The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (, ch. 477, , enacted June 17, 1952), also known as the McCarran–Walter Act, codified under Title 8 of the United States Code (), governs immigration to and citizenship in the United States. It came into effect on June 27, 1952. The legislation consolidated various immigration laws into a single text. Officially titled the Immigration and Nationality Act, it is often referred to as the 1952 law to distinguish it from the 1965 legislation. 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.
In response to the liberal immigration bill of Representative Emanuel Celler (D-New York) and Senator Herbert H. Lehman (D-New York), both McCarran and Walter combined their restrictive immigration proposals into the McCarran–Walter bill and recruited support of patriotic and veteran organizations. Opponents of the restrictive bill such as Lehman attempted to strategize a way to bring the groups together to resist McCarran's actions. Despite the efforts to resist, McCarran's influence as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee ultimately overpowered the liberal immigration reform coalition.
President Harry Truman vetoed the McCarran–Walter Act because it continued national-origins quotas that discriminated against potential allies that contained communist groups. However, Congress overrode the veto by a two-thirds vote of each house. The 82nd United States Congress enacted the H.R. 5678 bill, which became effective on June 27, 1952. The passage of the McCarran–Walter bill, known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, solidified more restrictive immigration movement in the United States.
Provisions
The Act abolished racial restrictions found in United States immigration and naturalization statutes going back to the Naturalization Act of 1790. The 1952 Act retained a quota system for nationalities and regions. Eventually, the Act established a preference system that determined which ethnic groups were desirable immigrants and placed great importance on labor qualifications. The Act defined three types of immigrants: immigrants with special skills or who had relatives who were U.S. citizens, who were exempt from quotas and who were to be admitted without restrictions; average immigrants whose numbers were not supposed to exceed 270,000 per year; and refugees.
It expanded the definition of the "United States" for nationality purposes, which already included Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, to add Guam. Persons born in these territories on or after December 24, 1952, acquire U.S. citizenship at birth on the same terms as persons born in other parts of the United States.
National quotas
The McCarran Report of the 1950s supported the quota allocation system of the National Origin Act, asserting that it was the most effective means to "preserve the sociological and cultural balance of the United States". 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 McCarran–Walter Act allowed for people of Asian descent to immigrate and to become citizens, which had been banned by laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Asian Exclusion Act of 1924. Chinese immigration, in particular, had been allowed for a decade prior to McCarran–Walter by the Magnuson Act of 1943, which was passed because of America's World War II alliance with China. Japanese Americans and Korean Americans were first allowed to naturalize by the McCarran–Walter Act. Overall changes in the perceptions of Asians were made possible by Cold War politics; the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 allowed anticommunist Chinese American students who feared returning to the Chinese Civil War to stay in the United States; and these provisions would be expanded by the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. states: