Becoming American: Why Immigration Is Good for Our Nation's Future Read Online Free PDF Page B

Itaru a troublemaker.
    Feeling that their country had betrayed them and not wanting to cut ties to their ancestral country, the Inas’ refused to swear undivided loyalty to the United States in a survey all internees were given. They then renounced their citizenship.
    When camp authorities demanded to know why he refused, Itaru told them he bought war bonds, registered for civil defense, and always voted, yet his country decided he was a threat based solely on his ethnic appearance. He now no longer believed he and his family had a future in the United States because of their ethnicity.
    For speaking out in protest and refusing to swear loyalty, Itaru was charged with sedition, and in 1944, he was separated from his family and sent to a U.S. Justice Department camp. The camp, actually a military fort, had been converted to detain German prisoners of war, and Americans of Japanese decent were deemed enemies.
    At war’s end in 1945, Japan was in ruin, firebombing raids had devastated its cities and industry, and two atomic bombs had leveled two major cities. Reports back to the camps convinced the Inas there was nothing for them or their children to return to in Japan. 
    Japanese Americans were treated more harshly because of their appearance. The country was at war with Germany and Italy, too, but the Americanized citizens and immigrants from those countries had only to pledge a loyalty oath. As a group, the government may have monitored them, but they were not imprisoned.
    The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, only revised the quota formula assigned to each country of origin. Countries could send one-sixth of 1 percent of each nationality’s population in the United States in 1920. Because the law was based on U.S. population percentages, immigrants during this period were primarily from Western Europe. McCarran and Walter were afraid the United States could face communist infiltration through immigration and were concerned about national security. Thus, their solution was selective immigration, which did not take economics and, to a certain extent, foreign policy into account. Although the law technically ended Asian exclusion by allotting each Asian nation a minimum quota of one hundred visas each year and allowing Asians to become naturalized American citizens, the law ensured low immigration numbers from Asian countries. President Truman vetoed the law because he believed it to be discriminatory, but it was passed with the support of Congress.
    By the early 1960s, calls to reform U.S. immigration policy had mounted, thanks in no small part to the growing strength of the civil rights movement. The movement’s focus on equal treatment regardless of race or nationality led many to view the quota system as backward and discriminatory. With the passing of the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 to end overt discrimination within the nation, the next logical step was to purge it of its external discriminatory policies toward the rest of the world as embodied in its prevailing immigration policies.
    In particular, Greeks, Poles, Portuguese, and Italians—of whom increasing numbers were seeking to enter the United States—claimed the quota system discriminated against them in favor of Northern Europeans. At that time, 70 percent of all immigrant slots were allotted to natives of just three countries: the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany. These slots went mostly unused, while there were long waiting lists for the small number of visas available to those born elsewhere in eastern and southern Europe.
    The resulting Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 was as much a manifestation of civil rights policy as it was an instrument of immigration reform. It marked a dramatic break with past immigration policy and had an immediate and lasting impact. In place of the national-origins quota system, the act provided for preferences to be made according to categories, such as