IMMIGRATION: Foot-Dragging on Refugees

Although President Eisenhower does not wear his troubles with Congress on his public sleeve, last week he was working himself into a private slow burn. Reason: Congress is dragging its feet in granting permanent visas to some 25,000 Hungarian refugees admitted to the U.S. last winter as temporary "parolees" under the McCarran-Walter Act.

Actually, the President had stepped well beyond the letter of the law in permitting the parolees to enter the U.S. and promising that they get regular citizenship status, which had to come from Congress. But he understood the outpouring of U.S. sympathy for Hungary's Freedom Fighters, and Congressmen, then on vacation, generally applauded his act. Since then, the necessary legislation has been bottled up in the Senate Judiciary Committee by Chairman James O. Eastland and in the House Immigration Subcommittee by Chairman Francis E. Walter, who is averse to any change in the McCarran-Walter Act, which he coauthored. Also bottled up by congressional-committee corks are the Eisenhower Administration's broader, longer-range proposals for revision of U.S. immigration laws to the extent that the annual number of immigrants would be more than doubled (from a currently authorized 155,000 to about 345,000).

The President is willing to let the dilatory 85th Congress move on civil rights before he makes an all-out fight for the Hungarians. But he feels that the U.S. has made a high moral commitment. And beyond that, he wonders how, if Congress is not even willing to grant help to the Hungarian refugees, the U.S. could possibly offer any sort of hope to Freedom Fighters if revolt were to break out in another Soviet satellite.