By 1938 economic recovery was well under way; as Hoare noted, immigrants (after an adjustment period) generally contribute far more to an economy than they draw from it, and the moral obligation to aid those in need should surely outweigh mere economic calculations. (Nowadays, Britain is bound by the 1951 U.N. Convention on the Status of Refugees to give asylum to refugees once they have landed, but this merely formalizes what was already the case in practice anyway. If anything it makes the government even more determined to keep refugees from landing.) Native British Nazi sympathizers, of whom there were not a few, would have made far more effective agents than any outsider; in any case there is not a single known case of a Jewish immigrant serving the Nazis. The argument that some people should not be helped because it would encourage others to seek help is morally bankrupt; the argument that to help the victims of persecution would encourage other persecutors is speculative and should properly lead to the conclusion that ways should be found to discourage persecution, not that its victims should be abandoned. Finally, though Britain could not have known that Nazi Germany was going to murder the Jews, there were strong reasons for suspecting such a possibility--not least, Hitler's speech of 30 January 1939, threatening "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe," which was widely reported at the time.