Senate Bill Bans Burma (in National News) Learning Center Reaches Out in Oakland to Mentally Ill (in Bay Area News) New Business Deal to Import Chinese High Tech Workers. (in Business) Missing Persons: The Existential Work of Hiroshi Teshigahara (in A&E) Emil Amok: What Are Tiger Privates Doing in My Soup? (in Opinion)

Fifty Years Since
McCarran-Walter

Pat McCarran, top, and Francis Walter.

For those with a sense of Asian Pacific American history, today’s events provide an eerie sense of deja vu. Concerns about China as a global menace, fears that Asian Americans are secret agents for foreign governments, and anxieties over the end of unfair white male privilege at the dawn of a political and socio-economic realignment can be seen both in today’s newspapers and in those from the early 1950s.

June 2002 will mark the 50th anniversary of one of the most important — and controversial — laws in Asian American history. I hope that schools and organizations will study the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, and reflect on the positive and negative aspects of this comprehensive codification and revision of federal immigration laws.

To understand the importance of McCarran-Walter requires a brief review of Asian American immigration history.

The Naturalization Act of 1870 prevented immigrants from China from gaining United States citizenship, and prohibited the wives of Chinese laborers from entering the county. By 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act closed the door to Chinese laborers (but not merchants) for 10 years, and subsequent laws extended it indefinitely. The Immigration Act of 1917 used geographic criteria to exclude Indians, because their racial and ethnic status was not clearly “white” or “black” under prevailing laws. The Asiatic Barred Zone included South Asia, Southeast Asia, and islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but specifically excluded Guam and the Philippines, which were American colonial prizes.

Meanwhile, the class bias of our nation’s immigration laws continued to show through in 1924, when the National Origins Act barred Japanese immigrants and placed quotas on all incoming groups, yet allowed the wives of Chinese merchants to enter the country. In 1934, the Tydings-McDuffie Act cut Filipino immigration to fifty people per year, and this limit was not repealed until 1946 for both Filipinos and Indians.

By 1943, Japanese wartime propaganda correctly pointed out that the United States was hypocritical in its assertion that it cared for the people of China while onerous immigration restrictions continued in force. The Magnuson Exclusion Act of 1943 repealed the previous Chinese immigrant restrictions, allowing a paltry 105 Chinese immigrants to enter the United States each year.

While the War Brides Act of 1945 and the G.I. Fiancees Act of 1946 allowed Asian war brides to enter, the population of Asian-derived peoples on these shores was still very small compared to what it might have been if there had been no restrictions. And while many of the countries of post-war Europe developed democracies based on a socialist economic model, socialism and communism were crushed in this country by a fear of subversion that was tied by the captains of industry to a nativistic (fear of immigrants) fervor.

By 1950, Senator Pat McCarran, D-Nevada, was head of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which went so far as to investigate the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to determine the effects of alleged communist influence. The McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 required American Communist Party members and others to register with the Attorney General. Title II of this onerous act went so far as to view the Japanese American wartime incarceration as a precedent in case alleged subversives had to be rounded up. The potentially disastrous use of the incarceration precedent was a galvanizing factor in the Japanese American redress movement, when Japanese Americans and civil libertarians successfully fought to repeal this provision in the 1970s.

Harry Truman.

President Harry Truman saw the folly of McCarran’s 1950 Act when he noted that requiring members of banned organizations to identify themselves was like “requiring thieves to register with the sheriff ... The basic error of this bill is that it moves in the direction of suppressing opinion and belief ... that would make a mockery of the Bill of Rights and of our claims to stand for freedom in the world.” (from Truman’s 9/22/50 veto message).

When Congress passed the 1950 Act over Truman’s veto, millions of Americans lost jobs or had careers destroyed because of rumors that they were a “bad security risk.” Significantly, “loyalty clearance” programs were set up to define what was “American,” yet Martin Dies, John Rankin, and other key members of the House and Senate “Un-American Activities” committees decided not to investigate the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups because they themselves were Klan supporters or sympathizers.

By 1952, Senator McCarran had teamed up with Congressman Francis Walter, D-Pa., another anti-Communist and anti-immigrant crusader to pass the McCarran-Walter Act, again over the veto of President Truman. The 1952 Act ended the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone, but replaced it with something called the Asia-Pacific Triangle. Immigration from this area was capped at 2,000 people per year, and if, for example, someone living in France was of Japanese origin, that person would be counted under the 2,000 person limit. Not until the comprehensive overhaul of our immigration laws in 1965 did this explicit discrimination against Asian immigration cease.

While the Japanese American Citizen’s League lobbied successfully for naturalized citizenship of Japan-born issei (first generation) in the 1952 Act, some Japanese Americans and others felt that the potential civil liberties infringements were not worth the price of supporting a bill which could help the issei. Even President Truman objected to the 1952 Act because it created a second-class status by distinguishing between citizens by birth and citizens by naturalization.

By 1953, Truman took the initiative by convening a presidential commission to investigate the social and political implications of the national origins quotas. The Brown vs. Board decision in 1954, the resultant civil rights movement, the election of a Catholic president (John F Kennedy) in 1960, and other developments finally led to a lifting of national origins quotas in 1965.

However, it took until 1975 for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to be abolished, and bills such as the “Foreign Relations Revitalization Act of 1995” periodically surface, which seek to make membership in a group or “advocating terrorism” (however that is defined) as a grounds for excluding someone from the country — even if the same speech would be protected by the First Amendment if spoken by an American citizen.

As we look back 50 years and then contemplate the present, it is important that we understand how Asian Americans were victimized, how we fought back, and how we joined with other human rights and civil liberties activists to build the multicultural America that is emerging in this 21st century.

With knowledge, we can vaccinate ourselves against a recurrence of the excesses of the 1950s.