Speech #870286974

The answer to which I am unalterably led is that. with regard to most of its provisions. the McCarranWalter Act has been. in a strictly pragmatic sense. a good law. It has worked reasonably well in operation. Under it. and with the assistance of a number of special laws enacted during its lifetime. we have been able to control the flow of immigration into this country. It has kept this flow within numerical bounds. regardless of the fact that the pattern of immigration has not at all been what the framers of the law had intended. I would go further than this and concede that the McCarranWalter Act is. with a few basic exceptions. a good law no matter what standards are applied. It was. after all. the product of many years of study by the Judiciary Committees of both the House and Senate. From 1947 until 1952 all of the immigration and nationality laws in force at that timea great patchwork of legislationwere reviewed. modified. and consolidated into one bill which was finally enacted as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Although the act was for the most part a codification of existing law. it also contained a few basic improvements. The most noteworthy of these changes was the granting. for the first time in our history. of the rights of U.S. citizenship. through naturalization. to all qualified resident aliens regardless of race. Prior to that time the peoples of most oriental countries had never been given the right to become naturalized in this country. The McCarranWalter Act is a long and complicated statute. It is made up of four separate titles. containing around 150 separate and closely interrelated sections. which take up 182 pages of print.