Speech #870286974

I repeat. has a quota of 65.361. How have these quotas been utilized? During the year ended June 30. 1961. more than onethird of the worldwide quota immigrant visas went unused. Out of a total quota exceeding 156.000. some 96.000 quota immigrants were admitted. Great Britain used well under half of its quota. And. strangely enough. total immigration for the year far exceeded the number of visas available under the quota. This was because for every two quota immigrants admitted. there were three or more immigrants admitted outside the quotaanother clear indication that the quota system is not doing what its designers intended. Yet in spite of the fact that a third of the worldwide quota was not utilized there were hundreds of thousands of aliens who could not enter the United States because the quotas for their countries were used up. The latest Visa Office survey of quota immigrants registered on oversubscribed quotas shows that there are close to 900.000 persons barred from admission to this country solely because of the quota system. Surely something is amiss in our immigration policy when we have qualified aliens waiting for years to enter the country and at the same time have onethird of the quotas being unused. Certainly some other plan could be devised which would at least offer a more equitable distribution of the quotas. A multitude of proposals have been introduced for this purpose.