Memorandum, "Department of State Views on HR 5678 Immigration and Nationality Bill"

Department of State Viewa on H.l. 5678 Immigration and Nationality Bill The Department of State has reviewed the opinions it expressed in its memorandum of April 14 to the President and on other occasions concerning the Immigration and Nationality Bills with a view to pre- paring specific recommendations on H.R. 5678 in its final form. The opinions got forth below are based prinarily - but not exclusively - on the discussion of the Walter and McCarran Bills in the memorandum of May 9 from the Director of the Bureau of the Budget to the President and the detailed staff memorandum attached thereto. Although the monorandum prepared in the Bureau of the Budget contains some obser- vations on aspects of the bill that are primarily of domestic concern, the Department of State has undertakon to comment only on those provisions that have a direct and immediate bearing on foreign relations. No comment has therefore been made on questions relating to naturalisation, deportation and certain other subjects. Failure to make any reference to comments in the staff menorandum should not be construed as either concurrence or disagreement with the Bureau of the Budget. The present bill constitutes a much needed and long overdue codification. Aa such it necessarily enbodies many provisions of existing law, but it also contains important improvements and liberal- igations. This bill is lengthy and complicated, which is inevitable in any codification of United States laws enacted over a period of more than a century in the fields of both immigration and nationality. The Department of State has tried consistently, during the last three or four years while the present bill was being evolved, to assure the inclusion of those provisions that it deemed desirable, and many of then have been included. Among those that ware not included but which the Department still would consider extremely desirable was a proposed provision which would facilitate the performance by the United States of certain heat obligations under the Headquarters Agreement with the United Nations. The Department believes that the only choice at the present time, however, is between this bill and existing law, and that, on balance, the enactment of H.R. 5678 would be more beneficial than harmful to the foreign relations of the United States. From the purely administrative point of view, without regard to domestic or foreign policy considerations, the bill constitutes a distinct improvement over existing law. While the Department is not commenting in detail on the nationality provisions of the bill inasmuch as the Bureau of the Budget has not expressed great concern about them, nevertheless it may be stated that some of those provisions represent a liberalisation of existing law. One of the NARA