The Otto Frank File

The newly discovered documents in the YIVO archive of New York City's Center for Jewish History, describing Otto Frank's efforts to win admission to America, offer a window into an amazing story. They tell us what might have been — had Anne Frank's father succeeded in gaining entry to America, the world might have known his daughter not as a victim or a Holocaust diarist but as a great New York writer. But they also remind us of the potential America has today to welcome immigrants.

The parallels are obvious. Then, as now, the world was at war, and legitimate national security concerns were raised about how to distinguish immigrants from enemy infiltrators. Then, as now, America was coming off a period of relatively high levels of immigration. Foreign languages such as Yiddish and Italian were heard in the streets of New York as commonly as we now hear Spanish and Russian. Otto Frank had powerful American allies in both an heir to the Macy's department store fortune, Nathan Straus Jr., and a Worcester, Mass., industrialist, Jacob Hiatt, whose son-in-law, Robert Kraft, is now the owner of the New England Patriots. Even their help was not enough to win the Frank family passage to America from Amsterdam in the face of restrictive immigration laws.

We've never been among those who felt it was in any way logical to blame the Holocaust on American immigration laws. America did its part in war to defeat the Nazis, on whom the blame for the death of 6 million Jews in Europe solely rests. Even so, it is hard not to think of how different things would have been for the Frank family and for so many other families had America during World War II lived up to the promise of its Pilgrim roots as a haven for those fleeing religious persecution.

As for what this all means for today's policy feuds, the striking thing is how vast the gap is between the numbers seeking entry into America and the numbers that our immigration laws permit to enter. In one program, the Diversity Visa lottery, more than 5.5 million persons applied for 50,000 visas to enter America. Demand for the visa is so high that the State Department warns that the traffic might slow down its Web site as the deadline approaches. To take another category, refugee visas, the State Department estimates that the worldwide refugee population is 9.2 million. But the annual ceiling on the number of refugee visas for entrance into America stands at between 50,000 and 70,000.

This reluctance to allow immigrants into America legally comes in a context in which America is competing economically against nations that can marshal vastly greater populations. The economic rise of India and China is not unrelated to the fact that India has a population of 1.1 billion and China has a population of 1.3 billion, both in geographic areas no greater than that on which America harbors a scant 300 million residents. It also comes in a context in which many of those seeking to make lives in America are not strictly economic opportunity seekers — not that there is anything but virtue in that — but immigrants fleeing countries such as Mexico, where the rule of law is weak.

As the newly Democratic Congress puts prescription drug prices and minimum-wage hikes ahead of legislation that would liberalize immigration laws, the question to ask leaders in Congress is what will they say for themselves generations from now when in some archive is discovered the tale of the Otto Frank of today, a would-be immigrant who wanted to come be a productive American citizen with his writer-daughter, yet was turned away by a nation too insecure to welcome the talent teeming to its shores.