Einstein immigration papers found

 10 May 2011 Last updated at 09:17 ET  The landing card was issued to Albert Einstein when he arrived at Dover Recently discovered immigration papers documenting Albert Einstein's 1933 escape from Nazi Germany are being displayed for the first time - at a Liverpool museum.

The German-born Jewish scientist fled his native country after Hitler labelled him an enemy of the regime.

The landing card, issued when he arrived at Dover, was discovered at Heathrow Airport.

It is being exhibited at Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool.

Escape from Germany

The card, signed by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, records Einstein's arrival from Belgium on 23 May, 1933.

It lists his profession as "Professor" and his nationality as "Swiss".

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What's remarkable is that the landing card bears his signature, has his profession as 'professor' and lists his nationality as Swiss”

End Quote Lucy Gardner Merseyside Maritime Museum Landing cards were once completed by all passengers arriving in the UK.

The reverse of the card states that Einstein was heading for Oxford.

Lucy Gardner, assistant curator of Merseyside Maritime Museum's Border and Customs gallery, said: "We didn't know this landing card ever existed until we visited UK Border Agency officers at Heathrow.

"We were keen on acquiring any documents relating to immigration but were stunned to find paperwork relating to such a prominent historical figure as Albert Einstein."

Einstein was a professor at the Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin from 1914.

When Hitler's regime took over Germany and began its repressive measures against Jews in particular, Einstein resigned from his position.

Einstein, who died in 1955, settled in the United States after spending a period under armed protection in England.

His 1921 Nobel Prize was awarded for his services to theoretical physics.

Lucy Gardner said the immigration card revealed Einstein's feelings about his country's government.

"What's remarkable is that the landing card bears his signature, has his profession as 'professor' and lists his nationality as Swiss.

"This shows how Einstein had renounced his German citizenship only weeks earlier in angry reaction to Nazi policies."

Class-Action Lawsuit Says Utah Immigration Law Violates Civil Rights

The law, signed by Gov. Gary R. Herbert in March, was an effort by legislators to crack down on illegal immigration while avoiding the costly legal challenges and polarizing political furor that followed a stricter law enacted last year in Arizona.

But the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Immigration Law Center, based in Los Angeles, brought the class-action lawsuit claiming that the Utah statute violates federal civil rights and immigration law in “myriad ways,” mainly by interfering with immigration enforcement that is generally reserved for federal authorities. The groups are asking a federal judge to suspend the law before it goes into effect on May 10.

The Utah legal fight is one of many battles across the country, as several of states consider immigration crackdown bills late in the legislative season, and Latino and immigrant groups mobilize to try to stop a repeat of the Arizona law, known as S.B. 1070.

A tough immigration bill in Florida was changing by the hour in the State Senate over the past two days, as business and Latino leaders argued against it and lawmakers weighed its possible impact on the state’s tourism and agriculture.

A bill similar to Arizona’s is moving forward in Alabama. Georgia passed a tough enforcement bill last month that is awaiting the signature of Gov. Nathan Deal.

The legislature in Utah, looking for a political formula that would satisfy immigration hardliners without antagonizing the state’s growing population of Latino workers, passed three bills in March, including one that created a guest-worker program providing legal work permits to illegal immigrants living in the state. A third bill set up a partnership with the state of Nuevo León in northern Mexico to bring in temporary farm workers under an existing federal program.

The lawsuit challenged only Utah’s enforcement bill. “Federal immigration law leaves no room for this kind of intrusive state legislation,” said Linton Joaquin, general counsel of the National Immigration Law Center.

Utah’s attorney general, Mark Shurtleff, said he would vigorously defend the law. He said he had closely studied the Arizona law as well as a ruling by a federal judge that suspended central provisions of it. Mr. Shurtleff said Utah’s law was written to avoid racial profiling and to codify police practices that were already routine.

Last week, Mr. Shurtleff met with Justice Department officials in Washington to try to persuade them not to bring a lawsuit against the state. Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has criticized the Obama administration for failing to sue Utah, as it did Arizona.

As Florida lawmakers debated, Latino and African-American civil rights leaders warned on Tuesday that they would consider a boycott or other measures against the state if a harsh immigration law passed.

“Make no mistake about that: it will bring a loss of revenues, and it will do nothing to solve the immigration problem,” said Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza. She estimated that a boycott led by the groups in Arizona cost that state $490 million in lost tourism and convention business.

States have wrestled with the issue given the unlikely prospects for an overhaul of immigration laws to move forward in a divided Congress. But President Obama, in a meeting late Tuesday with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said he remained committed to trying to pass some form of immigration legislation this year, perhaps a bill limited to giving legal status to illegal immigrant students. The meeting was the president’s third in as many weeks to try to revive some form of immigration legislation.

“The president is just absolutely dedicated to the proposition that some legislation has to move,” said Representative Charlie Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas and chairman of the Hispanic caucus.

In the meantime, Mr. Gonzalez said, the Hispanic lawmakers pressed Mr. Obama to set guidelines so that young students with no criminal records who are picked up by immigration agents would not be deported.

 

Immigration Opponent Withdraws From Group

 

But when did it happen and what does it mean?

Dr. Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist, has been a magnet for criticism since the 1980s, for writings that appear to disparage minorities and for accepting money from a foundation that promoted theories of white superiority. Hoping to discredit his broader movement, immigrant groups intensified their attacks in recent years, in what Dr. Tanton’s friends call a campaign of vilification.

Yet the Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform, or FAIR, the influential group he started in 1979, kept him on the board of directors. Two years ago, Dan Stein, the group’s president, hailed him as a “renaissance man.”

On April 17, The New York Times published an article examining Dr. Tanton’s racial views. Soon after, his name disappeared from the list of board members on the FAIR Web site.

Critics crowed. “FAIR needed to finally distance itself from someone who had brought such a bad reputation to the organization,” said Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a long-time nemesis.

But the story may be more subtle — and revealing about immigration politics. Inside the movement, Dr. Tanton has been a giant, helping to start all three major national groups that seek to reduce immigration, legal and illegal. The others are the Center for Immigration Studies and Numbers USA.

An environmentalist and an advocate of population control, Dr. Tanton started with vows to build bridges with the left. But he attracted more support on the populist right, with warnings about the “Latin onslaught” and assertions that American society needs “a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”

Now 77 and with Parkinson’s disease, he has been withdrawing from public life.

In a brief telephone interview, Mr. Stein said Dr. Tanton left the board two months before the Times article. He forwarded an e-mail from Feb. 3, in which Dr. Tanton told the board that his term was expiring and he would not seek re-election.

Yet the FAIR Web site continued to list him on the board. In an interview on March 9, Mr. Stein simply described Dr. Tanton as “relatively inactive.” After the Times article appeared, FAIR issued a long statement, but did not say Dr. Tanton had severed his ties.

The next day, Julie Kirchner, FAIR’s director, canceled a scheduled talk to a class at Princeton, saying she did not want to discuss Dr. Tanton. But she, too, did not say he had left the board, nor did Dr. Tanton himself, in a letter to The Times. Then suddenly he vanished from the roster on the Web.

Why the delicate choreography? One theory is that neither FAIR nor Dr. Tanton wanted to appear that they were reacting to what they regard as unfair attacks by unscrupulous enemies.

“I had heard for months that John was leaving the board,” said one friend, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid entering the dispute over Dr. Tanton’s views. “I really think it’s purely his health. He’s been such a target forever, it wouldn’t be the attacks.”

Mr. Stein said he had not called attention to Dr. Tanton’s departure because he did not find it newsworthy. “I would certainly object strenuously if you characterized this somehow as a byproduct of external pressures,” he said.

Told that Dr. Tanton had resigned in February, Ms. Beirich said she found it “mystifying” that FAIR had not announced it. “Perhaps they didn’t want to draw any more attention to him and his views,” she said.

Julia Preston contributed reporting from New York.