The New York Times lead editorial of December 9, 2016, "California Prepares to Resist Mr. Trump," outlined three bills on immigration before the California state legislature, indicating special interest in the bill that "seeks to ensure that California will never be an accomplice to mass deportation."

The editorial's mindset on immigration is suggested in the second paragraph, asserting that "states and cities that value immigration ...  are girding for a confrontation" with the Trump administration, and the following paragraph, which states that the United States "cannot enforce its way out of its failure to enforce unjust immigration laws."

The New York Times seems to be convinced that president-elect Trump opposes immigration to the U.S.  Conversely, is the Times opposed, per se, to immigration laws?  

Today, with our population at more than 325 million and counting, the Times seems to advocate something pretty close to a literal "open border" approach to immigration.  (I write "literal" because I am not aware that the Times is urging our consulates to waive the need for immigration applications from all persons who hope to relocate, lawfully, to our shores.)

Perhaps the Trump transition team would be interested in knowing that there was a time when the Times was not concerned about the justness or unjustness of our immigration policy.

On June 14, 1939, when our population was about 130 million, the Times was not particularly hospitable on immigration matters -- certainly not with respect to people seeking refuge from the Nazis.  An editorial in the Times on that day, "In Elder Brewster's Steps," concerned the denouement of the "St. Louis Affair" – the "temporary sanctuary," offered by the Netherlands and Belgium, along with France and Great Britain, to the more than 900 Jews of the St. Louis seeking refuge from Hitler's Germany seven months after Kristallnacht, and after the liner had been turned away from its original destination: Cuba.  This was the paper's third editorial on the "St. Louis Affair."  None of the editorials asked President Roosevelt to give haven to the Jewish refugees on the St. Louis.

This final Times editorial on the "St. Louis Affair" did not refer to the Jews on the ship as "refugees," but called them "unhappy modern pilgrims who are passengers on the liner St. Louis." 

The editorial then observed:

For one shipload of people and for the time being this [temporary sanctuary] plan solves a problem which was not even dreamed of a generation ago, when in three successive years more than a million immigrants came into the United States. These days will not return, for mass migrations are no longer the simple solution of economic difficulties.

The Times, when it came to the plight of Jews fleeing the Nazis, opposed "mass migrations."  More than seventy-seven years later, the Times seems to have no difficulty with "mass migrations."

And today the Times is quick to apply the tar of anti-Semitism, among other evils, to anyone it finds..."deplorable"?

The bias of the Times on June 14, 1939 was indicated by the editorial's reference to the Jews of the St. Louis as "pilgrims" – not as refugees.  That editorial was accurate in one tragic respect – when it referred to the Netherlands and Belgium as places of "temporary sanctuary."  After May 1940, the Nazis murdered most of the Jews of the St. Louis admitted to the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.