Speech #890138049

And the doctors and chemists and biologists are still waiting. And others are waiting as wellAmerican citizens. waiting for their parents and brothers and children. An American citizen whose mother is Greek must wait more than 5 years before she can get a visa. An American citizen whose brother. or *sister. or married son or daughter is Italian or Australian. Spanish or Portuguese. Japanese or Korean. Indian or Filipino. cannot expect a visa for them until Congress passes a special bill. The last such bill. passed in 1962. admitted all such relatives who had first applied more than 8 years earlier. A system which allows an American citizen to bring to this country a maid or a gardener overnight. but forces him to wait 8 years for his sistermakes no sense at all. It makes even less sense when we realize that every year. tens of thousands of authorized quota visas go unusedbecause the principal beneficiaries of our discriminatory system neither want nor need the numbers allotted to them. England and Ireland are assigned 83.000 numbersover half our totalbut only 32.000 come from these countries each year. The other 51.000 numbers are lost.