Dividing Lines by Daniel J. Tichenor

Author:Daniel J. Tichenor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

McCarran and Walter’s own immigration reform initiative affirmed national origins quotas, but called for visa allocations within each country’s existing quota to be based on a new preference system emphasizing job skills and family reunification. With anticommunist vigilance, the McCar-ran- Walter bill included new exclusionary categories aimed at punishing political radicalism and social nonconformity. If the principal goal of the legislation was to preserve national origins quotas as the keystone of the nation’s immigrant admissions policy, its sponsors did their best to characterize their proposal as remedying the most pernicious racial biases in federal immigration law. These claims were based on a provision abolishing Asian exclusion and the ignominious Asiatic Barred Zone establishedin 1924. Yet its replacement was scarcely an improvement: two thousand total annual visas were to be available for all nonwhite immigrants born within an Asian-Pacific Triangle stretching from India to Japan to the Pacific Islands. Tellingly, immigrants from predominantly white Asian countries like Australia and New Zealand were not constrained by this new allocation scheme.

McCarran and Walter sought and won approval for joint House and Senate subcommittee hearings on the rival immigration reform bills, with McCarran serving as chair. This shrewd maneuver was intended to blunt the influence of Celler, the new House Judiciary Committee chair. The McCarran-Walter alliance proved frustrating to liberal immigration reformers, who were marginalized in the joint hearings process. Celler and a young Peter Rodino (D-NJ), both supportive of the Humphrey-Lehman-Roosevelt bill, were often muffled during the hearings.46 More importantly, McCarran and Walter orchestrated witness lists and testimony to favor their bill. To be sure, a small number of groups like the ADA and ACPFB testified that the bill reflected “politically exploited hysteria and confusion in the country” that sacrificed democratic “concepts of justice and equal treatment.”47 But this was the exception. Most groups appearing at the joint hearings endorsed the McCarran-Walter package. Prominent veterans and patriotic organizations, including the Veterans of Foreign War (VFW) and the American Legion, said the nation’s internal strength depended on severe immigration restriction. Although supportive of liberal efforts to assist European refugees, the AFL unwaveringly backed the McCarran-Walter bill. The AFL Executive Council denounced the Humphrey-Lehman-Roosevelt bill because it promised to undermine “the spirit of the Quota Act of 1924” and “disturb the ethnic equilibrium of this country.”48 Early in 1952, AFL president Walter Mason privately told his Washington lobbyists that the Executive Committee fully supported the racial basis for restricting immigrant admissions:

The pooling of unused quotas would be in direct conflict with the national origin principle . . . which seeks to maintain the general racial composition of our population. . . . The effect of pooling of unused quotas would be not only to increase substantially the number of people coming to the U.S. but would, in the course of a generation or so, change the complexion of the population of this nation.49

Even the Japanese American Citizens League testified in favor of the McCarran-Walter bill for providing annual visas for Japanese immigrants; the group’s ambivalent leadership decided that token quotas were preferable to outright exclusion.

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