‘Ship of the damned’ recalled 80 years after refugee tragedy

Law and Public Issues

By Ann M. Lousin

Ann M. Lousin has been a professor at The John Marshall Law School since 1975. Before then, she was a research assistant at the 1969-1970 Illinois constitutional convention and parliamentarian of the Illinois House of Representatives. Her treatise “The Illinois State Constitution: A Reference Guide” was published in December 2009. She can be contacted at 7lousin@jmls.edu.

Posted July 16, 2019 10:18 AM

Thousands of Central Americans fleeing oppression and violence in their homelands are huddled along the U.S.-Mexican border. So far, they have been denied asylum and may well be forced to return to an uncertain destiny.Eighty years ago a similar crisis arose when more than 900 European refugees were not allowed to land in Florida or Canada and were returned to Europe. They were the passengers on the MS St. Louis, “the ship of the damned.”By 1938, the world knew that almost all of Europe’s Jews — and …

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