Immigration Reform Advocates and the Passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act

Once the epitome of resurgent xenophobia, the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 is now viewed as an exercise in symbolic politics. Immigration to the United States not only rose during the 1950s, but most of the immigrants who came arrived outside the parameters established by the law. As the debate over the bill unfolded, few would have guessed that its impact on American immigration would be anything but deleterious. The bill, in fact, generated an intense debate that polarized public opinion and brought together an incredibly diverse coalition of ethnic, religious, and labor organizations that initially worked together to push Congress to pass a more liberal immigration policy.

Yet, as this paper demonstrates, interethnic and interreligious cooperation in the 1950s was still wrought with peril, and supporters of restriction successfully divided the reform coalition to carry out their agenda. When McCarran and Walter refused to negotiate, the coalition split into two factions. While most of the ethnic and religious organizations refused to compromise, the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the Japanese American Citizen League belonged to a smaller group that preferred to negotiate with the sponsors of the law because they considered the status quo far worse. Seizing on these divisions, McCarran successfully played each side off the other and framed the critics as disloyal fifth columnists. The tensions between these two factions escalated to the point that some prominent members of the Catholic hierarchy, along with some of the harshest critics of the McCarran and Walter bills, blamed the NCWC for the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act.