viewed immigration as a foreign policy instrument. He argued that the quota system damaged America’s global standing by implying that people from Eastern Europe and Asia were less desirable than those from Northern and Western Europe. That concern became central to the Hart-Celler Act. Repealing nationality-based preferences was not merely a domestic civil rights measure. It was a statement about what the United States wished to represent during the Cold War. Namely, a capitalist beacon that would pull ambitious migrants from the Global South away from communist influence and integrate them into America’s liberal capitalist order.

Celler was also associated with Franz Boas. For example:

Boas was greatly motivated by the immigration issue as it developed early in the century. Carl Degler (1991, 74) notes that Boas’s professional correspondence “reveals that an important motive behind his famous head-measuring project in 1910 was his strong personal interest in keeping the United States diverse in population.” The study, whose conclusions were placed into the Congressional Record by Representative Emanuel Celler during the debate on immigration restriction (Cong. Rec., April 8, 1924, 5915–5916), concluded that the environmental differences consequent to immigration caused differences in head shape. (At the time, head shape as determined by the cephalic index was the main measurement used by scientists involved in racial differences research.) See notes on Celler’s correspondence with Boas in Hungary data. The two men thus cooperated on immigration policy. Here Boas tells Celler “I wish very much that an amendment to allow Hindues to come here could go through,” arguing that higher caste Indians are basically European. “The difficulty at present lies with the definition of what is a white person and Caucasian race.” (Letter from Celler to Boas, May 26, 2927).

More on Celler, from Chapter 8 of The Culture of Critique:

In 1945 Representative Emanuel Celler introduced a bill ending Chinese exclusion by establishing token quotas for Chinese, and in 1948 the AJCommittee condemned racial quotas on Asians (Divine 1957, 155). In contrast, Jewish groups showed indifference or even hostility toward immigration of non-Jews from Europe (including Southern Europe) in the post-World War II era (Neuringer 1971, 356, 367–369, 383). Thus Jewish spokespersons did not testify at all during the first set of hearings on emergency legislation to allow immigration of a limited number of German, Italian, Greek, and Dutch immigrants, escapees from communism, and a small number of Poles, Asians, and Arabs. When Jewish spokespersons eventually testified (partly because a few of the escapees from communism were Jews), they took the opportunity to once again focus on their condemnation of the national origins provisions of the 1924 law. …

As noted above, Rep. Emanuel Celler was involved in the publication of the report Whom We Shall Welcome that viewed changing the ethnic balance of the U.S. as a desirable goal. Cofnas (2021) argues against this by noting that “Even the authors of the legislation were surprised by some of its immediate consequences. According to Graham: ‘Emanuel Celler himself, disturbed by the steep decline of European immigration, introduced a bill to allow higher immigration from Ireland, Britain, and the Scandinavian countries, which he said had suffered from ‘unintentional discrimination’ as a result of his own law.’” [1]

However, given the substance of the PCIN report and Celler’s involvement in its publication, it’s difficult to believe that Celler did not advocate changing the ethnic balance of the U.S. The fact that Celler wanted to increase immigration from parts of Europe is certainly not incompatible with this. It would be far more convincing if Celler had advocated a law explicitly reaffirming the ethnic status quo, as the 1924 and 1952 laws had done, but he vigorously opposed the ethnic status quo. Getting rid of the national origins formulas was a necessary condition for changing the ethnic status quo, as Celler was well aware. All that remained was increasing the absolute numbers of immigrants, as the PCIN advocated, and that is what ultimately happened.

[1] Graham, Collision Course, 94–95.

Viewed as a whole, Celler’s record offers an early version of the Invade the World, Invite the World, Support Israel Unconditionally consensus that Washington still vigorously promotes. He pressed the United States toward deeper involvement in foreign crises while helping construct the legal framework for mass migration, two commitments that remain embedded in the governing assumptions of both major parties.

José Niño is a freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can contact him via Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to his “Substack” newsletter by visiting “José Niño Unfiltered” on Substack.com.