CHAIN LOCK ON THIS LAND OF LIBERTY
Baldinger, Wilbur H.
Mr. Dulles Should Be Fired WE had moments of misgiving shortly after the appearance of our January issue editorial, "Mr. Dulles Should Resign." For the Secretary of State chose that period to...
...Instead, he rested his hopes for joint military action in Indo-China on his conviction that negotiations at Geneva would fail, and that the British might then accept his scheme for direct military intervention...
...The second amendment would have permitted a mother entering legally to bring along any illegitimate children if she wanted to keep them with her...
...That made a total of 1,183 sheepherders brought in from Spain under McCarran's dispensation...
...He is subject to deportation at any time for a wide variety of reasons, including ex-post facto reasons...
...in Indo-China, in April, 1954...
...Only Communists are regarded as interested in subverting the United States...
...One would have permitted otherwise blameless aliens who entered the country illegally to stay here if they were married to U. S. citizens and behaved themselves...
...IV No other changes in the Act have been made, although a year ago Walter proposed—but didn't pursue—two more...
...Philip B. Perlman, former Solicitor General...
...The United States has moved a long way since December 2, 1783, when George Washington said: "The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and Respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions...
...In the first session of the 84th Congress, 3,421 private bills relieving individuals from harsh penalties of the Act were introduced...
...We took strong action...
...The Ives bill is not to be interpreted as a determined effort by the Eisenhower Administration to rewrite or modify the Act...
...In fiscal 1954 a total of 821 beneficiaries of the Refugee Act struggled heroically out of its legal swamps and arrived on dry U. S. land...
...Last month we suggested that Mr...
...The McCar-ran-Walter Act draws a vast Asia-Pacific triangle around such countries as Japan, India, Korea, Indonesia, China, Burma, and Afghanistan...
...Some say," said Mr...
...Corsi, a lifelong Republican who was Herbert Hoover's Immigration Commissioner and served as New York State Industrial Commissioner during all of Governor Thomas E. Dewey's tenure in Albany, thought his job was to make the refugee program work...
...The real reason people aren't moving in," Walter said following an international conference in Germany last year, "is because there are no refugees...
...It touches up the Act along lines suggested in April, 1953, by President Eisenhower, who cautiously asked Congress for a 10-point study of "administrative provisions of the law which it is claimed may operate with unwarranted harshness...
...Dulles' story now is that he proposed to the President, and Mr...
...In March, when Corsi had had his desk a month, Walter sent a confidential letter to Dulles demanding that the Secretary of State "dispense with [Corsi's] services...
...Clarence E. Pickett, honorary secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, and Adrian S. Fisher, then legal adviser to the State Department, which had warned that the McCar-ran-Walter Act was damaging U.S...
...Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., were so shy that they refused to appear, as they were urgently requested to do by Chairman Harley M. Kilgore, West Virginia Democrat, at Senate Judiciary hearings on immigration measures last November and December...
...In the closing hours of the 83rd Congress in 1954, Walter rallied his colleagues to push through an amendment saying it was not their intent to make petty police-blotter misdemeanors a bar to admission...
...The Act has a special stamp for Eurasians in allocating overall immigration quotas of 154,657 a year...
...One of McLeod's policy ideas is that orphans under 10 make the "best type of immigrants" because they have no "preconceived political ideas" and therefore "are not security risks...
...Chain Lock on This Land of Liberty By WILBUR H. BALDINGER Washington REPRESENTATIVE Francis Eugene Walter, Pennsylvania Democrat and chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, is the fiercely proud co-author of a 302-page volume, titled "Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952", which Radio Moscow happily and industriously employs as a prime arsenal for anti-American cold warfare...
...And the predominantly Negro population of the British West Indies, once allowed to utilize unused British allowances, is now arbitrarily held to 100 entrants annually...
...Japan's quota is only 185, but nearly 20,000 Japanese long resident in the United States, hitherto forbidden as aliens even to own their own homes in some states, have now been able to become citizens...
...But like the Lehman bill, it bases quotas on one-sixth of one per cent of the 1950 U.S...
...The door is still ajar, but a chain lock is on it...
...ing to tell how much freedom of tn-gress and egress is being provided by the Soviet Union and its satellite these days—is that the Act just about eliminates racial disqualifications for American citizenship...
...Census instead of the same percentage of the 1920 population (from which "non-whites" were excluded to keep the quota counts lower and racial strains less tinted...
...Yet Walter's legislative monument, which the President's Commission on Immigration and Naturalization called "an arrogant, brazen instru-anent of discrimination based on race, creed, color and national origin," is liable to continue to stand virtually untouched...
...Dulles in boasting of his success in practicing the "art" of seeking peace by threatening war, concerns our course in Indo-China, where the French, in 1954, were fighting the last and losing stages of their nine-year struggle to retain colonial mastery of this land and people...
...But it was not until 1952—and then largely through persuasion by Walter —that the Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924 was wiped from the face of America and Africa was given any quota at all...
...Dulles, "that we were brought to the verge of war [in Korea in June, 1953...
...in the Formosa Straits in January, 1955...
...They preferred to try negotiations at the soon-to-be-held Geneva conference with Russia and Red China on Asian problems...
...III Their report on the Act, which filled 319 pages—17 more than the law itself—is the broad basis for the equally massive Lehman omnibus bill...
...Dulles withstood a little more of this, but dropped Corsi in April...
...II Even if Mr...
...McCarran-Walter Act language, cherished by its co-author, contains such passages as one denying immigration to: "Aliens who the consular officer . . . knows or has reason to believe seek to enter the United States solely, principally, or incidentally to engage in activities which would be prejudicial to the public interest, or endanger the welfare, safety, or security of the United States...
...Refugee administration reverted to Scott McLeod, head of the State Department's Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, who has worked since with extraordinary caution approved by Walter...
...Wherever they may be, Eurasians seeking haven here are charged to their ancestral homelands if as much as half their blood can be analyzed as flowing from Asian sources...
...Of course we were brought to the verge of war...
...Nor is tormented Africa spared an extra slap of color discrimination...
...Thus the quota for Soviet-held Latvia, for instance, is mortgaged until the 74th year of the Twenty-third Century...
...He won approval of a bill exempting 385 Basque sheepherders in the Spanish Pyrenees from quota restrictions so they could go to Nevada, armed with special visas, to work for his rancher constituents...
...As a starter, applicants seeking relief under the so-called emergency measure must take oaths that never in their lives have they resembled the sort of person "specified in subparagraph (A), (B), (C), (D), (E), (F), (G) or (H) of sec-tion 212 (A) (28) of the Immigration and Nationality Act . . . except as provided in subparagraph (1) of such section...
...I don't think the Secretary of State should retain his services five minutes longer," Walter said...
...The picture of this bumbling diplomat brandishing atomic weapons and threatening to blow the world to dust is an almost unbelievable revelation of what has been going on behind our backs, and the backs of our friends and allies throughout the world...
...Also ineligible is any alien who, in the opinion of a consular officer, would be "likely at any time to become a public charge...
...Dulles had already said on his arrival that he would meet the spokesman for the Communists, with whom he was presumably in Geneva to negotiate, only if their cars happened to collide...
...Not since the campaign to discredit Chiang Kai-shek and prepare the way for the Communist conquest of China have leftist forces in the United States been so aggressively united as in opposition to this law...
...III It was not until Mr...
...Earl G. Harrison, former Commissioner of Immigration...
...Walter, an earnest, brooding, tight-lipped man of 61 who has represented Carbon, Monroe, and Northampton counties in Eastern Pennsylvania since 1933, usually is sober-mannered...
...Also pending in this session—but in what will likely be a state of suspension—is legislation to curb the absolute authority of U. S. consular officers abroad to grant or refuse immigrant visas, which are priceless permits to apply for permission to put foot on the land of liberty...
...Dulles should resign...
...He helped block ten liberalizing changes sought by President Eisenhower last May, and he has an easy explanation of why more refugees don't take advantage of the alternate road to America...
...Dulles' best foot forward, argues for the Secretary of State that Communist awareness of the fact that the United States was prepared to act in the event the conference failed enabled the Western powers to negotiate from positions of strength at Geneva...
...Africans' share in the total quotas works down to about one per cent...
...A milder bill has been introduced by Senator Irving M. Ives, New York Republican, and co-sponsored by Senators Leverett Saltonstall, Massachusetts Republican, and Clifford P. Case, New Jersey Republican...
...Organizational supporters of the Act are pretty much limited to the Daughters of the American Revolution, Patriotic Women of America, Sons of the American Revolution, American Coalition, Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic, National Society of Descendants of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, Wheel of Progress, and the American Legion...
...Dulles' self-serving "documentation" of how he three times saved the world from war by dragging it to the brink of war were accurate—which it isn't—it would still stand as a terrifying indictment of American diplomacy...
...The Japanese government regards Walter with such esteem that it invited him to Tokyo in January to accept a decoration honoring him for his work against racial discrimination, II At home, in a quiet way obscured by Un-American Activities Committee headlines, Walter is one of the most effective and respected members of Congress...
...The silver-haired Walter exploded characteristically when the compassionate Senator Lehman, joined by twelve other Senators and eight House members, presented his repealer to drop the national origins quota system and replace it with one tied to merit and need...
...That hadn't been the case since enactment of the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1882 until McCarran and Walter came along...
...More than 60 bills to amend the Act, along with an omnibus measure sponsored by Senator Herbert H. Lehman, New York Democrat, to re peal it and start all over again, are before the second session in this election year...
...Now even a naturalized alien who entered legally can't attain the standing of a native-born citizen...
...Congress voted immigration and naturalization privileges for Chinese in 1943 and for Indians in 1945...
...President Truman vetoed it vehemently...
...At any rate, lifting the D.P...
...But the British refused to be a party to a scheme that might explode in a worldwide atomic holocaust...
...Subsequently, however, Brownell and Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers did get busy on a draft of an Administration bill for mention in the President's State of the Union message, to be followed up in February by a special message to Congress...
...Its prohibitions against importation of persons with criminal records, not to mention Communist connections, are so wholehearted, and they were being enforced so patriotically, that some cases were a bit comic, if not tragic...
...mortgages on McCarran-Walter immigration quotas might be more helpful to genuine refugees than extension of the Refugee Act into 1957...
...The Congressman and the late Senator Pat McCarran, his intimate partner in legislative anthropology, decree in their law that by virtue of their national origins the Nordic inhabitants of Western and Northern Europe are better material for Americanism than are Italians, Greeks, Turks, and Slavs in the East and South...
...It seems incredible that President Eisenhower, who has seemed genuinely dedicated to the proposition that there is no alternative to peace in this age of atomic and hydrogen weapons, could tolerate and, in fact, be a party to the brink-of-war diplomacy practiced by Mr...
...In 1955 the number of survivors was 29,002, and they were mostly non-refugee old-country relatives of U. S. citizens...
...whom we shall wellcome (sic) to a participation of all our rights and previleges (sic), if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment...
...He stayed in Geneva only briefly, and when he left he smugly told newsmen that he was proud that he had not shaken hands with, or even acknowledged the presence of, Chou En-lai, the Chinese foreign minister who was the principal negotiator for the Communists...
...Eisenhower agreed, that we and the British enter the conflict on the side of France, but that if the Chinese Communists did likewise, by intervening openly on the side of Ho Chi-Minh, we would bomb the coast of China...
...Walter, a principal mover in Displaced Persons legislation, may agree to the concession on persons uprooted by Nazis and Communists in return for the death of the Administration's miscalled Refugee Relief Act of 1953...
...He should have known better...
...This month we urge that Mr...
...foreign relations...
...For Walter stands with and by it, and since Pat McCarran dropped dead in September, 1954, there has been no more inflexible, authoritative, and decisive voice on the Hill in such matters...
...Dulles, aware that public opinion in the United States was overwhelmingly opposed to sending American troops to Indo-China, refrained from pursuing a "go-it-alone" policy...
...Dulles arranged to have two U.S...
...But a check showed that nearly 621,000 of them were temporary visitors, and that by quota only 82,232 came in compared with 88,863 in 1954 and 117,051 in 1952 before the McCarran-Walter Act became operative...
...McCarran, still alive at the time, deemed the Commission's findings to be the work of "out-and-out Reds," "pinks," and "demagogues who would auction the interests of America for alleged minority bloc votes...
...Walter thinks too many foreigners already are coming in, and his thinking prevails in Capitol corridors...
...Walter's conclusion about the Commission, appointed by President Truman, was that it spoke the "venomous language of Radio Moscow" in an underhanded Democratic "attempt to get the vote of the so-called foreign language group...
...Dulles' black "art...
...But the remorse that was building up inside us for having been hasty and harsh with Mr...
...Citing section and clause of Walter's intricate masterpiece (which few of his colleagues on Capitol Hill have yet bothered to read), Moscow broadcasts—over and over again—to the non-Communist world that official American citizenship policy "is very similar to the Nazi theory of racial superiority...
...Dulles saw to it by granting an interview to Life in which he proudly proclaimed that, with President Eisenhower's blessing, he had three times led the nation and the world to the brink of atomic war in order to wring concessions from the Chinese Communists...
...Dulles was shortlived...
...The ability to get to the verge without getting into war is a necessary art . . . We walked to the brink, and we looked it in the face...
...I laid that document aside with disgust," he assured the House...
...For example, the daughter of an English father and an Indian mother, living in London, would be assigned to the Indian quota of 100 if she wishes to emigrate to America—not to the never-filled quota of 65,361 for the British Isles...
...The Refugee Act, which was supposed to expedite the admission of 209,000 extra-quota refugees, escapees, and orphans by the end of 1956, is an almost impassable legislative morass...
...But Walter also is chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, and under that pontifical hat he is painfully sensitive to any questioning of the gospel according to Public Law 414, the deceptively simple code designation of the 1952 Act...
...Unlike the Lehman bill, the Ives measure retains national origins immigration policy—the racial heart of the McCarran-Walter Act—which freezes the mixture in America's melting pot as of 1920, giving Western and Northern Europe 81.6 per cent of the 154,657 allocations against 15.7 per cent for Eastern and Southern Europe...
...On the same day Pat McCarran had his last legislative triumph before his death...
...Meanwhile, figures on quota inflows for permanent U.S...
...the Reverend Thaddeus F. Gullixson, president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at St...
...It's all in the lawbook, too...
...Walter's most recent estimate is that in fiscal 1955 a total of more than 850,000 aliens entered, representing an immigration increase of eleven per cent over 1954...
...Even before he flew to London to confer with the British, Mr...
...The balance of the 209,000 can't possibly be processed this year, but Walter dislikes the Refugee Act anyway as too wide a bypass around his own law...
...By reason of racial origins the law bars their nationals, whose friendship is needed desperately by the West, from all but token entry to the United States...
...residence make a Washington numbers game nearly as confusing as the Administration's tallies on "security risks" dismissed from federal employment...
...Corsi, said Walter, was "a person of inferior judgment" who associated with "highly objectionable groups and organizations" and displayed "disdain and contempt" for immigration regulations...
...Walter also wrote the finale of last year's 90-day Administration wonder featuring Edward J. Corsi, who had been brought in by Dulles as the "best qualified man in the United States" to administer the Refugee Act...
...The President's Commission on Immigration and Naturalization concluded on New Year's Day, 1953, that the Act "should be reconsidered and revised from beginning to end...
...Nevertheless, and not too paradoxically, the McCarran-Walter Act, which passed its third anniversary in operation on Christmas Eve, stands as one of the most ponderous, bewildering, and repressive laws ever imposed by Washington...
...At one point Dulles wrote Kilgore that "until the position of the Administration is firmly formulated and transmitted to the Congress, it would be most embarrassing for me to be required to testify on the subject...
...In contrast to all of his predecessors as chairman, he handles business of his Un-American Activities Committee (of which he says he is an "unwilling" member and which he once hoped to abolish) with firm decorum, if not always with tenderness toward witnesses...
...Many Japanese-Americans name their babies Francis Walter, much as depression parents named sons Franklin Roosevelt in gratitude for the New Deal...
...Corsi once wrote a McCarran-Walter Act analysis for B'nai B'rith in which he said, "Walterism is even worse than Mc-Carthyism, as it results in conviction without any hearing at all," and that was enough to doom him from the start in Washington...
...For the Secretary of State chose that period to announce his adherence to foreign policy views for which we had long agitated in these columns—the need to emphasize the greatly increased employment of economic and political instruments of competition in meeting the Soviet challenge throughout the world...
...Paul...
...Of McCarran-Walter critics in general he has said: "Some of the attack—the most vicious and violent part of it—has been led by Communist and left-wing organizations rightly fearful of its more rigid restraints on subversives...
...aircraft carriers, laden with atomic weapons, steam from the Philippines to the South China Sea...
...faster than a Radio Moscow manipulator can give out with "Imperialist...
...To the Far East, already wary of American intentions, the Russians blare in particular that the Act spreads "racial prejudice among the people of the United States against the Asian people" who are held in "contempt" in an "inferior category" of humans...
...However, one thing Radio Moscow doesn't mention—in addition to failWltBUR H. BALDINGER served eight years with the Washington bureau of Newsweek before embarking on his present career as free lance writer in the nation's capital...
...The unchallengeable power delegated to consular officers, however, did result in bringing Walter around to one corrective in the law after it had been in force nearly two years...
...Life, committed as always to putting Mr...
...President Eisenhower—in 1952 campaign speeches—repeatedly recorded himself for improvements...
...But the harsh fact of history is that Mr...
...Perhaps the most revealing of the three episodes cited by Mr...
...Dienbienphu, which was soon to symbolize French defeat, was under heavy siege...
...The critical Commission was made up of Thomas C. Finucane, chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals...
...But the law still makes no exceptions for applicants who may have been framed for felonies in the past in Nazi or Communist courts...
...They had to meet no test of whether they were members of the Fascist Falange, for under the law's definitions of totalitarians who must be kept out of the country, records of dedication to Fascism and Nazism do not count...
...Dulles left that Sir Anthony Eden, later joined by Pierre Mendes-France, succeeded in negotiating a settlement of the conflict in Indo-China—a settlement which left much to be desired, but one which kept the world from plunging into atomic war even though it had been led to the brink by Mr...
...In the forefront of the "leftist forces" seeking basic revision of the Act are the National Council of Churches, National Catholic Welfare Conference, National Lutheran Council, Protestant Episcopal Church, Baptist World Alliance, Synagogue Council of America, National Community Relations Advisory Council, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Friends Service Committee, Young Women's Christian Association, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Jewish Committee—and the AFL-CIO, which, incidentally, gives Walter a high legislative batting average in most other fields...
...It is truly a devilish scheme," Walter said, "to give aid and comfort to future Moscow agents...
...Dulles be fired...
...From the time of the President's 1953 suggestions to the start of the 1956 campaign year, the White House and its environs have been silent on the topic...
...Its blasts made a strident obligato to cheers given Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev on their recent propaganda tours...
...In the House Walter admitted incidents in which visas had been refused applicants who stole a loaf of bread in the 1946 famine in Germany, failed to return a ration card as required in England, and roasted a poached duck on an outing...
...Section 15 of the Refugee Act incorporates the McCarran-Walter Act, which in turn picks up McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 as well as a codification of more than 200 ad-ditional executive orders, treaties, proclamations, regulations, rules, and-immigration enactments dating back to March 26, 1790...
...Dulles did everything in his power to wreck that conference and prevent give-and-take negotiation...
...Monsignor John O'Grady, secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Charities...
...She can't now...
...His reflexes can flash "Communist...
...This would raise total quotas to 251,162 immigrants a year, bestowing a little more hope on the outside to those who would like to sample the good things the Voice of America tells them about...
...In the spring of 1954 the French were everywhere in retreat against Ho Chi-Minh's Communist forces...
...This belated Administration formula, which will need Walter's help if it is to get anywhere, probably will call, for one thing, for retroactive revision of the device by which 400,000 World War II victims admitted under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 were charged against future immigration quotas...
Vol. 20 • February 1956 • No. 2
