The McCarran-Walter Act having proved notoriously unjust and inadequate in coping with the problem of refugees from behind the Iron Curtain, the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 was passed as an emergency palliative—with the results here described by James Rorty.
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“I kind of feel,” said Senator Hubert Humphrey, “that if we amend this act, the Statue of Liberty—the Goddess of Liberty—may get a smile on her face.” Since at that moment (June 1955) the mail of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee before which he spoke was running twenty to one against any liberalization of the Refugee Relief Act, the Senator was obviously expressing a hope rather than a conviction. The same afternoon the committee listened to Mrs. Ernest W. Howard, representing the Wheel of Progress and the Women’s Patriotic Conference. They heard her deliver a xenophobic tirade calculated to make quite impossible any such benign transformation of Bartholdi’s grave goddess, and even to snuff out her wavering torch—to which, because of its structural infirmity, tourists have long been forbidden to climb.
Earlier, representatives of the two principal veterans’ organizations had testified in somewhat similar vein, although more temperately. So pessimistic was the atmosphere of the hearings that even the able and liberal Roland Elliot, director of Church World Service, one of the principal voluntary agencies cooperating with the refugee program, seemed convinced of the political impossibility of liberalizing the Act; in fact, with an election year approaching, he considered it dangerous even to try. More could be accomplished, he suggested, by taking advantage of the broadened and more flexible administrative interpretations of the Act which were adopted some months before the President, in the aftermath of the Corsi affair, called for its amendment.
It was evident, too, that Mr. Elliot’s apprehensions were shared by Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah, author of the Refugee Relief Act and of an administration bill amending it in line with the President’s recommendations. Senator Watkins repeatedly expressed his fear of again arousing the nativist opposition in Congress, which had written impossibly restrictive security and sponsorship provisions into his original bill, and which, the year before, had passed the McCarran-Walter Act over President Truman’s veto.
In its final form the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 provided a token redemption of the administration’s pre-election promises to the religious, labor, civic, and nationality groups anxious to see a more liberal immigration policy prevail, while evading the ordeal of dealing forthrightly with the McCarran-Walter Act. Both Mr. Eisenhower and his Democratic opponents had repeatedly denounced the disastrous inequities, injustices, and obstructions embodied in our basic immigration law. But neither party was politically willing or able to legislate a statesmanlike immigration policy, or even, as it turned out, to pass an effective emergency palliative. Instead, what we were given in the Refugee Relief Act was “in many respects the most discriminatory, the most restrictive, and generally the worst piece of legislation on the subject ever enacted in the history of the nation.”
The characterization is by Philip Perlman, former Solicitor General of the United States and chairman of President Truman’s Commission on Naturalization and Immigration. The defects that Mr. Perlman observed at the time of its passage and that were abundantly manifested by subsequent experience with the operation of the Act, are evident in its major provisions. It calls for the issuance, over a period of three years and five months, of some 214,000 American visas to “expellees,” “escapees,” and “refugees” residing within the continental limits of the NATO countries and in Turkey, Sweden, Iran, and the Free Territory of Trieste; also to persons of Italian, Greek, and Dutch “ethnic origin” who are relatives of American citizens or the spouses or minor children of lawfully admitted immigrant aliens.1
The definitions of all these terms, as well as the onerous requirements for assurances of employment and housing by individual employers, were such as to insure in advance a maximum of difficulty, delay, and inequity in the issuance of visas. But to make obstruction doubly sure, the security provisions of the Act were (in the words of its administrator, Scott MacLeod, used in a letter dated July 28, 1953, to Representative Patrick J. Hillings of California) “stronger than under any present or former immigration laws. Any doubt that may exist will be resolved against the applicant and in favor of the United States.” Especially onerous was the provision that no person might be issued a visa “unless complete information shall be available regarding the history of such person covering the period of at least two years immediately preceding his application.” Since no such information could be obtained from behind the Iron Curtain, this meant that in practice most refugees would have to wait two years before obtaining visas.
The house version of the bill was passed by a vote of 221 to 185, with 132 Republicans and 88 Democrats supporting, and 74 Republicans and 111 Democrats opposing. In the Senate, 38 Republicans and 24 Democrats—all but two from the South—voted against it.
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Thus the administration was in a position to claim a partial fulfillment of its pre-election promises on immigration. By implication, at least, Senator Watkins made this claim when he urged the President not to support the liberal, enlightened Lehman bill, which would have replaced the McCarran-Walter Act, on the ground that Senator Lehman was trying “to offset, if possible, the advantage the Republicans have gained during the present session on the subject.”
The “advantage,” if it was that, was gained over the determined opposition of Senator Patrick McCarran and Representative Francis E. Walter. It was Representative Walter who, in the House, presented security and sponsorship amendments so obstructive as almost to defeat in advance the purposes of the Act. And it was the late Senator McCarran who on this occasion quoted a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, a 19th-century Hearst laureate whom most Americans have happily forgotten:
Columbia, large-hearted and tender,
Too long for the good of your kin
You have shared your home’s comfort and
splendor
With all who have asked to come in. . . .
Your overrun proud sister nations,
Whose offspring you help them to keep,
Are sending their poorest relations
Their unruly, vicious black sheep. . . .
Shall aliens born over the ocean
Dispute us the fruits of our toil?
Most noble, and gracious of mothers
Your children rise up and demand
That you bring us no more foster brothers
To breed discontent in the land. . . .
It is time that your wardens were rallied
And stationed outside the locked door.
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If the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 was designed to take the heat off the McCarran Walter Act, then by the same token the appointment in December of 1953 of Edward Corsi as a special assistant to Secretary Dulles and to Scott MacLeod, represented a renewed attempt to placate the groups that had been demanding a more liberal immigration policy. By this time the latter, along with the voluntary agencies charged with the task of obtaining individual assurances of employment and housing for prospective immigrants, were convinced that they had been sold out, both by the Act itself and by its administration under Scott MacLeod.
Mr. Corsi has described, on the lecture platform and in print,2 his service as a burnt-offering on the altar of his party’s broken promises. In December of 1954 he was given an indeterminate appointment as consultant to the Secretary of State and assistant to Scott MacLeod in the administration of the Refugee Relief Act. Obviously, the political purpose of this appointment, which Mr. MacLeod has said that he himself had suggested to the Secretary, was to demonstrate to the country the administration’s desire to make the Refugee Act work. Corsi’s fault, from the administration’s point of view, would appear to have been that he tried seriously to make it work. To that end he used his long experience with immigration problems and his old friendships with foreign officials to break bottlenecks and speed up procedures. He called for administrative interpretations and substantive changes in the Act for which the voluntary agencies had long been pleading, and which conceivably, if obtained, might have made it work. And when he found his labors obstructed by Representative Walter, who smeared him with demonstrably false charges of past pro-Communist activities, he was rash enough to fight back.
Seemingly, his final sin as a loyal and expendable Republican immigration expert was his refusal to accept the mild sentence of silence and exile to South America—Walter had demanded his head—which his friend Secretary Dulles had decreed. Instead, Mr. Corsi resigned from the State Department with an explosive public statement designed to refute and expose all soothing administration statements about how well the Refugee Relief Act was working.
It wasn’t working, said Corsi. Eighteen months after its enactment, and with only two more years to run, less than 25,000 visas had been issued and less than a thousand of the 214,000 refugees authorized by the Act had actually been admitted to the country.3 Moreover, the failure to bring in anything like the authorized quota of refugees was due not alone to the restrictive clauses which the foes of immigration had inserted in the Act, but to needless delays in establishing the machinery of security clearance, and to administrative interpretations that needlessly handicapped the voluntary agencies in obtaining assurances of employment and housing.
Corsi had encountered these and other obstructions at first hand when he toured European immigration centers under the chaperonage of two of Mr. MacLeod’s assistants, one of them a former Texas Ranger. Some of the consular service officers he interviewed were scared and reticent; others were openly hostile to the “security gang,” whom they charged with obstructing the program.
“What are you doing with these flatfeet?” asked the supervising consul general in Bonn. “You’re not really planning to waste your time on this project, are you? As for these characters and their boss back home, we’re sick and tired of seeing them around here.”
In the same city Corsi listened to the representatives of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration deny violently that people in Germany did not want to emigrate to America and declare that the German Minister of Refugees would confirm this denial. Arrangements were made for Corsi to interview the Minister, but behind his back his security escorts canceled the appointment.
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Despite these and other obstructions, Corsi became convinced that, bad as it was, the Act could be made to work if its administrators really wanted it to. In Italy he persuaded the government to set up provincial committees for the expediting of visas. On his return to this country, he was assured of cooperation by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers, as well as by leading employers, including Spyros Skouras, president of Twentieth Century-Fox, and Fortune Pope, head of the Colonial Sand and Stone Company, who offered to organize Italian and Greek committees to promote the issuance of assurances. With these and other evidences of support in hand, Mr. Corsi then proceeded to write an optimistic report to Secretary Dulles, which the latter was rumored to have read and considered excellent.
Then came the Walter attack, followed by MacLeod’s statement that, regrettably, Corsi’s security clearance had not come through. To his surprise, Corsi learned that his appointment had been for ninety days only, and that Secretary Dulles now wished him to undertake “a very important assignment to South America.” Administrative advisers registered shock and distress at this development and for a day or two Corsi hoped that he might be given a chance to state his case at the summit. By the President’s press secretary he was assured that the White House was deeply concerned with his troubles and would call him back; the call never came.
Forced to choose between political exile and an open noisy break with the leaders of his party, Mr. Corsi decided that only by such a break could he serve the objective of the liberalized immigration policy to which he had dedicated his career. Subsequent developments soon proved him right. During the weeks that followed Corsi’s refusal of the South American appointment and Secretary Dulles’s discovery that he was “not qualified” to be an administrative executive of the Refugee Relief Act, MacLeod’s office promulgated many of the procedural reforms and relaxations which both Corsi and the voluntary agencies had long been demanding. And on May 27, 1955, the President sent a memorandum to Congress proposing a dozen substantive amendments Which, if passed, might conceivably have let in at least a large part of the 214,000 immigrants called for by the Act.
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All of these amendments had been repeatedly urged by the directors of the voluntary agencies on which rested the burden of securing assurances of employment for prospective immigrants. In brief, they provided:
—That the definition of “refugee” be broadened to include all escapees and expellees and that it be interpreted so as not to exclude, as it frequently had in the past, some of the most desirable of the refugees applying for visas.
—That people who have become “refugees” in their own countries, as for example flooded-out Dutch farmers and Greek victims of Communist border raids, be brought within the scope of the Act.
—That the Attorney General be permitted to waive, in special cases, the provisions of the Act that have been used to deport political refugees in this country to the “people’s democracies,” and that the passport requirement be waived at the discretion of the State and Justice departments.
—That the two-year political history requirement be revoked and the granting or withholding of visas on security grounds be left to the discretion of the consular authorities.
—That the requirement for individual sponsorship of immigrants be revoked and the voluntary agencies permitted to underwrite the sponsorship of groups of immigrants with respect to employment and housing.
—That special visas be issued to wives, husbands, and children so that the entire family might not be obliged to emigrate together.
—That where an entire family is excluded because a single member is suffering from partially arrested tuberculosis, visas be granted if provision is made for tuberculosis treatment in this country under the direction of a federal medical authority.4
Nothing was said in these recommendations about the insistence of Corsi and other critics of the program that its administration be removed from the office of Scott MacLeod. Indeed, the appointment on June 8, 1955, of Pierce J. Gerety as deputy administrator of the Refugee Relief Act was generally interpreted as a rejection of this demand. Mr. MacLeod remains as the titular administrator of the program. Moreover, qualified candidates for the job of deputy administrator who had been nominated by the voluntary agencies were passed over in favor of Mr. Gerety, a lawyer known to be acceptable to Congressman Walter and formerly general counsel of the Civil Service Commission, but without specific experience in the field of immigration.
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The President’s recommendations were embodied in S. 2113, introduced by Senator Watkins. Further liberalization of the Act was provided for in various clauses of S. 2140, introduced by Senator Langer, and especially in S. 1794, which was introduced by Senator Herbert Lehman and cosponsored by Senators Humphrey, Douglas, and Kefauver.
Hostile witnesses at the June 1955 hearings concentrated their attacks on the key provisions of the Lehman bill, which called for removing the administration of the Act from the office of the State Department’s security director, for the pooling of the national quotas, and for extending the life of the Refugee Relief Act by an additional four years, ending December 31, 1960. Other provisions of the Lehman bill, some of which appeared in modified form in the Watkins bill, called for:
—Eliminating the distinction between “refugee” and “escapee” now contained in the law.
—Eliminating the requirement that a refugee must not be “firmly resettled” and must be in “urgent need of assistance for the essentials of life and transportation.”
—Increasing by 15,000 the over-all visas authorized under the act and making escapees residing in Spain and North Africa eligible for these visas.
—Eliminating the onerous term “ethnic” from the provisions of the act.
—Raising the age of eligible orphans from the present maximum of ten to fourteen years.
—Eliminating the requirement that the alien applying for adjustment of his status to that of permanent resident in the United States must have been “lawfully admitted.”
—Eliminating the requirement that persons escaping from behind the Iron Curtain must have passports or other travel documents. This requirement has frequently strained relations between the United States and other nations.
—Eliminating the requirement that a fully documented two-year history of each alien be available prior to his being eligible for admission under the Act.
—Repealing Section 12 of the Refugee Act providing for a system of priorities for the issuance of visas.
—Permitting individual housing and employment assurances to be given for aliens by recognized voluntary agencies.
At the June 1955 hearings, all the national groups and, with the exception of Church World Service, all the voluntary agencies urged adoption of the Lehman bill. In general, the line-up for and against the liberalization of the Refugee Relief Act closely resembled the alignment of forces at the 1953 hearings of the Truman Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, held after the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act. Several of the witnesses who supported the Lehman bill borrowed effectively from earlier testimony concerning the disastrous restrictions, inequities, and discriminations embodied in our basic immigration law. On the whole, however, the hearings were disappointing in that the friends of an intelligent immigration policy failed to achieve either an impressive mobilization of the different interested groups or a comprehensive and coherent presentation of the issues.
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A major difficulty of the immigration problem is that it can no longer present itself, as it did to 19th-century sensibilities like those of Bartholdi and Emma Lazarus, as a humanitarian issue pure and simple. Rather, it is a collateral aspect of other issues, most of them political and economic.
To the degree that a liberalized immigration policy might arouse fears that the jobs of American workers would be endangered, it is a domestic economic issue. To the degree that better treatment of Iron Curtain refugees would strengthen our hand vis-à-vis the Soviet bloc, it is an issue of defense and foreign policy. To the degree that relaxing the security requirements of the Refugee Relief Act and of the McCarran-Walter Act might facilitate Communist espionage and subversion, it is a security issue.
Our failure to legislate a realistic, statesmanlike immigration and refugee policy would seem to be due, in part at least, to the more or less calculated confusion and obscuration of these issues, and especially to the demagogic exaggeration of the security issue by the enemies of immigration in Congress.
That immigration involves serious security hazards is the primary assumption around which both the McCarran-Walter Act and the Refugee Relief Act were written. Even the amendments proposed by the President would leave the administration of the Act where Congress, by a dubious extension of the legislative power, placed it: namely, in the hands of the State Department’s chief security officer, despite the latter’s obvious unfitness for a task demanding an entirely different kind of experience, training, and temperament.
Actually, security is a minor and incidental aspect of any immigration or refugee program. Logic suggests that the MGB, the Soviet secret police, would seek to send undercover agents across the mined and guarded frontiers and into the refugee camps, and experience shows that this has been in fact a routine practice. But at this point security becomes the primary concern and responsibility of the DP camp administrators and of the security authorities of the country in which the camps are located. The presence of Communist agents in the DP camps and refugee colonies does not affect our immigration policy unless these Communist agents apply for visas to this country—which few of them do. Why should Moscow employ this slow, circuitous, and relatively hazardous route when it can readily send its agents across the Mexican or Canadian borders, or recruit undercover operatives from the American Communist party and among fellow-travelers, and direct their efforts from the Russian and satellite embassies?
The answer, of course, is that the MGB uses its pseudo-escapees for quite different purposes: chiefly to aggravate the disillusionment and disaffection caused by the unspeakable living conditions prevailing in many of the camps, and by the frustrations and delays encountered by the refugees when they try to get into this country. The security provisions of the Refugee Relief Act were well calculated to foster the success of Communist propaganda and subversion in the camps. Even the lowering of the security and sponsorship barriers to immigration along the lines recommended by the President would be far from enough to repair the damage already done.
For that, there would be required a positive immigration and refugee relief program designed to implement with deeds the verbal welcome which the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberation extend to potential escapees from Iron Curtain countries. This would mean bigger refugee appropriations, better conditions in the camps, and the abandonment of the national origins quota system as well as the relaxation of the present unreal and self-defeating security restrictions.
Such a program would mean treating the refugees not as probable security risks until proved otherwise, but as worthy human beings and also potentially valuable instruments of a foreign policy and moral purpose aimed at supporting and encouraging disaffection with the tyranny of the Communist satellites.
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A positive refugee relief program is in fact the only practical means of countering the alarming success of Moscow’s re-defection campaign, which has already seriously impaired one of our most potent political assets. Among the many unpleasant things that Edward Corsi learned in Europe, despite the vigilance of his security chaperons, was that at least 100,000 refugees have gone back through the Iron Curtain during the past four or five years, among them from 20 to 25 per cent of those from Czechoslovakia.
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary have all declared amnesties for returned refugees. Last March, Moscow’s re-defection campaign came into the open with the establishment of a “Committee for the Return to the Homeland.” The committee is headed by a Soviet major general and equipped with a lavishly subsidized newspaper called H.E.P.N.D. This propaganda sheet is distributed in the DP camps by Communist agents and mailed free to large numbers of refugees, for whom the H.E.P.N.D. keeps an astonishingly accurate address file. The refugees are also the targets of a systematic letter-writing campaign. From their families behind the Iron Curtain come glowing accounts of the prosperity at home, of the benignity of the secret police, and of the forgiveness and welcome that await the returned refugee.
Moscow’s re-defection campaign also makes effective use of the Communist parties and front organizations in Western countries. An article entitled “We Want to Come Home,” published in the Canadian Slovak paper Luduvo Zvesti, was promptly reprinted on the other side of the Iron Curtain in the Bratislava Pravda. The article asserted that copies of H.E.P.N.D. were reaching exiles in the United States, England, France, and West Germany, all of them alleged to be living in desperate conditions. They were planning to return home, it said, despite “the threats of anti-Communist traitors.”
Unhappily, H.E.P.N.D. can find much real substance on which to base its re-defection propaganda. The war deposited a pool of some 40 million refugees in the host countries of Western Europe. Of these, at least 15 million are still without secure employment or social roots; thousands of them, in and outside of the DP camps, have been living for years under conditions of indescribable misery. This makes them easy converts to the anti-American propaganda that is ceaselessly disseminated by both Communists and neo-Nazis, so that today the early torrent of escapees has been greatly reduced, while the West-to-East stream of re-defection has reached the substantial proportions of over seventy-five a day.
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Is Congress misreading the nation’s mind on the subject of refugee and immigration policy? Corsi made this charge at the June hearings. The subcommittee’s mail, he suggested, was perhaps not a reliable index of the actual state of popular opinion; his own mail had been running twenty-to-one in favor of liberalizing the Refugee Relief Act.
It would, of course. Since Corsi’s break with the administration and during his subsequent cross-country speaking trip, the religious, civic, labor, and nationality groups have rallied to the support of the man who for thirty years has been one of the most eloquent and effective champions of liberal immigration.
But the same “of course” applies to the anti-immigration mail of Senator William Langer of North Dakota, the subcommittee’s chairman. Most of his mail, in all probability, comes from superpatriotic xenophobes whose articulateness is by no means a measure of their numbers or of their influence.
The Women’s Patriotic Conference, the American Coalition, and the General Society of the War of 1812, to whose spokesmen the committee listened with exemplary patience, are all paper federations of state and local affiliates whose chief activities would appear to be that of passing resolutions and sending telegrams to Washington. It has yet to be proved that they represent any substantial sector of American opinion; in fact, the current evidence runs to the contrary. Yet it is the xenophobic attitude that continues to triumph in the field of immigration.
While the hearings on amending the Refugee Relief Act were in progress, the American Institute of Public Opinion announced the results of its poll of popular sentiment on the McCarran-Walter Act. Of those who were familiar with the existing immigration laws, 53 per cent wanted the Act changed and only 15 per cent wanted it left unchanged. Of those who wanted it changed, 68 per cent wanted it liberalized. When asked, “Would you approve or disapprove of having a few families from Europe come to this neighborhood to live?” 63 per cent voted approval. It is reasonable to suppose that a public opinion poll on the amendment of the Refugee Relief Act would have yielded similar results.
As Corsi and others have repeatedly pointed out, the churches and the nationality groups are politically important, and they are all for liberalizing our immigration policy; likewise the leadership of organized labor, whose spokesmen testified effectively at the hearings. Even the isolationist farmers of the West and Middle West are influenced by their current need of farm labor.
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One of the most effective statements in support of the Lehman bill was made by David Carliner, representing the American Veterans Committee, who put to good use testimony given before the Truman commission. Arguing that the requirements of national defense and of the expansion of the American economy demand the admission of more, not fewer, immigrants, Mr. Carliner cited data of the Selective Service Commission showing that in 1955 we have 200,000 fewer men coming of military age than we had in 1940. There are also shortages of manpower, he pointed out, in many segments of the American economy, including farm labor and especially in the low-wage service industries. The short birth classes of the depression years have cut the growth of our labor force. Because of these and other strains on our expanding economy, so conservative a demographer as Dr. Frank W. Notestein, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, has favored an annual rate of immigration of 500,000, or about three times the total annual quota allowed, even with the augmented immigration permitted under the Displaced Persons Act, which admitted over 400,000 immigrants. American labor leaders are somewhat more cautious in their appraisals of the assimilative capacity of the American economy. But both the AFL and the CIO have supported the Lehman-Celler bill, which would admit about a quarter of a million immigrants a year.5
It is true, of course, that the minuscule American Veterans Committee, which specializes in being informed and intelligent about such things, speaks with a still, small voice compared to the thunder of the two big veterans’ organizations, both of which with minor qualifications opposed the liberalization of the Refugee Relief Act. But it is also true that the legislative representatives of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars do not always reflect accurately the views of their rank and file, a substantial proportion of whom are of recent immigrant stock.
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Finally, however, it must be recognized that what Congress habitually listens to are not the still, small voices of wisdom but the loud voices that represent votes, or sound as if they do. The disturbing fact is that at the hearings on the bills amending the Refugee Relief Act, the voices favoring its liberalization were neither numerous enough nor loud enough to get any of these bills out of committee.
Administration and Democratic spokesmen blamed each other for this failure. On July 30 Senator Kilgore quoted voluminously from the promises of President Eisenhower, both during and after the 1952 election, to amend the McCarran-Walter Act. Vainly, he reported, he had tried to ascertain the position of the administration in 1955 on fundamental immigration and naturalization policies. The administration, he charged, was “ambiguous, unresponsive, and evasive in answering my inquiries.”
In reply, Senator Watkins pointed out that responsibility for reporting bills dealing with the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Refugee Relief Act lies in the Judiciary Committee, which is controlled by the Democratic party. There had been a split in the subcommittee, he said, with three in favor of a bill liberalizing the Refugee Relief Act and three against. Hence, after repeated failures to get a quorum of the subcommittee, the bill had been reported without recommendation to the full Judiciary Committee, which is expected to resume hearings on the measure when Congress reconvenes.
Meanwhile the Refugee Relief Act remains unamended and the Statue of Liberty continues unsmiling. No amount of administrative stretching, in the opinion of most of the voluntary agencies, is going to make possible the fulfillment of the Act’s objectives by December 30, 1956.
Is partisan politics to blame for this unhappy stand-off? Only in part. Much as one might like to agree with Corsi’s belief that Congress has “misread the mind of the nation,” the more realistic answer is perhaps that the nation has not yet made up its mind to change what has by now become a traditional immigration policy. Rightly or wrongly, most of our legislators believe that most of their constituents favor a restrictive policy.
It is also true that the security aspect of immigration has been deliberately exaggerated. Yet Representative Walter can still get applause when he tells his audiences that the way to fight Communism is to raise immigration barriers against its victims.
In short, there is a considerable job of education still to be done. Immigration will undoubtedly be an issue in the 1956 election, when our legislators and their constituents will again educate each other on this and other subjects. Only as a result of such education may we hope that some Congrss—perhaps the Eighty-sixth—will have a clear enough mandate to warrant putting a smile on Liberty’s face.
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1 Amendments to the Refugee Relief Act, which became effective on August 31, 1954, permitted visas allotted to refugees of Italian, Greek, and Dutch origin to be used by Italian, Dutch, and Greek relatives respectively, and vice versa, thereby making the original quota allocation for refugees and relatives available interchangeably to both classes of aliens. This facilitated greatly the movement of relatives without lowering the obstructions encountered by the refugees whom the Act was originally designed to benefit. Thus, by July 15, 1955, Mr. MacLeod had reported the arrival of a total of 28,729 immigrants, of whom only 7,300 were refugees.
2 “My Ninety Days In Washington,” The Reporter, May 5, 1955.
3 Corsi’s protest resulted in a considerable speed-up of administrative procedures, so that on July 9, 1955, Mr. MacLeod and his new deputy, Pierce J. Gerety, were able to announce the arrival of the first refugee ship containing 1,200 immigrants. The rate of visa issuance, said Mr. MacLeod, had been doubled, and 131,529 applicants were “in the pipeline”—that is to say, being processed for visas.
4 A step in this direction was taken by the passage, during the closing days of the Eightyfourth Congress, of H.R. 6086. This private bill permits the entrance of 108 persons—spouses and children of United States citizens and lawful resident aliens—by the posting of a public-charge bond in behalf of each alien, and the fulfilment of the conditions for his care, hospitalization, and maintenance prescribed by the Surgeon General.
5 At its December 1954 convention, the CIO called for the liberalization of the Immigration and Nationality Act and for the administration of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 “in accordance with its provisions and as Congress intended, instead of seeking to nullify the statute by thwarting and minimizing immigration.”
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