Speech #890120767

Can there be any doubt that this country has indelibly declared that each individual shall be judged on his own merits? Yet these sacrosanct pronouncements are tarnished by a conscious policy that this country is now pursuing. and which now must be terminated. Our immigration law. today. reflects a racial philosophy repugnant to our American tradition. This Iniquitous law is predicated on the belief that certain people are inferior to others solely by reason of their land of birth. Mr. Speaker. the proposition that some are more equal than others must not be permitted to persist as a national immigration policy. Opposition to a change in immigration law is based on unfounded fears. It is said that a new law would flood the country with 1 million immigrants a yearmany of them hard to assimilatethat it would bring to this country thousands who are unfit and that it would overload the labor market. These fears have no foundation and crumble when exposed to the facts of immigration reform. Under the present law. the sum total of quotas for all areas. excluding the Western Hemisphere. is 158.561. This total does not include the number of refugees who are paroled in the United States. Under the proposed immigration revision a limitation of 170.000. exclusive of the Western Hemisphere. is imposed. but this limitation includes an allocation of up to 10.200 for the conditional entry of refugees. Thus. the increase in the authorized annual total will not exceed 2.000. It should also be emphasized that there has been no relaxing of the qualitative criteria for admissibility to the United States. and that no relaxation of the mental. health. moral. economic. and security criteria is proposed. The preferences within the new revision are designed to reunite families and to admit those whose skills are vitally needed by our country. As an added guarantee the law would require the Secretary of Labor to make an affirmative finding that any alien seeking to enter the United States as a worker will not replace nor adversely affect wages and working conditions of the American worker. This is a land of immigrants. this is a nation of immigrants and we must remain cognizant of the genesis of this great and powerful country. It has been built on the broad backs and agile minds of immigrants and their descendants. Those same people who deny or exclude entrance on prejudicial grounds would no doubt be denied this prerogative if their forebears were subject to present unjust law. An added factor necessitates revision.