Speech #810188939

I find that. while this body does not seem to know what the problems are concerning displaced persons. we hear it said that this Nation must do its full and fair share. that we must take the lead in caring for displaced persons. As an example. a statement is cited to the effect that 174.000 displaced persons have entered this country. Actually. since the beginning of the war. the refugees classified as displaced persons who have come to this country number between 600.000 and 700.000. showing that more refugees have been admitted by the United States than have been admitted by all the other nations of the world. taken together. The propaganda is backed up by an expensive lobby. My impression at the time was that the problem of displaced persons involved only some few hundred thousand persons in central Europe. who were the survivors of the concentration camps or who constituted the backwash of the war. I had read.vivid descriptions of the displaced persons. in which they were portrayed as suffering humanity. behind barbedwire fences. who could neither be repatriated to their homelands nor settled in the occupied areas of Germany or Austria. I had read. too. the charges that the United States had not received a fair share of the displaced persons. that the present law was discriminatory and that each of some two dozen amendments to the displaced persons law which were then pending before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary would solve the problem of displaced persons. After months of intensive study of the facts which have been developed by the subcommittee under the able leadership of the senior Senator from Nevada I am convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that the appealing term. "displaced person." is being used for the perpetration of a gigantic fraud on the American people by those who would destroy our protective immigration system to the end that our country may be inundated with a flood of aliens who are storming our portals from the turbulent populations of the entire world. May I hasten to add. Mr. President. that I do not question in the slightest the motives of the proponents of the socalled liberalizing substitute bill which is pending in the Senate under the sponsorship of the Senator from West Virginia and 17 other Senators. because if the facts were as they have been so dramatically portrayed by those who have expended $1.000.000 in perverting a great humanitarian problem to their own designs. then I. too. would join as a sponsor of the substitute bill. I may say in passing that I have checked the committee service records of the 18 Senators who are sponsoring the substitute bill. and not a single one of those distinguished Senators has ever served in either House of the Congress on a regular immigration committee or a regular immigration subcommittee. I hazard the assertion that the sponsors of the substitute bill do not know the significance or the operative effect of a substantial number of the provisions of the bill which they have sponsored. This was clearly demonstrated on the floor of the Senate a day or so ago when the senior Senator from Mississippi was engaged in a colloquy with the proponents of the substitute bill. The Senator made -reference to certain language contained in the present law. in which a displaced person is defined. but which is omitted from the substitute bill. The net effect of the omission of this language in the substitute bill would be to permit certain groups of displaced persons who have been received by other countries of the world to return to Germany or Austria from all over the world and gain eligibility for immigration to the United States as displaced persons. Already. Mr.