Even there, however, it should be pointed out that this is much easier to see in retrospect than it was at the time. The most damning section of Wyman's book is his charge that American antisernitism played a major role in the American failure to act. He shows that American society was shot through with antisernitism and demonstrates that by far the biggest single obstacle to saving the Jews from the Holocaust was immigration restriction. He then puts these two irrefutable facts together and claims that the restriction resulted from the antisernitism. But politics, and their result, national policy, are never so simple that they can be described through simple causality.
Immigration policy is always a major issue for any government at any time in any place.
Innumerable cross- currents are at work. Pressures come from every direction. America's restrictive policies, adopted in the 1920s and maintained to this day, were only in small part a result of antisernitism. Certainly true, and for the exact reason the Committee impliesthat no government can ever abandon its citizens, especially in large numbers, and still stay in power. But the further truth is that Hitler knew exactly what he was doing when he declared Germany's Jews to be stateless.