"No One Wants Them!"

Here is a question for Jeopardy fans.

Most people would find that a difficult question. Still, a quick thinking contestant might guess, “What is Évian?

Why? Évian (Évian-les-Bains, France) was the French Alpine resort hosting the recent G-7 meeting of major countries. So, Évian might be a good guess. Or the contestant might remember that Evian bottled water is marketed as spring water​​ from the French Alps, a natural location for a French Alpine resort.

But what possible connection could Évian have with a recent Supreme Court decision on immigration?

I’m guessing Ken Jennings or James Holzhauer—top Jeopardy contestants—would know. Évian, France was the location of the Evian Conference on Jewish Refugees held during July 1938. There, thirty-two countries spent ten days at a luxury hotel discussing immigration quotas for Jews desperate to flee Nazi Germany.

The discussions were a master class in eloquent evasion.

Golda Meir, the future Israeli prime minister, attended the conference as a guest where she was permitted to observe the proceedings, but not to speak. Meir later wrote that it was a heartbreaking experience to sit in the magnificent hall listening to delegate after delegate explain how their country would like to accept Jewish refugees but why, for various reasons, they could not.

After ten days of discussion, only one country agreed to accept even a small number of Jewish refugees, the Dominican Republic. All the other nations—including the United States, France, and United Kingdom with a combined population of 223 million—refused to accept even a token number of refugees.

Nazi Germany gloated. On July 13, 1938, the Nazi party paper, Völkischer Beobachter, ran a triumphal headline: "No one wants them!" In a Reichstag speech, Adolf Hitler sarcastically noted that the world’s leading nations expressed great sympathy for the Jews but refused to allow them into their own countries.

A year later on May 13, 1939, the MS St. Louis German ocean liner sailed from Hamburg carrying 937 Jewish passengers fleeing Nazi persecution. Cuba, the United States, and Canada refused to let the desperate Jews disembark. The ship was forced to return to Europe where an estimated 254 passengers ultimately died in the Holocaust.

The Nazi regime bears responsibility for the Holocaust, which murdered six million Jews and millions of so-called Untermenschen (sub-humans) during the Second World War. Yet in the years preceding the war, the world’s leading nations refused to open their doors to desperate Jews seeking refuge—many of whom would later die in Nazi gas chambers.

The delegates at the 1938 Evian Conference could have saved many Jewish lives, but failed to do so through their inaction. A decision last week by the U.S. Supreme Court may have a similar effect, not by the Court's inaction, but by its decision to overturn the previous rulings of four federal courts.

In 2010, a massive earthquake struck Haiti killing over 220,000 Haitians and leaving more than 1.5 million homeless. Thousands of Haitians were permitted to enter the United States under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a government program that allows refugees from countries experiencing environmental disaster, armed conflict or other life-threatening conditions to legally live and work temporarily in the United States.

Since the 2010 earthquake, 350,000 Haitian refugees have entered the United States under the TPS designation. The Trump administration, though, rightly points out that TPS is a temporary program. Since taking office, the Trump administration has attempted to deport the Haitians back to their home country, but were blocked by federal courts. The courts ruled that the Department of Homeland Security was unlawfully discriminating against Haitian immigrants on the basis of race.

On June 26, however, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court rulings and ruled that the Trump Administration can cancel the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Haiti (and Syria) forcing the refugees to return to their native countries.

But according to the United Nations and other reliable sources, the conditions in Haiti today are worse than they were in 2010. Wracked by hurricanes, earthquakes, and crime, Haiti is in a state of collapse. On October 29, 2025, Hurricane Melissa killed forty-three people and damaged or flooded nearly 12,000 houses. Armed gangs control an estimated 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, the national capital. Over 16,000 people have been killed since January 2022 and 1.5 million displaced from their homes. Half of the nation’s 11.9 million people face acute food shortages with 600,000 experiencing famine.

The U.S. State Department, warning Americans not to travel to Haiti, has assigned Haiti a Level 4 Travel Advisory, its highest warning, “due to the risk of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care.” Commercial air travel to the country has been cancelled. For the few U.S. citizens still residing in Haiti, the State Department advises, “Consider hiring a professional security organization.”

Sending 350,000 Haitian refugees back to their native country will almost surely result in many of their deaths from starvation, disease and crime.

The Haitians living in the United States under TPS are hardly a burden on American society. An estimated 200,000 are employed, working as nursing assistants, hotel housekeepers, agricultural workers, cooks, caregivers, and other critical jobs in industries struggling with labor shortages. As a group, Haitians contribute an estimated $5.9 billion to the U.S. economy each year and pay $1.56 billion in federal, payroll, state, and local taxes.

Nor are Haitians, as a group, criminals. According to the non-partisan Cato Institute, Haitian immigrants have an incarceration rate approximately 81 percent below native-born Americans. More broadly, even as the immigrant share of the U.S. population more than doubled from 6.2 percent in 1980 to 13.9 percent in 2022, the total U.S. crime rate dropped by 60 percent over the same period. Simply stated—although there are tragic exceptions—immigrants as a group are significantly more law abiding than the average American.

Yet during his rallies, President Trump has called Haitians a threat to America, claimed they were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, alleged they probably have AIDS, and declared they, and others from “shithole countries”, are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

During the 2024 presidential election, J.D. Vance amplified the false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were abducting and eating cats and dogs. Springfield’s mayor and police quickly debunked the irresponsible claims. When confronted with the facts, Vance said, "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."

In its June 26 ruling, the Supreme Court, while ruling in favor of the Trump administration, declared the comments made by Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and others directed at Haitians were “not overtly racist.” And yet, how could a presidential statement that Haitians were “poisoning the blood of our country”—a phrase that echoes Adolf Hitler's words in Mein Kampf—be dismissed by the Supreme Court as something other than overtly racist?

In 1938, the leading nations of the world refused to assist Jews desperate to flee Nazi Germany. History has judged that act of indifference harshly.

Today, the United States intends to act deliberately, deporting thousands of Haitians to a country its own State Department has declared too dangerous for Americans to visit — condemning many Haitians to death through starvation, disease, and gang violence.

History's judgment will not be kind.

Share

Leave a comment