Speech #890120789

H.R. 2580 sets right four decades of wrong embodied in legislation passed in 1924. With its passage we can correct a mistake of history and reaffirm our devotion to the principle of equal justice for peoples previously subject to discrimination. When the national origins quota system was introduced in the 1920s. a House minority report called it "blatant discrimination." The report said the system adopted "an unfounded anthropological theory that the nations which are favored are the progeny of the fictitious and hitherto unsuspected Nordic ancestors while those discriminated against are not classified as belonging to that mythical stock." It was. in the eyes of the minority. a "pseudoscientific proposition." Today it Is still a pseudoscientific proposition. That is now recognized by the majority. I would have been with that minority in 1924. I am happy to be with the majority who will vote for this bill in 1965. The national origins quota system was last considered in depth in this House 13 years ago. I had hoped at that timeas many other members who are here today had hopedthat three decades of the inequities of that system would have prompted its abolition. Instead of abolition. we obtained the McCarranWalter Act. which incorporated most of the worst features of the existing quota system and added further restrictions. It is best described by that which a celebrated author labeled "administrative ecstasy." It spun a labyrinthian web of consular. executive. and congressional redtape over and around the American melting pot. I fought that bill. I voted against it and I voted to sustain President Trumans veto. I have sought its repeal ever since because it is unfair. it is discriminatory. it is arbitrary and it is obsolete. It is a legal hangover from the xenophobic isolationism that permeated this Nation in the HardingCoolidge days. There are few Members of this House who have not made attempts to bypass the narrow limitations of the present immigration laws. Congressional action shows that the humanity of America is more evident in the exceptions to the law than in the law itself. We have endorsed bills admitting thousands of displaced refugees from World War II. from behind the Iron Curtain and from disaster struck homelands. The committee report on H.R. 2580 almost understates when it says: The performance of the Congress in the field of immigration in the postwar period has been far more generous and sympathetic than adherence to the national origins systems alone would allow. The failure of that system is noted by the continual changes that special legislation have made on the pattern of immigration over the years. One of those changes is in private immigration bills. In the 78th Congress. there were less than 100 such bills. In the last Congress there were more than 3.000. I have introduced many such bills to permit war brides to join their husbands. children to join their parents. parents to join their childrenall this. to correct the cruelties of the immigration law. Mr. Chairman. one of my favorite immigrants was the fictional Mr. Dooley. a longtime resident of Chicago. who arrived in the 19th century as "a Pilgrim father that missed the first boats." Once ashore. Mr.