Representative Francis Walter, Pennsylvania Democrat, and co-author of the MeCarran-Walter Immigration Act, last night said that if President Eisenhower were “sincere” in his criticism of the immigration law he “will have the Attorney General of the United States submit specific legislation.”
The statement was made by Rep. Walter on Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now,” CBS television program, after excerpts from a Presidential campaign address and two State of the Union messages criticizing inequities in the Immigration Act were heard.
The program was devoted to a discussion of the immigration law and participants, in addition to Rep. Walter, were Senator Herbert H. Lehman. New York State Attorney, General Jacob K. Javits, Archbishop Richard J. Cushing, and Rabbi Israel Goldstein.
Rep. Walter defended the Act as having accomplished “much that we hoped for.” He said that most of the criticism of it came around “election time.” He also said that he didn’t know how well the “melting pot” theory had succeeded because he saw “evidence on all hands of hyphenated Americanism.”
Declaring that “there’s no place in America for hyphenated Americanism.” he went on to defend the national origins quota system on the basis that racial groups given preference under the present law “would become quicker assimilated according to the size of the group.”
CLAIMS LAW IS NOT ANTI-SEMITIC; REFUTED BY JEWISH LEADERS
Rep. Walter went on to note charges that the law was anti-Semitic and said he had asked Javits “wherein this law was anti-Semitic and he (Javits) laughed and said nowhere is there anything in the law that’s anti-Semitic.” Mr. Javits, replying to this statement, said that he told the Pennsylvania Congressman that there was nothing specifically anti-Semitic in the law, “but I hastened to add that the law, in my opinion, discriminated against minorities,” and that included persons from areas such as Eastern and Southeastern Europe, from which a good many Jewish people have come; that it was “anti-all people who came from those areas.”
Both Senator Lehman and Archbishop Cushing similarly attacked the immigration law on the basis that it perpetuated the discriminatory features of the national origins quota system and was intended to prevent national minorities from entering the United States.
Rabbi Goldstein said that the Jewish stake, numerically speaking, was not large in this matter, “owing to the unfortunate fact that six million Jews have been exterminated by Hitler and two and a half million Jews are now sealed off in the countries behind the Iron Gurtain, and owing to the fortunate fact that hundreds of thousands of Jews have come from European countries into Israel where they have found their homes and their freedom.” Nevertheless, Rabbi Goldstein pointed out, “our opposition is just as strong and just as vehement as that of any other group because we condemn the grounds on which it (the law) is based.”
Asked by CBS correspondent Dan Schorr what he thought of the fact that leaders of all three major religious denominations had criticized and attacked the Act, Rep. Walter answered, “I don’t know what religious leaders are criticizing this law who know anything about it. However, a lot of the old pros, the old immigrant movers whose job it is to move people, and of course, they don’t like to see any limit placed on their work, find that it isn’t as easy to bring people into the United States as they would like it to be.”
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.
