Let us now examine several Western reactions to Hitler's forced emigration policy, which followed the pogroms of 1938. I shall repeat only briefly the more recent research results of those qualified historians who have studied British and American refugee policies at the time of Hitler's rise to power and since that time, not because they are not important but because they are, and the reader may consult them separately. Indeed, after his reelection campaign of 1936, President, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) became more open to Jewish pleas to help their compatriots. Yet this generated angry reactions in the U.S. Congress, which threatened to cut even the existing immigration quotas, and from 1937, FDR was caught in the pendulum of rising conservative reaction to his policies in general. Public opinion polls carried out in 1938 yielded an enormous vote against allowing a large number of Jewish exiles from Germany to immigrate to the United States. Hence, another aspect of the double trap was the growing wave of anti-Semitism in the United States, in some collusion with the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis instead of a growing sympathy with their plight, as officials, politicians, and ordinary people feared more Jewish refugees and Jewish interest at home would drive them to war abroad.

The president considered settling the Jews elsewhere rather than in his country.