Speech #830195681

I cannot refrain from raising basic policy questions which are inevitably involved in this bill. The Senate should know. and the public should understand. the significance of what we are proposing to do by means of the bill. We have on our statute books an immigration law whose author and chief defender is the senior Senator from Nevada. The heart and soul of that law is the national origins quota system. That system presupposes as a first and immutable principle that qualification for admission into this country must be based on the national origin of the alien in question. Our total annual immigration quota is broken down into rigid. ironclad subquotas. There are thousands and thousands of cases of human tragedy and human heartbeak occurring constantly because of the inflexible. discriminatory nature of the quota system. Worthy and deserving personsparents and grandparents and brothers and sisters of American citizensare denied admission into this country because they happened to have been born in a country whose quota is oversubscribed. Today there are 30.000 on the waiting list in Greece. most of whom have been on that waiting list since 1945. This is just one illustration. The example can be duplicated on an even larger scale in many other countries. Now we are being asked to set that quota system aside. and to give nonquota status to 385 Basque sheepherders who are needed in Nevada. The annual quota for Spain is 250. There is a long waiting list under the Spanish quota.