Immigration and the Status Quo

Senator Kennedy, in his never-ending quest for the Holy Grail, was reported last week to be working on an immigration bill to replace the much-maligned, little-understood McCarran-Walter Act. His proposal, to make admission of aliens contingent upon blood relationship to individuals already resident in the country, though perhaps salutary in practice, would scarcely be any more logical in principle than the existing legislation.

The McCarran-Walter Act, as enacted in 1952, is based on a simple principle of chemistry: that a constant solution is maintained through a constant proportion of component elements. Messrs. McCarran and Walter (along with a sizeable segment of Congress, which passed the bill over President Truman's veto) decided that in 1920 the national elements in the Melting Pot had reached the proper mixture, and decreed a quota system of immigration whereby the number of aliens admitted from each country was proportional to the national origins of the population according to the 1920 census.

In addition to its chemistry, the McCarran-Walter Act contains some unpleasant little ideological twists, which, like most "security" measures, put the burden of proof on the "suspected subversive." Liberals have long attacked these clauses as violations of civil liberties and freedom of belief, but the most glaringly unjust and illogical provision of the Act is its core, the national origins quota system.

The assumption behind the system is that the national origins of 1920 America had made the country great and that the government must not let the ethnic balance of that glorious year be disturbed. This idea is absurd in principle and disastrous in application.

The practical defects of McCarran-Walter have been demonstrated with remarkable frequency since its enactment. And, as the Hungarian situation showed, the provisions for emergency refugee admission are totally inadequate.

As an attempt to replace the McCarran-Walter Act, Kennedy's proposal cannot help being an improvement over current policy, but its effect is merely to replace the inapplicable principles of chemistry with equally inapplicable genetics. Reunion of families is an extremely desirable goal for immigration policy, but it cannot constitute the entire basis of an alien-admission system. The assumption that relatives of citizens and resident aliens make more desirable immigrants is as ridiculous as McCarran-Walter's national origins hypothesis.

But whether or not the quota system is accepted as a necessary evil, a method must be worked out more just and more sensible than what is now in effect.