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.
This law increased the quota for Europeans outside Northern and Western Europe, gave the United States Department of State authority to reject entries affecting native wages, eliminated 1880s bans on contract labor, set a minimum quota of one hundred visas per country, and promoted family reunification by exempting citizens' children and spouses from numerical caps.
Legislative history The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 was debated and passed in the context of Cold War-era fears and suspicions of infiltrating Soviet and communist spies and sympathizers within American institutions and federal government. Anticommunist sentiment associated with the Second Red Scare (also known as McCarthyism) in the United States led restrictionists to push for selective immigration to preserve national security.What to Know About the 1952 Law Invoked by President Trump's Immigration Order
Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nevada), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was alarmed by passage and amendment of the Displaced Persons Act, which he believed put the country at risk to “a flood of undesirables,” and he blamed Representative Emanuel Celler, Senator Herbert H. Lehman, and Jewish organizations for its passage. He proposed an immigration bill to maintain the status quo in the United States and to safeguard the country from Communism, "Jewish interests" and immigrants that he deemed as external threats to national security.Marinari, Maddalena. "Divided and Conquered: Immigration Reform Advocates and the Passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 35, no. 3, Spring 2016, pp. 9–40. 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. However, various immigration reform advocacy groups and testimonies by representatives from ethnic coalitions, civil rights organizations, and labor unions challenged proposals of restrictive immigration and pushed for a more inclusive immigration reform.Marinari, Maddalena, and Donna Gabaccia. "'In the Name of God ... and in the Interest of Our Country': The Cold War, Foreign Policy, and Italian Americans' Mobilization against Immigration Restriction." New Italian Migrations to the United States: Vol. 1: Politics and History since 1945, University of Illinois Press, Urbana; Chicago; Springfield, 2017, pp. 59–79. 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.A later amendment, effective November 3, 1986, added the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
Immigration
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". The legislation prioritized Europeans, but due to limited interest in immigration during this time, many visas remained unutilized between 1952 and 1965.
The McCarran–Walter Act abolished the "alien ineligible to citizenship" category from US immigration law, which in practice applied only to people of Asian descent. Quotas of 100 immigrants per country were established for Asian countries; however, people of Asian descent who were citizens of a non-Asian country also counted towards the quota of their ancestral Asian country. 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.
A key provision, however, authorized the President to overrule those quotas. Section 212(f),Now (f) of Title 8 of the United States Code § 1182. states:
Quotas by country under successive laws Listed below are historical quotas on immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere, by country, as applied in given fiscal years ending June 30, calculated according to successive immigration laws and revisions from the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, to the final quota year of 1965, as computed under the 1952 Act revisions. Whereas the 1924 Act calculated each country's quota by applying the percentage share of each national origin in the 1920 U.S. population in proportion to the number 150,000, the 1952 Act adopted a simplified formula limiting each country to a flat quota of one-sixth of one percent of that nationality's 1920 population count, with a minimum quota of 100. The 1922 and 1925 systems based on dated census records of the foreign-born population were intended as temporary measures; the National Origins Formula based on the 1920 Census of the total U.S. population took effect on July 1, 1929, with the modifications of McCarran–Walter in effect from 1953 to 1965.
Annual National QuotaAct of 1921Act of 1924Act of 19521922%1925%1930%1965% 288 0.08% 100 0.06% 100 0.07% 100 0.06% 230 0.06% 124 0.08% 100 0.07% 100 0.06% 7,451 2.08% 785 0.48% 1,413 0.92% 1,405 0.89% 1,563 0.44% 512 0.31% 1,304 0.85% 1,297 0.82% 302 0.08% 100 0.06% 100 0.07% 100 0.06% 14,357 4.01% 3,073 1.87% 2,874 1.87% 2,859 1.80% 301 0.08% 228 0.14% 100 0.07% 5,619 1.57% 2,789 1.69% 1,181 0.77% 1,175 0.74% 1,348 0.38% 124 0.08% 116 0.08% 115 0.07% 3,921 1.10% 471 0.29% 569 0.37% 566 0.36% 71 0.02% 5,729 1.60% 3,954 2.40% 3,086 2.01% 3,069 1.94% 67,607 18.90% 51,227 31.11% 25,957 16.89% 25,814 16.28% 3,294 0.92% 100 0.06% 307 0.20% 308 0.19% 5,638 1.58% 473 0.29% 869 0.57% 865 0.55% 75 0.02% 100 0.06% 100 0.07% 100 0.06% 28,567 17.35% 17,853 11.61% 17,756 11.20% 42,057 11.75% 3,854 2.34% 5,802 3.77% 5,666 3.57% 1,540 0.43% 142 0.09% 236 0.15% 235 0.15% 2,460 0.69% 344 0.21% 386 0.25% 384 0.24% 92 0.03% 100 0.06% 100 0.07% 100 0.06% 3,607 1.01% 1,648 1.00% 3,153 2.05% 3,136 1.98% 12,202 3.41% 6,453 3.92% 2,377 1.55% 2,364 1.49% 31,146 8.70% 5,982 3.63% 6,524 4.24% 6,488 4.09% 2,465 0.69% 503 0.31% 440 0.29% 438 0.28% 7,419 2.07% 603 0.37% 295 0.19% 289 0.18% / 24,405 6.82% 2,248 1.37% 2,784 1.81% 2,697 1.70% 912 0.25% 131 0.08% 252 0.16% 250 0.16% 20,042 5.60% 9,561 5.81% 3,314 2.16% 3,295 2.08% 3,752 1.05% 2,081 1.26% 1,707 1.11% 1,698 1.07% 2,388 0.67% 100 0.06% 226 0.15% 225 0.14% 77,342 21.62% 34,007 20.65% 65,721 42.76% 65,361 41.22% 6,426 1.80% 671 0.41% 845 0.55% 942 0.59% and 359 0.10% 221 0.13% 200 0.13% 700 0.44%Total from Europe 356,135 99.53% 161,546 98.10% 150,591 97.97% 149,697 94.41%Total from Asia 1,066 0.30% 1,300 0.79% 1,323 0.86% 3,690 2.33%Total from Africa 122 0.03% 1,200 0.73% 1,200 0.78% 4,274 2.70%Total from all countries 357,803 100.00% 164,667 100.00% 153,714 100.00% 158,561 100.00%
Preference system The 1952 act created four preference categories for quota admissions: 50% for immigrants with essential skills, 30% for parents of adult citizens, 20% for spouses and children of legal residents, and any leftover green cards for siblings and adult children of citizens.
The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act removed the contract labor restriction, introducing employment-based preferences for immigrants with economic potential, skills, and education. It established the H-1 visa for temporary nonimmigrants with merit and ability, the H-2 process for approving visas for temporary foreign laborers where local workers were unavailable, and introduced the treaty trader or investor (E) and student (F-1) visas.