Speech #810137613

President. on behalf of myself and the distinguished junior Senator from Illinois . I submit for appropriate reference an amendment intended to be proposed by us jointly. to the bill to amend the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. as an immediate and necessary step toward an ultimate constructive solution to the socalled German ethnic expellee question. The Displaced Persons Act. passed by the Eightieth Congress in 1948. was used as the vehicle for amending part of our existing immigration law to provide that onehalf of the German and Austrian immigration quotas should be devoted to admitting into the United States political exiles of German blood from eastern Europe. The combined German and Austrian quotas available to expellees under last years amendment totaled somewhat more than 13.000 persons annually. and after a years experience under that law. we are forced to conclude that the hastily drawn amendment has failed almost completely to achieve the purpose for which it was designed. Instead of issuing a thousand or so visas a month to expellees. as the law provided. somewhere around 700 expellees have reached America thus far in 1949a fact which in itself affords convincing proof that the law has been unworkable. We propose in our amendment. then. to make this annual quota of 13.000 persons a workable quota which will. in fact. admit that number of people. In submitting our amendment at this time. we wish to invite discussion and comment prior to calling up Senate Resolution 160 to discharge the Judiciary Committee from further consideration of H. R. 4567. the amendments to the Displaced Persons Act passed by the House of Representatives earlier this session. Our amendment to give us a workable immigration quota for expellees is aimed at carrying forward in somewhat more express detail an intent set forth in H. R. 4567 at the time it passed in the House. Section 9 of H. R. 4567 recognizes that the expellee proviso in last years DP Act has proven unworkable. and to alleviate the deadlock. the House provided that the contractlabor clause ordinarily applying to immigrants shall not apply in the instance of the German ethnic expellee. Frankly. after a rather thorough investigation of the entire question. both the junior Senator from Illinois and I have reached the conclusion that the provision of the House bill does not go far enough to assure the effective use of the expellee quota. Our amendment spells out in detail two additional and affirmative guaranties that the quota will be filled.