Historical perspective:

"...roughly 150,000 refugees fled Germany from 1933 to the start of 1938 compared to over one million Russians in the 1920s - goverments’ asylum policies became strikingly more restrictive as the economic crisis continued. Sir Neill Malcolm, the League of Nations High Commissioner for German Refugees from 1936 (his predecessor in the role, James MacDonald, resigned in protest at the ‘intransigence of the international community’ in facing up to the German refugee problem) did manage to bring together representatives from fifteen countries in late 1936 for a conference focused on the German refugee question. States, although supportive of potential measures to alleviate the suffering of German refugees within their territories, remained particularly hesitant to commit to helping potential future arrivals from Germany. Romania noted that it had already reached its capacity for receiving refugees apart from those travelling through the country. The Netherlands wanted to retain its power to allow or disallow refugees from entering its territory. Switzerland repeatedly drew attention to the problem of clandestine refugees and underlined the problems caused by their continued entry at a time of economic depression, stating its preference to ‘aid the refugee coming from Germany to settle elsewhere’ rather than allow them settle in its territory. Resembling recent asylum debates, Belgium thought countries should be allowed to ask refugees to return to the country in which they found first asylum. Nevertheless, all of these countries, with the exception of Romania, adopted the provisional non-binding arrangement set out in the conference with various amendments, in addition to the UK, France, Norway and Denmark. Further efforts by the High Commissioner for German Refugees to attain states’ acquiescence to more authoritative rules defining their treatment of German refugees proved mostly futile, however. Only two countries, the UK and Belgium (and France in 1945) ratified the later Convention concerning the Status of Refugees coming from Germany, completed in February 1938 as restrictive measures against rising numbers of refugees from Germany and Austria became more widespread.

Twenty-nine governments came together in the small French town of Evian in July 1938 to discuss the problem of refugees fleeing Nazism. Evian’s negligible recommendations – the highlight involved setting up the ineffective Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees – clearly demonstrated states’ reservations in helping refugees escape Nazi persecution. In the historian Michael Marrus’s words, ‘Evian simply underscored the unwillingness of the Western countries to receive Jewish refugees’ with ‘one delegate after another read[ing] statements into the record, justifying existing restrictive policies and congratulating themselves on how much had already been accomplished for refugees’. Soon after the Evian conference, Hungary and Yugoslavia closed their frontiers, Italy announced its 1938 anti-Jewish decrees, and Holland, Belgium and Switzerland reinforced their borders to restrict the entry of refugees.

The annexation of Austria in March 1938 and Kristallnacht in Germany in November of the same year turned, in the words of historian Claudena Skran, ‘a manageable refugee flow into an uncontrollable flood’. To make matters worse, the 1938 Nazi laws forbidding Jews fleeing from taking their belongings and savings caused many European countries to step up their restrictions against the entry and stay of Jews. Previously, Jews brought certain economic advantages to host states because they arrived with significant financial resources but from 1938 onwards Jews frequently arrived penniless at a time of serious economic recession. Between early 1936 and mid 1938 private organisations and individuals drew the High Commissioner’s attention to approximately 5,000 cases where German refugees received expulsion orders from countries of asylum, leading to the High Commissioner’s intervention to halt ‘unauthorised measures of expulsion taken by the police or minor officials’. But the cessation of the High Commissioner’s office on the 1st of January 1939 closed off this avenue despite the marked augmentation of refugees from Nazism and Fascist Spain. By the outbreak of war in September 1939, the number of people that escaped Nazism since 1933 reached approximately 400,000. More would have left except for the increasingly restrictive immigration policies of European countries caused by anti-Semitism, labour shortages and refugees’ destitution."

[(source)] (http://migrationeducation.de/33.2.html?&rid=219&cHash=a21915e38b6857b98d81aedf584fb3f2