For about 150 years, the United States pursued a policy of relatively unrestricted immigration. Since 1924, however, we have pursued a policy of drastically restricted immigration, with the restrictions based on considerations which many persons have believed to be discriminatory, unjust, and not based on facts. In the early I950's, it seemed that changes in this policy might be effected. The final result, the McCarranWalter Act,1 however, although undoubtedly a more efficient instrument than the 1924 law,2 still clashes with the democratic ideals held by most Americans and not only perpetuates most of the injustices of the earlier legislation, but adds new discriminations of its own. We shall here concern ourselves not with the entire law, but rather with the principle upon which it is based: that it is not desirable for the United States to permit more than a small amount of immigration, and that such immigration should be specifically and unequally allocated among various countries. The assumptions here embodied are that the place of birth of an immigrant is a reliable indication of his capability of becoming a desirable American, and that people from some countries are not sufficiently likely to become desirable Americans that we can afford to chance the entry of more than a hundred or two a year. It is a serious matter when a majority of Congress votes in favor of an immigration law based on the assumption that mankind is divided into fixed breeds, some superior to others. On the contrary, as Edward Corsi has said:3