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Alaska's mythic welcome was once all myth, no welcome for refugees - and now?

Alaska Dispatch News recently provided a useful reminder of the complexity of real life by reprinting from the Anchorage Daily News Tom Kizzia's 1999 four-part series on the unfulfilled plan floated by officials in the U.S. Interior Department in the late 1930s to resettle German Jewish refugees in Alaska.

For reasons familiar to history, German Jews were desperate to get out of Germany both before and after "Kristallnacht" in 1938 as Nazi hatred and scapegoating overtook them. The Interior Department, at the time engaged in a campaign to develop Alaska, imagined the territory as fertile ground for new settlers. The resource-rich province was sparsely populated but apparently had no substantive history of ethnic prejudice. Alaskans, it was thought, accepted anyone willing to work and pull his own weight. Race and other accidents of circumstance didn't matter; it was character that counted. Kizzia investigated the case of one group, from Neustadt am Ruebenberge near Hanover.

Drawing on work by UAF historians Orlando Miller and Claus Naske, and on his own interviews with a biographer of Ernest Gruening, a UAF sociology professor who visited Neustadt and relatives of members of the Jewish group, Kizzia found that the doctrine of acceptance on merit was a lot more myth than practice among Alaskans then, at least where German Jews were concerned. A majority of Alaskans reacted negatively to the idea of settling the Neustadt group, or any collection of displaced Jewish families, in Alaska. Principally, they feared that the Jews would not assimilate, would not fit in. Some used the term "misfits."

In one sense their rejection was uninformed: Few if any in Alaska at the time knew of the systematic persecution of Jews being pursued by the Nazi government, and articulation of the "final solution" was a few years in the future. Nonetheless, it's difficult not to conclude that some level of anti-Semitism was at work as well.

Perhaps the culture has sufficiently changed that groups of refugees fleeing oppression and war carnage will be accepted here today; perhaps Anchorage, at least, is a highly diverse community now, and immigrants from near and far have been made welcome here. The arguments against an influx of new refugees now are the same as some of those against resettlement in 1938-39: additional pressure on existing resources, such as schools, hospitals and police and the associated costs, plus anxiety about different cultural mores and habits.

The flood of refugees entering the European Union has generated these same concerns. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande and others have firmly reiterated the EU commitment to helping refugees, both in EU nations and in Turkey and other countries being stressed. There have been anti-refugee demonstrations, to be sure, but the counter demonstrations have been as large or larger, and in the bigger picture, Europeans seem determined to continue the post-war humanitarianism that earned the EU the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. The recurring refugee concerns are seen as challenges to be solved not by rejection but by inclusion.

There are remarkable models of inclusion. At the end of November, Alaska Dispatch News also carried the Washington Post story of Syrian and other refugees arriving in Siilinjarvi, near the Arctic Circle in Finland. Villagers there express all the anxieties others have. But they carry on with the business of welcoming the newcomers and figuring out how to accommodate them.

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The positive stance of the EU nations represents several significant shifts of reference occurring since World War II. The will to resolve conflict nonviolently is one. Additionally, the West is several magnitudes more affluent than 75 years ago. Some of that affluence has spread to the Middle East; many of the new refugees are well educated and upwardly mobile. At the same time, we now all live in a global context that in many ways supersedes nationality, often making nationalism irrelevant. Most of the refugees are wireless connected, for one thing, and they refuse to be powerless in the agony that their leaders have made of everyday life. They're prepared to do something about it, including moving, if necessary, as far away as Siilinjarvi is from Aleppo, if need be.

In a global world where tangible and abstract boundaries are dissolving, rejection is not only arrogant and heartless; it's futile.

Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com.

Steve Haycox

Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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