If feasible. it was desirable. Through meticulous planning and skillful management. the AHEPA brought to a climax this idea by the arrival in Athens in August of some 15.000 Greek Americans. there to participate in what could be considered to be both a pilgrimage and a convention. We were on the eve. it will be recalled. of the final stages of the drafting and debate on an immigration reform bill in Congress. I was privileged at a banquet. on the AHEPA program. not alone to give my reaction as a son of Ireland rather than a son of Hellas to the convention itself. but also to discuss prospects for immigration reform. This morning. in anticipation of my comments today. I turned to some of the notes which I had prepared for the banquet in Athens. I find that there I made the prediction that the Congress. in this session. would eliminate the national origins quota concept in our admissions to this land. I said thenand now that the event has occurred I wish to repeatthat while drama attached to the role that was played in this reform effort by President Lyndon Johnson and President John Kennedy and his brother. Senator EDWARD KENNEDY. and by Representative EMANUEL CELLER and others in the Congress. it really was a national response to years of patient explanation by men and women who had assembled in Athens. first of the value which they attach to their American citizenship. second. of the offense that was involved in being told that birth in Greece made some relative of theirs less acceptable in America than birth in England. and third and more important. perhaps. than anything else. in reminding all thoughtful Americans that the contributions made to America by the sons and daughters of Greece and its islands was the best evidence of the values that we could still obtain from that land.
Keywords matched
immigration national origins quota