The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952

I was reading the London Review of Books and came across this article by Jameel Jaffer stating that, in 1952,

Congress overrode the presidential veto and passed the McCarran-Walter Act with a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate. The law codified a system of immigration quotas that privileged applicants from Western Europe and almost guaranteed that those from Asia and Africa would be rejected. The section on activities ‘prejudicial’ to the US, together with others targeting suspected communists and anarchists, supplied a mechanism which government officials would use over the next decades to justify refusing visas to foreigners whose political views they didn’t like.

I had no idea. I knew that President Truman was very unpopular in 1952 and I knew there was lots of xenophobia, but, still, overriding a veto takes a lot of votes, and the Democrats had a majority in both houses in Congress.

Also I didn’t realize that there had been any major immigration bill since the act of 1924 that had drastically reduced immigration and the act of 1965 that opened things up again.

So I went to wikipedia to look up the bill, and, yeah, there it is:

Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nevada), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, proposed an immigration bill to maintain the status quo in the United States and to safeguard the country from Communism, “Jewish interests”, and undesirables that he deemed as external threats to national security. His immigration bill included restrictive measures such as increased review of potential immigrants, stepped-up deportation, and more stringent naturalization procedures. The bill also placed a preference on economic potential, special skills, and education. In addition, Representative Francis E. Walter (D-Pennsylvania) proposed a similar immigration bill to the House.

Parts of the story are kind of complicated:

The McCarran–Walter Act abolished the “alien ineligible to citizenship” category from US immigration law, which in practice applied only to people of Asian descent. Quotas of 100 immigrants per country were established for Asian countries; however, people of Asian descent who were citizens of a non-Asian country also counted towards the quota of their ancestral Asian country. Overall immigration from the “Asiatic barred zone” was capped at 2,000 people annually. Passage of the act was strongly lobbied for by the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, Japanese American Citizens League, Filipino Federation of America, and Korean National Association, though only as an incremental measure, as those organizations wished to see national origins quotas abolished altogether.

The total quota was 4720 per year from Africa, 3690 per year from Asia, 150,000 per year from Europe, and I think unlimited from the Western Hemisphere. Some famous people excluded under this law were Julio Cortázar, Michel Foucault, Dario Fo, Gabriel García Márquez, Doris Lessing, Pablo Neruda, and Graham Greene. Fair enough to exclude Greene, I guess; he was a British spy, after all. The others I think they should’ve let in.

I was wondering how that override vote happened, so I clicked the link:

The 113 Nay votes were concentrated in the northeast (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts) and various other big cities around the country–I don’t have the maps at hand so I just have the districts within states, but I’m guessing that the patches of Nay votes in Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Illinois, etc., correspond roughly to Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, etc. There were only 4 Nay votes in the entire south.

How consequential was this 1952 law? I’m not sure. Aside from the annoying anti-free-speech aspect, it was pretty much a reaffirmation of the 1924 immigration act with very minor reforms. So the 1952 law didn’t do much on its own. I’m guessing its main effect was to preempt any more serious reform of the immigration system. That would have to wait until 1965. So I’m guessing that the main thing the proponents of this law got, beyond the immediate political victory of overriding a veto, was a 13-year delay.

P.S. The author of the above-linked article, Jameel Jaffer, works at Columbia! I guess I should look him up.