Charge Bonds

Perkins spent her early career advancing progressive causes. She worked with Jane Addams at Chicago’s famous Hull-House settlement, which served at-risk women from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, most of them immigrants. All her life, Perkins worked to make the United States a safe haven for refugees.

When Roosevelt appointed Frances Perkins as his secretary of labor in 1933, her duties included overseeing the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which was in charge of the US entry ports. However, the 1924 US immigration law had granted State Department officials responsibility for reviewing potential immigrants’ applications and issuing visas. As the Great Depression worsened during President Herbert Hoover’s administration (1929–1933), he had issued instructions for the State Department to block any immigrant who might not be able to support themselves in the United States. Therefore, consular officials often denied visas to people they deemed “likely to become a public charge.”

Perkins decided to use her influence to assist German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. She met formidable opposition from officials in the State Department, some of whom held antisemitic and xenophobic prejudices common in 1930s America. As one of Perkins’s staff reminded her, “The [State Department] consuls are not known for their sympathy towards immigrants, and particularly towards Jews.”

While trying to figure out a way to assist immigrants, Perkins and her staff realized that an existing law gave her the power, as secretary of labor, to accept a “charge bond” from an applicant who the State Department had rejected as likely to become a public charge. If the potential immigrant (or an American sponsor) wrote a check to the Labor Department, the United States could draw upon that money if the individual ever needed public assistance. The immigrant was essentially insuring themselves against becoming a public charge. If the applicant otherwise qualified for a visa, theye could then enter the United States.

The State Department did not appreciate Perkins’s intervention in what they thought was a question of State Department authority, and a legal battle ensued between the two departments. The attorney general finally ruled that Perkins could bring immigrants to the United States using charge bonds. However, Perkins’s commissioner of immigration, Daniel MacCormack, never used charge bonds because he thought the State Department was issuing visas in a fair way and worried that an influx of Jewish refugees would cause a rise in antisemitism in America.

Helping Refugees

Secretary Perkins continued to advocate for immigrants and refugees throughout her tenure. She reduced the cost required to obtain a student visa to come to the United States and made it legal for foreign students to work. Perkins also worked with the German Jewish Children’s Aid organization to set up a corporate bond that allowed more than 400 Jewish children to come to the United States without needing individual financial sponsors. In the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom on November 9–10, 1938, she persuaded FDR to extend temporary visas so that some 12,000–15,000 German Jews already in the United States on temporary tourist visas could stay in the country indefinitely. She later wrote, “Immigration matters have to be decided in a few days. They involve human lives. There can be no delaying.”

Still, despite Frances Perkins’s hard work and good intentions, the Department of Labor could not significantly expand immigration to the United States. Unlike Perkins, the American public did not support loosening immigration quotas in response to the refugee crisis in Europe.

Personal Attacks

Perkins was confronted by opposition every time she tried to lift immigration restrictions—not just by the State Department, but even by progressive allies. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), whose support was necessary to the success of the New Deal, generally opposed any increase in immigration, fearing that new immigrants might become labor competition.

In 1934, an Australian immigrant named Harry Bridges led a longshoremen’s strike in California that resulted in two deaths and caused a public frenzy. Multiple attempts to deport Bridges failed because investigators could not find any grounds to do so. The US Congress also could not find a way to punish Bridges directly and instead set its sights on Perkins, trying to impeach her for having allegedly “defrauded the United States by coddling and protecting from deportation certain aliens." These impeachment efforts failed, but damaging rumors circulated suggesting that Perkins herself was a communist or a communist sympathizer.

In 1936, Frances Perkins’s interest in aiding immigrants led to an antisemitic rumor that she was hiding a secret identity and was actually a Jewish immigrant born as Matilda Wutzki. Perkins called it “un-American propaganda” and an “appeal to racial prejudice.” She did not know of anyone Jewish in her ancestry. Nevertheless, she issued a public statement declaring: “If I were a Jewess I would make no secret of it. On the contrary, I would be proud to acknowledge it.”

End of Control Over INS

As the war in Europe escalated, many Americans believed that a “fifth column” of foreign spies might be infiltrating the country, even arguing they might be disguised as Jewish immigrants. In June 1940, President Roosevelt moved the Immigration and Naturalization Service from the Labor Department to the Justice Department, signaling that immigration had ceased being a labor issue and instead had become a national security issue. With this move, Frances Perkins lost much of her influence over immigration and refugee matters.