The medical school in the city I grew up in had a policy of taking the students with the highest marks in last year school exams. That was it, no other judgement.
One year this would mean that the intake would be solely one ethnicity, and it was not white.
So the policy was abandoned for a more rounded approach.
These days the medical schools try very hard to make the population of graduating doctors look like the population they are going to treat.
This drives the (rich) parents of white students who just miss out getting into medical school extremely irate and litigious. But so far it has withstood attack.
The results are not achieved by different standards for graduation, but by different standards for admission.
> These days the medical schools try very hard to make the population of graduating doctors look like the population they are going to treat.
I recall reading about some researchers that studied patients at a large walk-in clinic in a low income area. Both the set of patients and the set of doctors were diverse. Patients were randomly assigned to doctors.
What they found was that patients were significantly more likely to follow the doctor's instructions after the visit (such as getting prescriptions filled, following the doctor's home care instructions, or coming back for follow ups) if the doctor was the same race/ethnic group as the patient.
"Study Finds Patients Prefer Doctors Who Share Their Same Race/Ethnicity ;
In an analysis of more than 100,000 patient surveys, Penn researchers found that patient-provider race concordance led to higher odds of receiving maximum patient experience scores"
An important 2012 study found that higher patient satisfaction is correlated with higher costs and death. This is not counter intuitive if one has practiced medicine. Point being that healthcare isn’t a classic consumer product and social experiments like patient/provider concordance have complex effects.
> So the policy was abandoned for a more rounded approach.
This was the exact pretext used by Harvard in the early 20th century to reduce the number of Jews in attendance.
> As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically. By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”
> The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s first idea—a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body—was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn.
> The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the “character” of candidates from “persons who know the applicants well,” and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities.
"What do you call the person that finishes last in medical school? Doctor."
Somewhat less snarkily, I was under the impression that medical schools hate not graduating their students, so once you're in, basically anybody who can physically survive the grind will become a doctor. Is this incorrect?
In reality the person who finishes last in medical school is at serious risk of not being matched to a residency slot. So technically they're a doctor, but not able to practice medicine. Those people tend to go to work in related fields like pharmaceutical sales or hospital administration.
I'm not from the US, so this comes from curiosity and lack of knowledge of the system:
Doesn't that suck for everyone?
In Germany, there is a (apparently) large generation gap of countryside doctors. The old ones retire, but no one young shows up to replace them, even though they are very well paid. But what 30 year old would want to live and work in a village of 5000?
Is that scenario not applicable in the US, or are the jobs you mentioned simply still considered a better deal.
> But what 30 year old would want to live and work in a village of 5000?
Married with kids and want to move to the country to settle down. Isn’t that what a lot of 30-year-olds do? Especially middle class people like doctors.
Well, there's probably no work for your wife, and the daycare or school are probably miles away. That kind of moves it from "settling down in the countryside" to "getting away from civilization entirely" territory.
(That's speaking in broad generalizations, of course. This isn't the usual case, but there are broad parts of (especially Eastern) Germany that are depopulating rapidly since there are so few job opportunities)
I personally don't know, but I also can't imagine - German internet speeds outside of metropolitan areas is notoriously somewhere between non-existant and absolute garbage.
https://breitbandmessung.de/kartenansicht has a scrollable map, but it doesn't say from when the measurements are, nor if "no coverage" means that there is no coverage, or if they have performed no measurements there.
But you're probably lucky to get into the double digits of Mbps. Note how the whole map tops out at ">= 50Mbps".
All the sources I can find (like [0]) say "Starlink is currently available in some major cities especially in Western Germany, and promises to bring the network up mid-to-end-of-2021, but many, especially rural areas, are not in reach yet".
Starlink is still in its infancy and needs 10 times as many satellites up there before it can really provide a global coverage.
I believe they will make it by 2024 or perhaps a bit sooner (if Starship development goes well - that ship has an enormous cargo capacity to LEO), but it isn't an option for most people yet.
But those programs generally only apply to physicians who have finished residency. We really need to increase funding for residency programs in general so that those are no longer a limiting factor in training new physicians.
There is exactly this problem in the USA and Canada. To the point that students that want to be rural country doctors have a very hard time getting to be so, because the system is set up to maximize for city specialists.
Pay is worse, but acceptable to most, because of lower costs of living. Costs of education (indebtedness) are still astronomical.
(System is slowly improving though.)
Being last-ranked is not a guarantee not to interfere with a residency slot. There are many more factors that go into matching.
Being picky on specialty, or location, is going to make a match more difficult. A Competitive specialty like Ortho, Radiology, or Radiation Oncology trying for a big city that is popular would be a hard fit. Due to how few Radiation Oncology programs there are, even a class valedictorian may not get in - there are just not that many slots.
A less desirable specialty like family practice or internal medicine would be a much easier fit for a lower ranked candidate.
> So the policy was abandoned for a more rounded approach. These days the medical schools try very hard to make the population of graduating doctors look like the population they are going to treat.
So you know that the bar was lowered if they aren't from ethnicity X. Interesting. Is that the doctor you want for you, or your loved ones?
> The results are not achieved by different standards for graduation, but by different standards for admission.
It's so nice to be in tech where comparatively we let the free market figure out how to properly evaluate candidates; many companies have moved away from pure algorithm problems (the equivalent of testing) because relying solely on them misses a lot of important factors.
The fundamental problem with medicine that creates these dynamics is artificial supply constraints created by licensing regimes (I've yet to figure out how or why a MD is so much better than a PA for family medicine). Absent that, the market would just figure things out.
There's no particular reason to believe high test scores are 100% correlated with future doctor quality given that lots of other factors go into being a doctor - and yet medical schools have historically relied on this. On the other hand, there's also no particular reason to believe the best doctors will be equally distributed across whatever splicing and dicing of the population you perform.
> The results are not achieved by different standards for graduation, but by different standards for admission.
This is the key callout I think. It allows you to address representation problems while sidestepping opposing arguments about graduate quality.
Do it in rounds, unfilled spots open up to anyone.
If your child really wants to be a doctor but can’t get a spot, well, I’m sure that increased demand for medical spots means you’re willing to pay more, and the University can use that to expand their medical program. Or you can send them to another university.
This seems like a reasonable approach to improving systemic inequalities without causing systemic harm.
If there is a positive correlation between admission standards and graduate ability, what you have done is lowered the average but left it above the bar (assuming that the bar isn't curved).
There is still the question as to whether certain admission standards are actually correlated with graduate ability. I wonder if there is a way to find out?
But yeah, I think the difficulty of sociology makes it tough to reason about these issues in a comprehensive, logical way. And it's so hard to experimentally prove _anything_ when proving the counterfactual is "well, we'd need to split reality into two and wait 50 years".
Australia had a notorious "dictation test" that was used to weed out non-white immigrants.
"Under the Immgration Act, migrants who entered Australia between 1901 and 1958 could be asked to take a dictation test.
To pass the test, they needed to write 50 words in any European language, as dictated by an immigration officer. After 1905, the officer could choose any language at all. A Chinese immigrant, for example, could be asked to write out 50 words in French, Italian or another language.
Few migrants could pass the test in these circumstances. This meant that it was easy to fail an applicant if they were from an ‘undesirable’ country, had a criminal record, had medical issues or were thought to be ‘morally unfit’.
If an applicant failed the test, they could be deported by the Australian Government."
This still exists officially btw, migrants need to be at a certain level in IELTS and have no criminal records to get a migrant visa. And if you get any criminal conviction during the visa, you can get deported or be blacklisted from getting citizenship down the line.
An English language test and what the white Australia policy did are not the same thing.
Basically everything you've stated is just called immigration policy.
I personally think we're too hard on skilled migrants and too lenient on relationship visas. But I'm sure I don't have a properly informed opinion, just a hunch based on my experiences.
> we're too hard on skilled migrants and too lenient on relationship visas
"Funny", I'm a skilled immigrant with multiple friends whose marriage was torn apart by European immigration bureaucrats deciding theirs was fake, which if you see it play out in real life even once feels unnecessarily cruel beyond comparison, so I'm really wondering what kind of "experiences" you base your hunch on.
Can't speak for the European experience, only the Australian one.
Have had friends struggle on skilled visas, whilst relationship visas with no schooling or skills all get approved with minimal fuss. My preference would be to make skilled migration easier.
Would have thought from a nation standpoint we'd want to attract talent.
There was a famous German Jewish Socialist journalist from Prague, Egon Erwin Kisch, who was barred from Australia when they asked him to write a dictate in Scottish Gaelic.
> Among problems that were used by the department to blackball unwanted candidate students, these problems are distinguished by having a simple solution that is difficult to find.
Could someone explain the mechanism here? I can understand how this would hurt any relatively unprivileged group, by requiring certain "gotchas" that have nothing to do with people's innate ability or level of education.
But is there anything further? I.e. were these problems well-known among students who had already passed through an unfairly discriminatory gauntlet?
I didn't see anything like that mentioned in TA. It sounded like the same problems were being given to everyone -- and that the malicious behavior was in problem selection itself. Am I wrong?
The "A personal story of Tanya Khovanova" section at the start of the article itself describes the method more explicity: "One of the methods they used for doing this was to give the unwanted students a different set of problems on their oral exam."
The introduction adds that the Jewish (or otherwise "undesirable") students "were given these problems one after another until they failed one of them, at which point they were given a failing mark."
One, you only give the hardball problems to people you want to filter out, as the paper mentions.
Two, you use hardball problems with a simple solution, so that if people make a scandal / complain to political authorities, you can point to the simple solution and "No, look, it's actually really easy, these people just weren't good enough!".
Bias & fairness in enrollment is easy to solve, right? Just expand capacity to meet demand.
I get that higher ed has a branding problem. I don't care. If you want society support, you play by society rules.
Further, they're doing a fine job of destroying their own brands without any outside help.
Berkeley created and maintained an elite institution without being a finishing school for trust fund babies. Until they had their funding ganked, of course.
In the Lomonosov Moscow State Uni, in the math departments (Mechmat and VMK) there were 4 entrance exams, at the time of the article three of those graded at 3-5 points and one pass/fail. One could get 9-15 points total and the admission was in the order of the highest points, with the cut off being between 13 and 12 usually (the 12 pointers would compete in the high school's GPA and other extra credits). A failure in any of the exams (2 points) would eliminate one from the admission.
There was a shortcut: anybody with 9+ points for the first two (written and oral math) would be unconditionally admitted without even needing to take the two remaining exams (and risking a failure). There were other shortcuts not relevant here.
The written exam is 6 problems. You get a point for every one solved. Naturally the difficulty is increasing exponentially with the 5th and 6th being very hard (you only need to solve one of these to get the maximum 5 points, they are the same difficulty but one is usually an equation and another is a geometry problem). The first 4 problems are still easy for a good high school student, the 5th/6th requires extra preparation or going to a special math school. (some examples http://kvant.mccme.ru/1991/02/p65.htm )
The oral exam is two questions on a "ticket" and a problem. The list of questions is known beforehand and they are generic topics like "What are the properties of triangles?", the ticket is literally a piece of paper one pulls from a pile, face down. And each question and the problem give a point to add to 2. So you can only fail if you don't answer any question and don't solve the problem. Again, it's an easy 4 points with the two questions (out of total 50 or so) answered.
So what happens when somebody answered correctly the both ticket questions? He or she already has 4 points and the problem will decide between 4 and 5. If he or she has 5 for the written math (the written test is in front of the examiner) it does not matter, this person is already admitted with 9 points so the problem will be a simple one to save time. If the written score is 3, it will be a hard problem that this person is likely not going to solve (harder than the 4th problem in the written exam but not as hard as 5th or 6th) that will make the total math 7 points and limit that person's entrance exam score to 12 points, likely not letting them in because you really should not be in the math department if you could only solve 3 easy problems in the written exam.
The 4 points for the written math is the most peculiar, especially if one had good work done on the 5th problem even without solving it ultimately. If this person solves the problem in the oral math, it's the automatic admission. So a tricky problem comes out. You cannot give the same problem you give to the one with 3 points because it will be too easy. You cannot really give another 5th or 6th problem from the written math because it takes an hour to solve so they give a problem that is as hard as the 5th/6th but can be solved in minutes, giving a fair chance for an automatic admission. If the candidate fails it it's not the end, they continue with 8 points and still a fair chance for admission.
This is not related to Jews, as far as I know, I know people who were not Jewish and got these problems after getting 4 points for the written math. This is to set the uniform standard for the accelerated admission: five written exam problems and two theoretical questions.
According to Anatoly Vershik, those problems were given to "undesireables", including of course Jewish candidates (but not just): http://www.3038.org/press/vershik.pdf
I don't know these people but I had graduated from one of these departments and get my information from classmates and my own experience (I got 4-5, the reason I could solve such a problem is that I grinded a lot).
PS. These people you mentioned are from the St. Petersburg uni, where I have never been, it could be different there. I can only speak for the Moscow.
Are we reading the same HN here? You're telling me there are "legions of anti-Semitic trolls", but all I see is one post that's already been flagged & downvoted to oblivion.
There are currently four separate posters who have been flagged out of existence, as well as a couple others in that thread who have been downvoted to oblivion. One of the posters kept re-posting the same comment after it got flagged, although it seems that has been removed. At the time of my post that thread was the largest discussion thread on this article (it still is, although it's at least been downvoted enough to stop appearing near the top).
This is not entirely true. You had to apply to leave USSR and 90% were refused for one reason or another. Borders did not truly open until the 90s. Another unofficial motivation was in lines with "equity". Universities were trying to meet USSR's unofficial quotes per nationality. I heard China was/is trying to do something similar
The reason was bigotry, which is why problems like these were a kind of 'secret' method with plausible deniability. Otherwise why not just declare it as an open policy? People were not 'likely' to emigrate, emigration out of the USSR was exceptionally difficult and impossible for most.
Fucking over every single individual of a given group because of vague fears of what they might do if treated fairly, where these fears are entirely based on them belonging to said group, seems like the very definition of bigotry.
US universities also had a history of trying to exclude Jewish people [1]. I say history, because the practice has by all accounts stopped, and the current situation in the Ivy League [2] is as follows (looking only at non-international students):
Ivy League US Ratio
Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16
Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71
White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82
Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65
Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61
White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56
The numbers don't sum to 100% because I did not include multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.
No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias.
Probably because people think he is being anti-Semitic by posting the facts about over-representation of Jewish enrollment in top universities.
When you couple that with the fact that the data shows that "white supremacy" at college universities is kind of a myth and that there is another "supremacy" altogether, albeit one we're not really allowed to talk about in "polite society," you can expect a lot of downvotes.
I didnt downvote, but these stats seem to pop up a lot and often are being used to illustrate that "white people are discriminated against". The key flaw if thats the intention is that students are usually of a certain age, and Americans are more diverse than they used to be since the laws against marrying across races and immigrating when non-white got repealed.
Probably also likely a second generation immigrant effect and there's a lot if people in Asia.
Looking at only the college age 20-24 year age group [1], the numbers change as follows:
Ivy League US Ratio
Jewish* 17.2% 2.1% 8.21
Asian 19.6% 7.1% 2.75
White 33.1% 51.6% 0.64
Hispanic 11.4% 19.4% 0.59
Black** 7.8% 16.5% 0.47
The relative placement of the bottom 3 groups changes, but their individual representation ratios remain approximately the same. Any conclusions about discrimination that you could draw from the first set of numbers, you can draw from this one - the differences are negligible.
As for there being many people in Asia, that is irrelevant - I excluded international students when calculating Ivy League demographics, so only the US population is relevant.
*I assumed the same age structure for non-Jewish and Jewish whites.
**The census data table gives the total Black population as 47 million for 2017, while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... gives only 40 million, despite citing census.gov as its source. I don't know where the disparity comes from, and that's the only place I've seen such a high estimate of the US Black population.
It is to my knowledge factually correct and on-topic (I upvoted it). That being said, I believe discussion of upvotes/downvotes is against HN guidelines, so we should probably refrain from that here — if you're concerned about abuse you can email hn@ycombinator.com: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe they don't believe the data? And it's very tedious to check. If that's the case, I suggest to check the data for a few individual universities. Cornell and Princeton are slight outliers, but otherwise individual universities don't deviate much from the average. That should give some credence to the numbers.
The presidents of Yale, Pennsylvania, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Brown are Peter Salovey, Amy Gutmann, Lawrence Bacow, Lee C. Bollinger, Christopher Eisgruber, and Christina Paxson. They are all Jewish (don't take my word for it - check their wikipedia pages).
If you contend they are discriminated against despite holding at least 6 of the 8 presidencies, and despite being by far the most over-represented group, I assume you have some fantastically strong supporting evidence.
> They're the only small group being considered. Of course they're gonna be "by far" something. Many other small groups have above-average representation in academics.
Maybe small in the US as a whole, but in the Ivy League they are 17.2% - the 3rd largest ethnicity, almost as large as Hispanics and Blacks combined.
But lets suppose they are being discriminated against. That would require some other group, that makes up a significant % of the Ivy League, to be unfairly privileged (otherwise it would have a negligible effect on the % of Jewish students).
So which group do you think that is? You said Asians are discriminated against, so they're out. Maybe you think there's too many Hispanic or Black students, despite being 11x less likely to be accepted into the Ivy League? Or is it non-Jewish whites, the most under-represented group, that are also the most privileged?
There's no way to tell whether those numbers are evidence for or against discrimination because there's no control group of culturally blank ivy leagues to compare it against.
Thank you for doing this work. It would be great to have the spreadsheet or code that generates this table available. Would you be willing to share it?
There was a feeling that without deliberate effort, the university would be dominated by a minority who were simply good at tests/human calculators but lacking in the customs, morals, and values that contribute to society.
This really was not limited to Soviet Union, but also lots of Europe and American/Canada too. See also the way Asians are treated in America now.
This is not the reason why Asian-Americans are discriminated against in college admissions, and this is not why Jews were discriminated against in the Soviet Union.
> the university would be dominated by a minority who were simply good at tests/human calculators but lacking in the customs, morals, and values that contribute to society.
Relevant excerpt from "Why nerds are unpopular" [0]
> I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.
Europe in general has had a strong tradition of virulent antisemitism at least from the Middle Ages until the present day (but especially until the 1950s).
If you're seeking some negative stereotype that's true about them, you'll be disappointed to find out that the main one was their unwillingness to convert.
Religion was -at that time- just defining social norms, like the government defines them today (the church got kicked out at some point then, because science proofed them wrong with many things). If everyone lives by "rules A" (and are convinced those are the right rules, e.g. "don't lend money"), then just living by a different/opposing set of rules is asking for trouble.
They were forced in certain professions, such as banking, by making anything else unavailable to them. A very unlikeable profession for your average Joe, as having to interact with a banker is often bad news for people. They were also forced to keep to themselves in specific parts of the city -- combine that with looking different (mostly in hair and clothing), religious customs other than what the majority population was used to, difficult dialects bordering on being a different language altogether. The perfect scapegoat storm, so to speak, whenever there are fits of xenophobia.
Interestingly, banking and other professions associated with Jews, excluded Jews until relatively recently.
> The term originated in the Ivy League colleges and originally reflected a stereotype of old-line firms populated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). The term historically had antisemitic connotations, as many of the New York firms known as "white shoe" were considered off-limits to Jews until the 1960s.
in the medieval ages the church forbade certain types of lending, thats why in Crusader Kings 2 you can borrow money from the Jews, and then expel them so you dont have to pay them back (which actually gives you a negative economic bonus for a time)
The tradition of anti-Semitism probably began for a combination of religious reasons (Jews were for a very long time the main or only religious outgroup in much of Europe, and have traditionally been blamed for killing Jesus), and pure racism.
> Antisemitism has been explained in terms of racism, xenophobia, projected guilt, displaced aggression, and the search for a scapegoat.[243] Some explanations assign partial blame to the perception of Jewish people as unsociable. Such a perception may have arisen by many Jews having strictly kept to their own communities, with their own practices and laws.[244]
> It has also been suggested that parts of antisemitism arose from a perception of Jewish people as greedy (as often used in stereotypes of Jews), and this perception has probably evolved in Europe during Medieval times where a large portion of money lending was operated by Jews.[245] Factors contributing to this situation included that Jews were restricted from other professions,[245] while the Christian Church declared for their followers that money lending constituted immoral "usury".[246]
Following the expulsion of Jews from Israel by the Roman's, Jews spent ~2000 years as smaller communities in Europe, never quite integrating. It seems a sad tendency of human nature to distrust and blame visible minorities for our problems. We have similar problems today, with different minorities, mostly.
That didnt work in the slightest with the jewish community in europe, they were identified and forced into specific areas of cities or countryside. Unless by integrate you meant they should have just converted to christianity? Those that were in more liberal communities and integrated were identified and hunted regardless.
Sounds like an anti-Semitic troll, but I'll respond with a related point:
It is very slightly surprising that these come from Soviet times. Weren't the Soviets supposed to have rid Russia of evils like this?
Turns out that the relationship between the Soviets and Judaism was complicated. There were "good Soviet" Jewish organizations, but these are not remembered fondly by the sources I read today. I guess it was a problem of loyalty related to totalitarianism: Your only really important identity was supposed to be "Party member".
I also note that "Jewish problems" is a (sick) pun.
This is the article I'd had in mind. It's sort of about Judaism during Soviet times, though it's also about other things (and one core metaphor is backwards, IMO). But still, it's interesting:
Buying any Soviet propaganda at face value is like buying a stretch of fine Pacific beach in Nevada.
People in the Eastern Bloc, with the exception of the very gullible, developed such cynicism against any official communication that even 30 years later we struggle with the concept of "whatever the government says and does is blatant lie / corruption / theft".
I believe that you are misreading FooBarBizBazz's point. They were supposed to have eliminated things like this, according to their propaganda. But their history completely refutes the propaganda. That was FooBarBizBazz's point (as I read it).
> or have not spent much time looking at the history of the Soviet Union.
Probably that.
I say "surprising" because there's a simplistic view in some places (particularly the US) that "antisemitism is Right" and "Communism is Left" and moreover "antisemitism is all due to Christianity" while at the same time "those godless Soviets were against Christianity" so automatically "the Soviets must have been pro-Jewish". I think this is believed in large swathes of the "Right" and "Left", but particularly on the "Right", where super-dumb Nazi types think "all those damn Jewish libtards" and so-on.
I am making a pot shot at all that kind of stupidity, so people know life is never as simple as whatever dichotomous cartoon lives in their heads.
Well, not really. In order to immigrate, or even simply travel outside, one had to get a permission first. And one was not usually granted to those who had access to any state secret.
The USA embody both conservative and progressive extremes, and whether that is a cause or an effect of polarized politics I can't speculate.
In either case the leadership of the USSR was just reversing course with force on the issue around that time. I wouldn't put that bygone state on either side outside the spectrum that are the USA.
"The Triguboffs were refused visas for Canada and the United States, which had strict quotas on Jewish immigrants. But they had obtained landing permits for Australia back in 1946 when the country had an open-door policy to Jewish refugees.
By early 1948, however, Australian policy had changed and a family of rich Jews ... were not the migrants Australia was looking for.
In postwar Australia, Jews were tarred with a mix of old-fashioned anti-Semitism and suspicion they were either communists or Zionists attacking British forces in Palestine. Things came to a crisis in January 1947 when an old ferry called the Hwa Lien docked in Sydney carrying 300 stateless Jews from Shanghai. Sydney's The Sun newspaper claimed that criminal syndicates run by communists had backed the Jewish immigrants and hinted that Jewish refugees had collaborated with the Japanese. The Sun editorialised: "The danger of infiltration by professional trouble makers, whether Jewish terrorists or Communist agents, will arouse the natural suspicion of all who wish to see Australia kept Australian."
Arthur Calwell, Australia's immigration minister following World War II, was a champion of mass migration (although famously within the confines of the White Australia Policy) and had initially been sympathetic to the plight of Jewish refugees. He let the Hwa Lien unload its passengers. But in the heated aftermath he quietly imposed a secret quota on the number of Jews who would be given entry on any future migrant ships."
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...