What countries closed their borders to Jews

DarkyHughes

What countries closed their borders to Jewish people during Nazi era especially after the Nuremberg laws were passed & Jewish people started leaving Germany in their 10's of 1000's. Did Ireland close it's doors?

donaghs

Most countries seemed not interested in taking refugees. Didn't want the economic burden, or worried about importing, as they called it, a "Jewish Problem".
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005468

A conference was held in 1938 at Evian to see what could be done about Jewish emigration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vian_Conference but only the Dominican REpublic agreed to increase the numbers it was already taking. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/sosua.html

Ireland didn't officially close its doors to Jewish immigration, but took very few in. Mainly due to Irish officials like Charles Bewley who were basically anti-Semitic.

Can't find any examples of countries that explicitly said no to any Jewish immigration.

Manach

That is an issue that would be helpful to have context.
Legally, unlike today's very rights based approach - "Human rights" by Moyens(?), there were not many refugee laws and so no legislative
pressure to assist people entering their country. As for those countries, there were many pressures which could have forced people to move: from the Anti-Clericism in Mexico, The Spanish Civil war, the Soviet purges and class wars.
For much of continenant Europe was ruled by Authorian Governments (Long Shadow by Reynolds) which had forms of laws surpressing one form of minority or the other for the proported betterment of the state. The Irish state itself, in spite of its remarkible long and stable democratic system, had virtually no social welfare system, apart from that supplied by the Church.
There was both an implicit and explicit policy of exporting to the UK/US excess population. Thus the practicalial of introducation new people into this, would likely have not been possible.

Peregrinus

The question kind of assumes an initial state in which borders are open, and action is then taken to close them - either to close them to Jews specifically, or to close them generally, but in response to a feared influx of Jews.

Reality is more complicated. As Manach has pointed out, there was no internationally-recognised obligation to provide refuge - that came after 1945. (And we know why.) Countries could provide asylum, but always on a discretionary basis, and in practice was pretty rare. It was always done on an individual basis, case-by-case.

More generally, countries could have border policies which were mostly quite open, or mostly quite closed, and this might vary from time to time.

In the interwar years, most countries had tight border policies. Tough border and population controls put in place during the Great War had never really been dismantled. The sight of large empires fracturing into states divided along ethnic lines immediately after the Great War made governments fearful that too much ethnic diversity might lead to conflict and ultimately separatism. The Great Depression made countries protective of domestic labour markets, and fearful of large-scale economic migrations. So when Nazi oppression of Jews kicked into gear from 1933 onwards, it wasn't as if the world was full of open borders which governments promptly closed in order to exclude the Jews. Rather there was pressure to open the already-closed borders, to alleviate the plight of Jews wishing (or needing) to leave Germany - pressure which most governments rejected, most of the time.