Word: mccarran
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...answer to queries on his opinions about immigration policy, Kennedy re-affirmed his opposition to the McCarran-Walter Act. He claimed that the two-thirds vote overriding President Truman's veto of the bill indicated the difficulty of obtaining revision of the McCarran...