I will come to that in just a moment. The idea of this national origins amendment Is that we will establish a method against which there can not be the slightest accusation of discrimination. that ifI will answer the Senators question with an. "if" for the momentif we can determine the national origins of all our people. foreign born and native born. then the fairest thing and the wisest thing to do is to make our immigration an exact cross section of our present population. We talk about the melting pot today. and what we mean by the melting pot Is that a nation of one kind of people is getting an inflonv of different kinds of people.- but we will not need any melting pot if our immigration is just a cross section of our present population. and the idea which underlies the last proposition is that we will make our quotas whatever aggregate figure Congress sees fit to select. or as Congress may from time to time decide to vary it. but within that aggregate we will apportion the quotas to the several nationalities according as their people are represented in the United States in our present census. The Senator asks. and very properly. where it is that I get the figures which furnish the basis of the statement that 74 per cent of our present population has Its national origin in northwestern Europe. I say at the beginning that we have a study by the Census Bureau. which has determined that 47.000.000 out of the 94.000.000. of whites who are here today are descended from our original population. of 3.000.000 who were tabulated in the 1790 census.
Keywords matched
foreign born immigration