Senate Body Starts Hearings on Amending Mccarran Immigration Law

Hearings on bills to amend the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Naturalization Act began before a Senate Immigration Subcommittee today with critics of the measure blasting it as discriminatory, a source of controversy and a black eye for America in the world at large.

Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, in prepared testimony which he made public yesterday, called for scrapping of the measure and termed it “perhaps the most blatant piece of discrimination in the nation’s history. ” Sen. Kennedy noted that religious leaders regard the McCarran Act an “affront to the entire world” and added that the national origins quota system, on which the legislation is based, denies a fundamental principle on which the United States was founded–that all men are created equal.

A call for revision of the measure, but not its complete scrapping, was voiced by Sen. Clifford P. Case of New Jersey, who said that the controversy set off by the Act could best be ended by a revision free of politics, rancor and personalities. Sen. Case suggested that 1950 rather than 1920 be used as a base year for computing national origins quotas and that unused quota numbers be pooled and reallocated for countries whose quotas are oversubscribed.

All discrimination based upon national origin or racial heritage should be stricken from current U.S. Immigration laws, the president of the National Council of Churches of Christ, Rev. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, told the Subcommittee. Speaking for the CIO, Victor G. Reuther called for abandonment of any rigid scheme of allocating quotas to countries, urging “Congress simply to fix the maximum numbers of visas annually and leave it to an administrative agency to allocate these visas among the various countries each year on the basis of specified revelant considerations.”