McCarran-Walter Act Imposes Racialized Immigration Quotas Over Truman Veto - 85% for Europeans

Congress passes the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (McCarran-Walter Act) over President Truman’s veto on June 27, 1952, codifying a racialized immigration quota system that allocates 85 percent of the 154,277 visas available annually to individuals of northern and western European lineage. The Act revises the 1924 National Origins Quota System to allow national quotas at one-sixth of one percent of each nationality’s population in the United States in 1920. Immigrants from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany receive two-thirds of available spots, while the law imposes new quotas on former British Caribbean colonies designed to limit Black migration.

The Act abolishes racial restrictions in naturalization statutes dating to the Naturalization Act of 1790, allowing people of Asian descent to immigrate and naturalize for the first time since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Asian Exclusion Act of 1924. Japanese Americans and Korean Americans gain naturalization rights. However, while creating symbolic opportunities for Asian immigration, the Act continues discriminating through allocation mechanisms. Each Asian nation receives a minimum quota of 100 visas annually, with Japan’s largest at 185, while overall Asian immigration is capped at 2,000 per year by the Asian-Pacific Triangle restriction.

Uniquely, Asians remain the only population tracked by race rather than nationality. An individual with one or more Asian parents, born anywhere in the world and possessing any nation’s citizenship, is counted under the national quota of their Asian ethnicity or against a generic “Asian Pacific Triangle” quota. This racial tracking system does not apply to Europeans regardless of ancestry. Senator Herbert Lehman attacks the national origins provisions as a racist measure smacking of the ethnic purity policies of recently defeated German Nazis.

President Truman vetoes the Act as discriminatory, but Congress overrides with sufficient support. The Act also expands ideological grounds for exclusion, reflecting McCarthy-era anti-Communist hysteria by barring individuals affiliated with Communist or totalitarian organizations. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson subsequently work to eliminate the racially restrictive quota system. The McCarran-Walter Act sets America’s immigration standards until new legislation passes in 1965, establishing legal infrastructure for racial discrimination in immigration that persists for 13 years. The Act demonstrates how ostensible progress (ending Asian exclusion) can mask continued structural racism through quota allocation, and how national security rhetoric (anti-Communism) enables expansion of government power to exclude and control movement based on political beliefs.