Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

ANALYSIS:

Trump’s refugee ban echoes McCarran’s divisive immigration act of 1952

Pat McCarran

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

As a Nevada senator in the first half of the 20th century, Pat McCarran’s signature achievement was to grant the health care industry an antitrust exemption.

“We do not need to be protected against immigrants from these countries — on the contrary, we want to stretch out a helping hand, to save those who have managed to flee … to succor those who are brave enough to escape from barbarism, to welcome and restore them.”

That was not a response to President Donald Trump’s recent executive order banning refugees from entering the U.S. Rather, it was a statement nearly 65 years ago by President Harry Truman as he vetoed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, a measure co-sponsored by U.S. Sen. Pat McCarran, D-Nev.

The McCarran-Walter Act, which was passed when Congress overrode Truman’s veto by a wide margin, was designed to keep Eastern Europeans and other refugees from overrunning the United States as they escaped communist persecution in their homelands.

According to the State Department’s website, the act revised the 1924 system to allow for national quotas at a rate of one-sixth of 1 percent of each nationality’s population in the United States in 1920. But it wound up resulting in 85 percent of the 154,277 visas available annually being allotted to individuals of northern and western European lineage and thus created resentment against the United States in other parts of the world, the State Department said.

At the time, in a less enlightened atmosphere, many Americans felt that people from Eastern Europe were less desirable. McCarran latched onto those feelings, expressing concerns that the United States could face communist infiltration through immigration and that those immigrants could threaten the foundations of American life. McCarran believed limited and selective immigration was the best way to ensure the preservation of national security.

The McCarran law did not draw the heavy protests that the Trump order did because many mid-20th century Americans were fearful of the “Red Menace” and thus were open to any law that would thwart communists from coming into the country. But the legislation was not without its critics.

Late Sun Publisher Hank Greenspun, a strong and dogged critic of McCarran, theorized that the bill also was a veiled effort by McCarran — the man for whom McCarran International Airport is named — to keep European Jews out of the United States.

Although McCarran’s controversial law has been substantially diminished over the last half century, it remains on the books today.

Several months after enactment of his bill, McCarran, then one of the most powerful lawmakers in America, said in a March 2, 1953, speech before the U.S. Senate: “I believe that this nation is the last hope of Western civilization and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished.”

Also in that speech, McCarran praised some immigrants while condemning others.

“I take no issue with those who would praise the contributions which have been made to our society by people of many races, of varied creeds and colors,” McCarran said. “However, we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary, are its deadly enemies.

“Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain. ... I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed … in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation's downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence.”

While McCarran spoke almost poetically of the cracking of our gates, he did not promote the construction of a towering wall along the U.S.-Mexico border as Trump has proposed.

But McCarran’s law led to the barring of such luminaries as Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, Colombian novelist and future Nobel Prize Literature recipient Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Chilean poet and future Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Pablo Neruda. It also applied to Canada, barring such individuals as eventual Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau from entering the U.S.

McCarran, who first was elected to the Senate in 1933, did not live to see the watering down of his law. The lifelong Nevadan died in office in 1954.

Substantial modifications to McCarran’s law, particularly the lifting of immigration restrictions, were made in the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965. McCarran’s legislation was further weakened by the Immigration Act of 1990, which revoked the language that banned certain groups of immigrants from entering the United States because of their political beliefs.

However, what remained of McCarran’s law was restructured in 2003 to address efforts not to allow suspected terrorists into — or eject those already here from — the United States in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

Ed Koch is a former longtime Las Vegas Sun reporter.

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