19481776 Club
Truman signs the Displaced Persons Act; 200,000 Europeans may now enter as permanent residents
He signs it with protest: the President objects to clauses that shut out Jewish DPs who did not reach the camps by December 1945.
Three years after the end of World War II, roughly a million Europeans still lived in refugee camps across Germany, Austria, and Italy — stateless, homeless, and with nowhere to go. On June 25, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act into law, authorizing 200,000 European DPs to enter the United States as permanent residents. Truman signed it, but not quietly: he objected to provisions that discriminated against Jewish DPs from Poland and the Soviet Union who had not reached Germany, Austria, or Italy by December 22, 1945. Those objections were partially addressed two years later, and by June 30, 1952, the program had admitted 393,542 people — more than any other nation…
