Assyrian immigration

June is “Immigrant Heritage Month.” Throughout the month we will be posting materials relating to immigration and immigrant cultures of NYC.

One hundred years ago today … In a letter to the Times (written a month earlier), Paul Shimmon decried the 1921 US immigration law’s quota on Assyrian immigration. The quota was an “unintentional injustice,” he writes, against aspiring Assyrian immigrants, victims of war and of Western Imperialism.

Shimmon was a respected historian who had published Massacres of Syrian Christians in N.W. Persia and Kurdistan in 1915. (Read it here.)

At the time Shimmon was writing his letter, one Assyrian family, that of Maljan Chavoor, age 11, had spent over a year and a half traveling to the US. They would arrive in October 1922 and be detained three weeks on Ellis Island “because one of Maljan’s sisters was blind” (Chermayeff, 223).

We previously wrote about the 1921 immigration law here.

References/ Further reading

Chermayeff, Ivan, and Fred Wasserman and Mary J. Shapiro, Ellis Island: An Illustrated History of the Immigrant Experience. New York: MacMillan and Co., 1991.

– Jonathan Goldman, Jun 4, 2022

TAGS: immigration, law, Assyria, quota, middle-eastern