The State Department has no plans to replace Edward J. Corsi as special aide to the Secretary of State on immigration matters and as expediter of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, a Department spokesman indicated today. He said he knew of no intention to increase the staff to facilitate the movement of refugees to this country under the 1953 act.
Mr. Corsi was summarily dropped this weekend on the grounds that his appointment had originally been for a 90-day period which had now expired. The former Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization rejected the offer of a substitute position involving a survey of Latin American immigration policies.
In a letter to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, rejecting this assignment, Mr. Corsi said that America’s immigration and refugee program “needs to be entrusted in the hands of men who have faith in humanity, who honestly believe that America has a responsibility toward the victims of war and persecution in the world. I am not convinced that it is now in the bands of such men.”
He told Mr. Dulles that “the program will not work until you and the Administration are willing to rescue it from the grip of an intolerant minority both in Congress and within the Department itself which believes that in this world there are superior and inferior races. These people are sabotaging the program and have brought about my elimination from its administration.”
He said new and vigorous leadership is needed to rescue the program both in Washington and in field offices. “But more than this, Mr. Secretary,” he said, “more than administrative energy and leadership, the program needs heart.”
Meanwhile, the Administration stood accused today of having made a deal to abandon revision of the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act to secure passage of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953.
Cabell Philipps, a Washington correspondent of the New York Times, writing in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine, assailed “that phony refugee law” and charged that “seldom has there been a more calculated piece of legislative hypocrisy than the Refugee Relief Act of 1953.” The law, he said, stands on the books as “a national disgrace.”
Reporting on the sidetracking of the attempt to revise the McCarran-Walter Act, the article said: “…It was clear to Republican leaders, particularly in the Senate, that efforts to get such a revision would provoke a bitter and probably losing fight. They laid this dilemma before the President, it now appears, and urged that if he would forego his insistence on softening the McCarran-Walter Act, they would undertake to get, in exchange, some sort of special legislation for refugees.”
What they then emerged with was the refugee entry act, the article noted, adding: “This, at least, they argued, would quiet the minority groups who were doing all the shouting. The President apparently agreed to this substitution in good faith; he probably did not know he was swapping something for nothing. At all events, nothing more was heard about revising the McCarran-Walter Act.”
(President Eisenhower was urged today to reinstate Edward F. Corsi to his post as State Department expediter of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 in a telegram from former Justice Meier Steinbrink, honorary national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. In a parallel development, five Protestant and Jewish leaders protested the dismissal to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Irving M Engel, president of the American Jewish Committee, was one of the signatories to the message asking Mr. Dulles for a public explanation of the dismissal.)
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
