Making a National Program National: The US Resettlement of Displaced Persons After World War II

Abstract

The end of the Second World War in Europe left millions of people out of place, including Jews left in concentration camps, forced laborers in the huge Nazi work camp system, and many Germans as well. For roughly a million of these people, no immediate return to their home countries was possible, and the United States—although very slowly—ultimately resettled the largest number of them. One important thread in these US efforts was the intent to make the resettlement program a fully national one. Those efforts are seen most clearly in states that would not at that time have been obvious destinations for displaced persons, or at least not obvious destinations for relatively large numbers of them. This article examines three states—North Dakota, Minnesota, and Mississippi. The resettlement program may not have been fully coherent in policy goals, including veering sharply at times from the original humanitarian intent. Yet the program worked well on its own terms and set a new standard for state and local involvement in resettlement that has continued through the major surges of refugees to the United States since then, including recent efforts on behalf of those from Afghanistan and Ukraine. This US experience of refugee resettlement through a flexible federal/state/local system, with strong involvement from both public and private sectors, remains a crucial experiment in resettlement and a reminder of the ways refugee and immigration policies and programs are intertwined.