The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith criticized today a Senate-House staff report supporting the McCarran-Walter Immigration Law as "statistical hokum." Challenging the report, Henry Edward Schultz, the League’s national chairman, said it was drawn by apologists for the controversial law. He disputed the report’s conclusions as being based on "invalid and unfair" comparisons.
Mr. Schultz said that the report, which was prepared by a "task force" comprising staff members of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees and was made public yesterday, "seeks to justify the present immigration law because the number of immigrants we allowed in last year was higher than that of 1953.
"The report plays up the statistic of 94, 098 quota immigrants arrived here last year," the ADL leader said. "But it ignores the more pertinent figure that some 60,000 visas were unused, despite the fact that there is a tremendous unsatisfied demand for visas in many countries throughout the world. The reasons our low annual quota of 154,000 was not filled are found in the discriminatory regulations of the McCarran law. These are calculatingly stacked against immigration."
The most debilitating factor in the McCarran law, Mr. Schultz declared, was its national-origins restriction. He said the Anti-Defamation League is opposed to national-origins provisions "because their effect unquestionably is to discriminate on racial and religious grounds."
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