ABSTRACT
Most scholarship on US refugee and asylum policy focuses on the period after the Second World War, though some works briefly mention that the 1917 immigration law exempted from the literacy test those fleeing from religious persecution. One scholar has claimed this early provision was ‘stillborn’, given the passage of increasingly restrictionist quota laws in 1921 and 1924 that guaranteed no slots for refugees (Bon Tempo 2008: 15). Another scholar categorises the literacy test exemption as part of a liberal tradition of asylum, which developed in the USA as a defence against exclusion and deportation (Price 2009: 52–58). But there has been no investigation into what actually happened to a population that was supposed to benefit from the literacy test exemption – Armenian immigrants – to assess how the binary of realities and ideals structured the provision of refuge. 1
