Hungarian Refugees and the United States: Legacies and Lessons

About the Lecture: The United States' response to the 1956 Hungarian refugee crisis seems so distant now, especially given the unraveling of America’s refugee admissions programs by the Trump administration. This talk examines the role the United States played in helping Hungarian refugees, how that aid shaped – for good and ill – future refugee admissions, and how the Hungarian episode shed light on the current American commitment to refugees.

About the speaker: Carl J. Bon Tempo is an associate professor of history at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War, published by Princeton University Press in 2008. He is the co-author, with Hasia Diner, of Immigration: An American History, published by Yale University Press in 2022. His current research and writing focuses on modern immigration history, human rights history, and punk rock history. He lives in the Hudson Valley with his partner and their son, where he also coaches high school soccer.

This lecture is part of the symposium, "The Hungarian Refugee Crisis and Its Global Impact," organized by the Center for Austrian Studies, Department of History, and the Immigration History Research Center Archives. This lecture has been made possible due to the generous support of the Immigration History Research Center. Co-sponsors of the symposium also include the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch, the Department of Political Science, the Center for German & European Studies, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Human Rights Program, and the Deinard Fund.