Letter from Joseph Duggan to Richard Neustadt

ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL Department of Instice Mashington March 21, 1952 Honorable Richard E. Neustadt Special Assistant to the President The White House Washington, D. C. Dear Mr. Neustadt: This is in reply to your memorandum of March 20, 1952, asking for comments by ten o'clock this morning regarding the latest draft of the proposed message of the President to the Congress on special European migration (draft dated March 20, 1952) and regarding the memorandum from Assistant Secretary of State Hickerson, dated March 14, 1952, raising policy questions concerning the proposed message and legislation based upon the message. 1. You already have the comments of this Department on the proposed legislation, made to the Bureau of the Budget in a letter from the Deputy Attorney General dated March 14, 1952. In the letter it was pointed out that while we were not in a position to contribute views on the European needs and foreign policy con- siderations leading to the proposed program of special migration, we did have a preference, if a program was adopted, for normal immigration handling by the Immigration and Naturalization Service under the Attorney General, with assistance on the features involving employment and selection of migrants by other established agencies of the Government. That position was made known to the Interdepart- mental Committee on Refugees and Overpopulation which was responsible for formulating the policy underlying the proposed message, and apparently was not acceptable to a majority of that Committee. This Department was not represented in the drafting of the legislation. 2. The new State Department proposal is to alter the sug- gested program of specially admitting 300, immigrants of the contemplated categories in three years, to provide instead for a program of admitting 60,000 annually over a period of five years, utilizing each year the unused quota numbers of the preceding year. The reason offered is that since Congress will insist upon main- taining the principle of existing immigration quotas, to confine the proposal to a use annually for five years of the approximately A &