Tag: “New Due Process Army” (“NDPA”)

Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees From Nazi Germany

May 29, 2025

As someone who has spent more than five decades working on immigration issues, many of them involving refugees and those seeking asylum, in and out of Government, I found Dear Miss Perkins by Rebecca Brenner Graham interesting and in many ways moving.

True, the book suffered from some editorial and organizational difficulties: more like a string of essays than a unified volume with a thesis or overall theme; lots of repetition; some awkward sentence structure; and lack of a comprehensive index were among the most noticeable and occasionally annoying. Full disclosure: I mostly listened to the audiobook while driving from the D.C. area to Kansas City, Missouri to participate as a faculty member in the 2025 Immigration Court Trial Litigation College sponsored by Pen & Sword. The “road trip audio experience” might have minimized some of the book’s weakness as noted above.

I related to Perkins’s struggle to achieve “good government” and humane, sensible, practical administration of the immigration laws, as well as her frustrations on being thwarted, mirrored by my own Government experiences. Like her, my efforts at institutionalizing best practices and interpretations were ultimately largely unsuccessful. Yet, like her, I was able to solve “real life” (often life or death) problems, save lives, teach and inspire others, and get some degree of personal satisfaction in achieving things that helped others and overall benefitted our nation.

Here, in my own somewhat random order, are my major “takeaways” from the book, most of which remain as troublesome today as they did in Perkins’s era.

1) The prevalence of antisemitism in Government and society, a continuing issue.

2) The persistence of racism, misogyny (frequently directed at Perkins herself), bigotry, and false economic arguments being used against immigrants.

3) The use of “legal fictions” in place of common sense in immigration legal opinions (e.g., the “charge bond controversy”).

4) Focusing more on what particular immigrants can do for the U.S., than on the humanity, needs, situation, and potential of the immigrants themselves.

5) Lumping Nazism, socialism, and communism together as “totalitarianism.”

6) Minimizing the culpability of the German people for Nazism and the holocaust.

7) The extraordinarily poor performance of Congress in protecting refugees and other immigrants in a nation of immigrants.

8) The subservience of legal, Constitutional, and human rights of immigrants to domestic political considerations.

9) The enduring, and often toxic, nature of “turf battles” and arcane bureaucratic distinctions in overruling “good government,” efficiency, and practicality in the immigration bureaucracy.

10) Who you know often trumping fair treatment in individual cases.

11) Creative, progressive actions within the bureaucracy, such as those championed by Perkins, can save individual lives even if they can not systematically save everyone who should be saved.

12) The remarkable lack of empathy for child migration and family separation.

13) “Sanitization” of the saga of World War II (e.g., “Hogan’s Heroes Syndrome”), and diffusing or watering down the responsibility for the holocaust, and the other dehumanizing effects.

14) Intentionally overplaying immigration, particularly by refugees and other forced migrants, as primarily a national security/law enforcement concern rather than as a practical humanitarian response to recurring situations (e.g., the transfer of immigration responsibility from DOL to DOJ and eventually to DHS).

My parting thought is that Perkins’s tale confirmed what many of us already knew. It’s hard to survive as a progressive in Government even with friends in high places.

In an age of human progress in technology, I find it disturbing and puzzling indeed that regression has come to dominate immigration policy and that so many of the deadly and tragic mistakes, misconceptions, and lack of courage that faced Perkins remain very much with us today. As caring and engaged humans, we must strive for just solutions for the sake of future generations. Despite the current, largely unrelentingly negative rhetoric, immigration is integral to our country, is here to stay, and will continue to shape our nation and our world.