To quote an old post of mine:
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I know that W. D. Rubinstein's
The Myth of Rescue is a controversial book, but Rubinstein may have a point in arguing that until the last moment many German Jews were just not that anxious to come to the US--which if true suggests that adjustment in quotas might have had less of an effect than is widely assumed:
"Critics of America's immigration policies during this period have often focused upon the fact that Germany's quota was underfilled until 1939. In 1937, for instance, only 11,520 persons migrated to the United States from Germany, only 42 per cent of the possible total of 25,957 set by the 1924 quota. Critics of American policy have often attributed this to the 'paper walls' erected by America's consular bureaucracy in Germany, walls which were removed only at the last possible moment, when a vast tide of desperate refugees resulted, at last, in some humanitarianism being introduced into America's harsh immigration administration. There is, of course, an element of truth in this, and many individual cases of bureaucratic pettifoggery and narrow-mindedness, strongly suggestive of anti-semitism, can doubtless be found. Yet this begs perhaps the central question, a question which all critics of the refugee policies of the democracies during these years should certainly address and answer: how many German Jews had actually applied, at any particular point during the years of Nazi rule, to enter the United States (or any other country), but were denied entry through bureaucratic harshness or anti-semitism? No definitive data is available to answer this question, but such information as does exist strongly suggests that the answer is that, until
Kristallnacht, many fewer German Jews actually wished to enter the United States than one would assume.
"On 17 November 1938 — that is, just after
Kristallnacht — Frances Perkins, the American Secretary of Labor, stated that the German—Austrian immigrant quota was then filled 'for at least fourteen months'. In other words, at this time perhaps only 32,000 Germans and Austrians (Jews and non-Jews) had actually applied to migrate to the United States. At the time perhaps 250,000 Jews remained in Germany and 125,000 in Austria. During the early period of Nazi rule, the number of German Jews who applied to migrate was, almost certainly, much smaller still, and the fact that the quota figure was not met until amazingly late must be attributed in large part to the unwillingness of Germany's Jews to apply to migrate to the United States until the very last moment...'
https://books.google.com/books?id=6IaEAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA225