Jackson–Vanik amendment

• 1. Introduction

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  The Jackson-Vanik amendment started as a wager about human nature. A Senate staffer named Richard Perle explained the thinking behind it in an interview. "If people could vote with their feet, governments would have to acknowledge that and governments would have to make for their citizens a life that would keep them there." That wager became a provision buried inside the Trade Act of 1974. It tied America's trading privileges to whether a country let its own citizens leave. Congress passed the underlying trade bill unanimously, and President Gerald Ford signed it into law, amendment attached, on the 3rd of January 1975. Getting there took a senator willing to defy his own party's president. It took a secret channel between Washington and Moscow. It took a collision of history: Watergate, a Middle East war, and Soviet emigration policy. What did that collision actually cost the countries it targeted, and who paid the price? And why, decades after the Cold War ended, was Congress still passing new laws just to close the book on it?

• 2. The Emigration Tax

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  In the years after the June War of 1967, Soviet authorities let a number of Jewish citizens leave the country. Hopes rose that Israel would gain new settlers. Those hopes collapsed in 1972, when Moscow imposed a new head tax on emigrants. The tax hit hardest the people the state had educated and housed for free. That burden fell heavily on Jewish applicants.

  The tax followed the 1972 Moscow summit between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev. Critics seized on it as proof that Nixon's policy of detente was burying human rights to keep the peace. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger's reluctance to even raise Soviet Jewish emigration frustrated American Jewish activists watching the talks. Just before Congress took up the amendment, the Soviets announced they were scrapping the tax. Many read the move as an attempt to head off the legislation before it could pass.

  Henry M. Jackson, a Democratic senator from Washington with his own presidential ambitions, had already been organizing around the emigration issue alongside Jewish activist groups. He took the drafting into his own hands in mid-1972. Jackson introduced the amendment to the 92nd Congress on the 4th of October 1972. Three-quarters of the Senate signed on as co-sponsors, leaving President Nixon's opposition with little room to maneuver. Jackson's own staffer, Richard Perle, later said the amendment's animating idea belonged to Jackson alone.

  That near-unanimous vote in the Senate still left the House to settle, where Charles Vanik was about to pick up the fight.

• 3. Building The Coalition

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  In 1973, Charles A. Vanik, a Democratic representative from Ohio who chaired the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade, introduced the House version of the legislation. He had drafted it together with Jackson. The bill would deny normal trade relations to nonmarket economies that restricted freedom of emigration, aimed above all at freeing Jewish refugees and other religious minorities from the Soviet bloc. Vanik's aide, Mark E. Talisman, is widely credited with playing an instrumental role in getting it passed.

  Jackson attached his amendment to a trade bill the Nixon administration badly wanted, giving himself real bargaining power over the White House. He kept widening his coalition as the fight dragged on. Organized labor, ethnic groups with roots in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, human rights organizations, and liberal intellectuals joined the Jewish activists already on board. Even while building that support, Jackson refused to compromise with either the administration or the Soviet Union.

  During the House Ways and Means Committee's markup sessions, the Nixon administration tried to keep the amendment out of the committee's version of the bill entirely. Once that failed, delay became the administration's next tactic. A threatened presidential veto backed up the delay.

  The Yom Kippur War broke out in October 1973, complicating how Congress viewed the Soviet Union. Soviet involvement in that conflict deepened some lawmakers' distrust of Moscow. Other members worried that pushing the Nixon administration on emigration would slow emergency weapons shipments to Israel. Israel prevailed in the war. On the 11th of December 1973, the House voted 319-80 to include the full amendment in the trade bill, which then passed 272-140.

  Congress recessed until January 1974, with the amendment's fate still undecided in the Senate.

• 4. The Back-Channel Negotiation

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  On the 21st of January 1974, the second session of the 93rd Congress opened, and Jackson's amendment moved onto the Senate floor. Having lost the legislative fight in the House, the Nixon administration and Soviet officials turned instead to negotiating directly with Jackson. Trilateral talks began that spring among Congress, the executive branch, and the Soviet Union.

  Three men dominated those talks: Jackson, Henry Kissinger, and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, a senior diplomat who had served in Washington for decades. Kissinger held a unique advantage, since he alone controlled the communications passing between Jackson and the Soviet side. He also ran a long-running informal "back channel" with Soviet authorities through Dobrynin. His influence only grew as Nixon became consumed by the Watergate scandal.

  In March 1974, Kissinger returned from Moscow reporting that the Soviets were willing to cooperate with Congress. Jackson then complicated matters by making those private concessions public. By summer the talks had bogged down, as Watergate drained the executive branch of its political energy. Nixon resigned on the 9th of August 1974.

  With Gerald Ford now in office, Jackson faced a choice. He could accept an imperfect deal, or hold out and risk losing the entire trade bill. Kissinger appeared willing to let both the bill and the amendment die rather than budge further. Jackson compromised, agreeing to grant the Soviet Union temporary trade concessions, including extensions of credit.

  Anxious for a legislative win after years of fighting, Jackson eventually accepted terms that fell short of what he wanted. He decided against pressing for firmer, less ambiguous pledges, wary of ending up with nothing to show for his efforts. On the 10th of January 1975, the Soviet government sent a letter that appeared to refuse emigration assurances or changes to the underlying 1972 Trade Agreement. On the 13th of January 1975, Kissinger met Soviet officials. He then announced that the 1972 Trade Agreement could not be brought into force, and that the president would not exercise his waiver authority.

  None of that Washington maneuvering had happened without an unlikely push from outside government, from a greeting-card company based in Cleveland, Ohio.

• 5. A Cleveland Connection

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  Harry Stone served as vice president of American Greetings, and his brother Irving Stone served as the company's president. Both ran the business from Cleveland, Ohio, which happened to be Charles Vanik's hometown. Harry Stone had also served as Vanik's campaign chairman, a connection that mattered when Vanik asked the two brothers for help.

  Vanik asked the Stones to lean on Congressman Wilbur Mills. He wanted Mills to schedule a floor vote on the amendment, which required the Soviet Union to permit Jewish emigration in exchange for most favored nation status. American Greetings happened to be the largest employer in Mills's Arkansas district. The company later opened one of its largest printing plants in that same state, home to both Mills and Senator J. William Fulbright.

  Fulbright, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, dismissed the entire effort as "idealistic meddling." He objected to using free Jewish emigration as a bargaining chip against the Soviet Union.

  Vic Gelb, an honorary life director of the Cleveland Jewish News, later said: "The role that Harry Stone played in making the Jackson-Vanik bill a reality will go down as one of the most meaningful contributions that a Clevelander has ever made." Gelb added that Stone's work "made a world of difference in the history of events and enabled the exodus of Jews from the former Soviet Union."

  Whatever pull a greeting-card company carried in Arkansas, it was the amendment's actual legal text, written into the Trade Act as Section 402, that would decide which countries it could touch.

• 6. The Fine Print

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  Section 402 of the Trade Act, titled "Freedom of Emigration in East-West Trade" and codified as 19 U.S.C. 2432(a), spelled out exactly how the amendment worked. A nonmarket economy country lost eligibility for normal trade relations, government credit programs, and commercial agreements with the United States. That happened if the president determined the country denied citizens the right to emigrate, or imposed more than a nominal tax, fine, or fee on anyone trying to leave.

  The president did retain authority to grant an annual waiver. That power kept trade open with the People's Republic of China through the late 1970s, and it was later extended to Vietnam and Laos in later decades.

  Twelve countries eventually fell under the amendment's reach: the Soviet Union and later the post-Soviet states, the People's Republic of China, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, Mongolia, Albania, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

  Poland was exempted outright, though the exemption briefly lapsed. Poland's unconditional most favored nation status was suspended in 1982-1987 over its crackdown on the Solidarność movement.

  Yugoslavia was exempted as well. In 1991-1992, violence during Yugoslavia's breakup led Washington to suspend the most favored nation status of Serbia and Montenegro specifically.

  Moscow's own record under that same freedom of emigration standard would look very different by the end of the 1980s, under an entirely new Soviet leadership.

• 7. Mixed Results

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  At first, the Jackson-Vanik amendment barely helped Soviet Jews at all. The number of exit visas issued actually declined in the years right after the amendment passed.

  By the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed to comply with the protocols of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Historian Lazin, writing in 2005, found that scholars still disagree on how much credit the amendment deserves. Some argue it helped draw the world's attention to Soviet Jews' plight. Others believe it actually hindered emigration and weakened America's diplomatic position instead.

  Since 1975, more than 500,000 refugees have resettled in the United States, including large numbers of Jews, evangelical Christians, and Catholics from the former Soviet Union. Separately, an estimated one million Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel over that same period.

  The amendment's ripple effects reached beyond emigration statistics. Other Soviet ethnic groups began demanding the same right to leave. That forced the ruling Communist Party to confront widespread dissatisfaction with its own governance.

  Former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, in his 2004 book The Case for Democracy, wrote that Kissinger saw Jackson's amendment as an attempt to undermine plans to smoothly divide the geopolitical world between the superpowers. "It was," Sharansky added. "Jackson believed that the Soviets had to be confronted, not appeased."

  Physicist Andrei Sakharov, another prominent opponent of detente, insisted that human rights was never merely a humanitarian issue. He saw it also as a matter of international security. As he put it: "A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors."

  Sakharov's formula outlived the Soviet Union itself, and Congress kept revisiting the emigration question well into the 1990s, this time under a law named for Frank Lautenberg.

• 8. The Long Unwinding

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  After Boris Perchatkin addressed Congress in 1989, Senator Frank Lautenberg proposed what became Public Law 101-167. It was enacted on the 21st of November 1989 and took effect in 1990. The Lautenberg Amendment granted refugee status to nationals of the Soviet Union, and later Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, who were Jews, evangelical Christians, Ukrainian Catholics, or Ukrainian Orthodox. It also covered nationals of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and Jews, Christians, Baha'is, and other religious minorities from Iran.

  The Lautenberg measure let people from historically persecuted groups claim refugee status without proving they had been personally singled out. Under it, an estimated 350,000-400,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union gained entry to the United States by October 2002, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, without presenting any evidence of persecution. Starting in 2002, a dedicated Refugee Corps inside the Department of Homeland Security took over handling Lautenberg cases.

  Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had fallen under the amendment because the Soviet Union had forcibly incorporated them. They were freed from it once the United States recognized their independence on the 6th of September 1991.

  Kazakhstan's Jewish community reportedly asked the United States to cancel the amendment's application to their country. Journalist Robert Guttman, in an article titled "A Relic of the Cold War," called the amendment an "outdated and rather meaningless piece of legislation." The U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued it left American companies at a competitive disadvantage there, and urged Congress to graduate Kazakhstan from it entirely.

  Kyrgyzstan received conditional normal trade relations in 1992. By 1997 it was found fully compliant, though its status stayed subject to annual review. On the 18th of May 2000, Public Law 106-200 finally authorized unconditional normal trade relations for Kyrgyzstan.

  Moldova followed a similar path, receiving conditional normal trade relations in 1992 and being found fully compliant in 1997, though also kept under annual review. On the 16th of November 2012, the House of Representatives passed a bill repealing the amendment for both Russia and Moldova. After Senate approval, President Barack Obama signed the repeal on the 14th of December 2012, alongside the Magnitsky Act. That law granted both countries normal trade relations, shifting the focus toward punishing individual human rights violators instead.

  Years earlier, in 2003, Vladimir Putin had pursued his own agenda to normalize Russia's trade with the West. He sought both European Union membership and repeal of Jackson-Vanik. Putin leaned on his relationship with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, then head of the European Union's Council, to advance Russia's EU ambitions. He also courted Hank Greenberg, chairman and chief executive of the American International Group, hoping AIG could help develop Russia's fledgling home mortgage market in exchange for support on repeal.

  On the 8th of March 2006, the House of Representatives passed a bill permanently exempting Ukraine from the 1974 restrictions.

  China remained covered by the amendment until its accession to the World Trade Organization in December 2001. Before the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, the presidential waiver for China had been granted almost routinely. After the crackdown, that waiver became a far more contentious yearly fight. It only ended when China's 2001 WTO entry gave it permanent normal trade relations.

  In April 2011, Eduard Lozansky, a professor at American University in Moscow, and Antony Salvia, a former Reagan administration official, filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C. Their lawsuit argued that the Jackson-Vanik amendment itself was illegal, a direct legal challenge to the law from outside Congress even as lawmakers kept dismantling it country by country.