This statistic keeps going around about US citizens being 70% against - 30% for allowing Jewish European refugees to immigrate to the United States during World War II. But nobody is saying how many refugees were actually allowed to enter. What were the numbers like? What percentage of people who requested asylum were allowed in? Did this have an effect on later regulation for immigration into the United States? I'm especially interested in this in regards to pre-Pearl Harbor versus post-Pearl Harbor sentiment, as I believe the US was pretty non-committal about the conflict up until that point.
A little over 600,000 Jews managed to leave Europe before the Holocaust began in earnest, with the majority leaving between the years 1933-1939. There were a very limited number of destinations for Jews, and the majority escaped to Mandatory Palestine, the US, and the UK, with Argentina, Switzerland, Spain, Turkey, and Shanghai also being important destinations for Jewish refugees.
Jewish refugees were leaving from nearly every country in Europe, but the exodus was most pronounced in Germany and Austria, where nearly 70% emigrated by 1939. Even with the animosity towards immigration and tendency towards isolationism during the Great Depression, nearly 120,000 Jews managed to come to the US in the 1930's, with some 95,000 of the refugees originating from Germany and Austria, with the largest cohort coming 1939, between Kristallnacht and the start of the war. Many legislative barriers were set up to block Jewish refugees from reaching the US and many plans to allow more hundreds of thousands of more Jewish refugees were scuttled in congress. To successfully immigrate to the US, one was often required to prove they could provide for themselves, or had some sort of special skill or abilities, allowing the US to attract highly skilled scientists, academics, and artists.
*(Just to include a little more info.) The US was dedicated to only admitting a high caliber of immigrants. While the UK was accepting kinder-transports; groups of unaccompanied Jewish minors, and Mandatory Palestine was essentially the only destination accepting the majority of poor, unskilled Jews fleeing Eastern European countries, you often needed your own money to get to the US, or have private donors in the US helping you, and you needed to be from a "desirable" location. The US government was wholly opposed to offering any support to foreigners during the Great Depression, even humanitarian aid. Nearly all the aid that went to Jewish refugees came from private donors.
For comparison: nearly 250,000 went to Mandatory Palestine, 90,000 went to the UK, around for 40,000 went to Argentina + approximately another 40,000 who went elsewhere in Latin America, Spain/Switzerland/Turkey each took in around 20,000, Shanghai took in 18,000, as well as others.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007824
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005139
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Paraguay.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_deportations_of_French_ews_to_death_camps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah#Statistics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%27erit_ha-Pletah
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_England#Before_and_during_World_War_II
You might enjoy this read: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005139
In late 1938, 125,000 applicants lined up outside US consulates hoping to obtain 27,000 visas under the existing immigration quota. By June 1939, the number of applicants had increased to over 300,000.