Sen. William Benton, of Connecticut, warned today in a Senate speech against the McCarran Omnibus Immigration Bill. The bill, he said, would “erect an iron curtain around our own United States–an iron curtain of arbitrary standards which will mark us for the rest of the world as a nation which declines to practice the principles which we preach.”
Sen. Benton argued that the bill, which is opposed by major Jewish groups and many other national organizations, “would turn our immigration officials into bureaucrats on the totalitarian model.”
As the Senate went into its second day of debate today on the measure, liberals intensified their efforts to have it returned for further committee study. Sen. Pat McCarran has said that he would consider any such return of his bill an insult. He complained that “subversives” were opposing his bill.
(The New York Times, in an editorial today, said that “the McCarran Bill and its companion-piece, the Walter Bill – which has already passed the House – are so unsatisfactory that it would be far better for Congress to adopt no new immigration law at all this session than to accept either of these two measures unless they are thoroughly amended.”)
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