The adoption of an “alien code” to embody all laws concerning immigration, naturalization and deportation was urged by Representative Albert Johnson, chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, at the Conference on Immigration Policy at the Hotel Woodstock on Saturday. There will be no great changes in the naturalization laws within the next five years unless a strong deportation act is passed, he said.
Explaining the difficulties of immigration and naturalization legislation, he declared also that the entire problem is too great to be handled by a committee sitting during Congressional sessions.
“We are seeking to formulate a grand program, to be called the alien code, in which all laws concerning immigration, naturalization, deportation and possibly registration, shall be embodied, and the only way this vast problem can be worked out adequately is for a joint commission to be named to sit steadily until its work is done,” he said.
There are a million persons in this country, he continued, who entered it through irregular channels prior to 1924, and are now mostly well established and conforming to citizenship regulations. It is the duty of the country to make provisions for these people, he said, and suggested a blanket “king’s excuse” of some of the laws to permit the entry to citizenship of those who entered the country during the three years prior to July 1, 1924, possibly, he said, upon the payment of a nominal fine of $10 or $12.
“As soon as our immigration laws are rationally worked out,” he said, “naturalization will not be a serious problem. If we can keep out the undesirables, the simpler we make these naturalization tests the better. I have no sympathy for tests which include such questions as ‘Who is the present Secretary of the Interior?’ There have been times when I could not answer that question.”
It will be necessary, he said, before this simplicity can be allowed, to solve certain problems regarding the United States’ land borders, to devise immigration laws which will not open the “Oriental problem,” and to pass deportation laws which will give the government greater power in ridding itself of undesirables.
Chief Judge Myer J. Block of Baltimore, Md., who was recently elected Judge of the Orphans’ Court, has been notified by Governor Albert C. Ritchie that he has been reappointed Chief Judge.
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.
