Proposal of Congressman Sabath to Base Present Quota on 1900 Census Rejected; Dickstein Introduces Bill to Deport Aliens Guilty of Non-Support of Families Abroad (Jewish Daily Bulletin)
A resolution proposing to strike out the “national origins” provisions from the Immigration Act of 1924 was approved by the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the House yesterday. The committee decided to report favorably the resolution to the House and place it on one of the legislative calendars.
The Senate passed the resolution February 1, which then included a provision for extending the time of the applicability of the “national origins” provisions from July 1, 1927 to July 1, 1928. As amended by the House Committee, the resolution provides for the entire repeal of the provisions, so that they shall not, at any time, be applicable.
Subdivisions b, c. d. and e, Section 11, Immigration Act of 1924, which the amended resolution proposes to repeal, would have provided that after July 1, 1927, the annual quota of any nationality should be the number “which bears the same ratio to 150,000 as the number of inhabitants in continental United States in 1920 having that national origin bears to the number of inhabitants in continental United States in 1920.”
The provisions stipulated that this number for every national origin should be determined by a commission, and the number should be fixed through a proclamation of the President to be made on or before April 1, 1927. A preliminary report was recently made by the commission, consisting of State, Commerce and Labor, in which it was stated that the “statistical and historical information from which the computations were made is not entirely satisfactory.”
The report also stated that it was problematical whether the issuance of the proclamation fixing the quotas of the national origins was mandatory upon the President. According to the report of the commission, “the statistical and historical information available raises grave doubts as to the whole value of these computations as a basis for the purposes intended.”
The annual quota of any nationality, fixed by the Immigration Act of 1924 and now in existence, is “two percent of the number of foreign-born individuals of such nationality resident in continental United States as determined by the United States census of 1890, but the minimum quota of any nationality shall be 100.” Should the resolution, as amended by the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, be enacted into law, the present immigrant quotas will remain in effect.
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