Speech #890139702

I thought that I should have first call on the leading committees in the House. Instead. I found myself assigned to the Committee on the District of Columbia. to the Committee of Insular Affairs. and to the Committee on Immigration. I served a great many years on the Immigration Committee on the House of Representatives. I recall so well the individual cases and the individual bills which were introduced every year in hardship cases. and other cases which were presented to Members of Congress in every corner of the country. In 1952 there was an overall survey of the whole problem. and out of it came the McCarranWalter Act. It laid down the socalled national origins concept and fixed the quotas. It repealed what was sex discrimination at that time in the existing law. It repealed the Oriental Exclusion Acts that were on the books. Every country received a quota of at least 100. Then we dealt with the socalled AsiaPacific triangle. That is an area in the Pacific that runs roughly from Pakistan to Japan. and then to the Polynesian Islands. Those were the intrusions on our immigration policy at that time. One may well wonder how the McCarranWalter Act actually worked. I believe that these figures are substantially correct. and they are yearly averages for the years from 1959 to 1963. By averages. for each of those 4 years. we received 98.000 quota immigrants. We received 180.000 nonquota immigrants. There were an estimated 27.000 alien departures in each year. The net number of immigrants could be set at the figure of 250.000. That figure. of course. included the nonquota immigrants from this hemisphere. Generally speaking. they were divided about like this: 40.000 from Mexico. 32.000 from Canada. and 20.000 were accounted for mainly as being the wives of citizens of the United States who. as such. enjoyed a special preference. The character of immigrants who came to our country in the period from 1952 to 1961 is. I suppose. of considerable interest. and probably will be. because of the preferential status which we have established in the pending bill. The figures which I have show that in that 9year period we received 8.600 who could be identified as skilled craftsmen.