Tucsonan Mo Goldman remembers his maternal grandmother, Esther Praw, a Holocaust survivor, as a frail and anxious woman, haunted by the losses and the atrocities she endured.
Esther immigrated to the U.S. in 1949 with her first husband and their infant daughter, Gloria, Goldman’s mother. In 1969, widowed ten years, Esther married Harry Praw, also a survivor, but with an upbeat and calm demeanor that balanced her anxiety.
The security and opportunity Esther found in the U.S. inspired first her daughter and later her grandson to pursue careers as immigration lawyers.
In his book, “The Last Survivor: Lessons from the Past and the Dying Dream of Freedom,” Goldman wonders what it might have been like if Esther were seeking asylum in the U.S. today, facing “a web of draconian laws and policies structured to crush” refugee’s dreams of freedom.
“Would Esther have been able to handle the additional trauma imposed upon her by contemporary immigration laws? How much of a struggle would it have been for her to come to this supposed ‘nation of immigrants’ and be detained in ICE custody while recalling the horrors that occurred against her?”
The dwindling number of living Holocaust survivors is one reason Goldman wanted to share Esther’s story, which she recorded in an interview preserved by the University of Michigan.
A book banning was another powerful motivation for “The Last Survivor.”
Goldman explains that he was disgusted when a Tennessee school board banned Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus,” a book his parents had given him when he was in grade school to help him understand the terrors his grandparents faced.
“The Last Survivor” is an opportunity to counter some of the “disinformation that gets shared by social media and just generally in the public sphere,” regarding both Holocaust denial and the scapegoating of immigrants, he told the AJP.
He particularly wants to refute the idea that the present U.S. system provides an opportunity for most would-be immigrants to “do it the ‘right way.’”
“Doing the process the ‘right way’ sounds nice until you see example after example where it doesn’t work,” he says.
In “The Last Survivor,” Goldman outlines some of the legal barriers to immigration in America, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was only repealed in 1943.
In 1924, the U.S. passed immigration quotas that severely limited the number of people who could legally immigrate, based on their national origin. In 1939 the U.S. turned away the U.S.S. St. Louis, a ship filled with refugees from Nazi Germany, because of these quotas.
Even in the aftermath of World War II, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 authorized only some 200,000 European refugees to enter the U.S.
Esther had to wait for a visa to come to the U.S., but the path to immigration now is so slow that asylum seekers and refugees may be subject to wait times of a decade or more, Goldman says.
He adds that without guidance from legal organizations, nonprofits, or lawyers, it’s almost impossible for an immigrant to successfully navigate the system’s complexities.
Many immigration laws and policies are based on fear, he says, whether it is fear of the “other,” fear of crime or disease, or “fear of sharing a piece of the American dream.”
“There is a myriad of ways that a society, like ours, can fall into the same psychological traps that caused the Nazis to take such drastic fear-based measures,” he says.
Goldman is particularly critical of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.
Under this law, a person who enters the U.S. without permission or overstays their visa can be barred from the U.S. for three or 10 years, depending on how long they have been in the U.S. These bars often end up separating parents and children.
The only way around the bar is to plead “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to a judge. Goldman recalls one local judge, now retired, notorious for denying even the most heartrending cases.
He says the 1996 law has had the opposite effect of its intent. Instead of decreasing the number of long-term unauthorized residents, it increased the number who remain undocumented — even if they are eligible to adjust their immigration status — for fear of these harsh penalties.
Despite the byzantine and often cruel nature of our immigration system, Goldman has hope. He was heartened by the backlash against Arizona’s SB1070. This 2010 law required law enforcement agencies to check the immigration status of anyone they encountered, which became a pretext for racial profiling. SB1070 sparked lawsuits and boycotts of the state, resulting in tens of millions in economic damage. Although it was not repealed, SB1070 was gutted by the Supreme Court and other lower court rulings.
Goldman also hopes people will use their votes to support immigration reform.
He says his grandmother’s journey shows why we should help immigrants, undocumented or not, to thrive.
“We should provide immigrants with better tools to become entrepreneurs. We should give them legal benefits expeditiously and not force them to wait several months for a simple work permit,” he says. “The opportunity and determination to have a better life for themselves and our communities is what made America great.”
