Letter to the Speaker Urging House Action on the Immigration Bill.

Dear Mr. Speaker:

As you suggested I write you, more fully and formally, the view I expressed in our conversations earlier yesterday and today.

There is no piece of legislation before the Congress that in terms of decency and equity is more demanding of passage than the Immigration bill. Four Presidents have urged this kind of legislation. Four decades have been witness to this kind of need. Countless Americans with ties of family and heritage reaching beyond the seas have cried out for this kind of action.

Our present restrictions say that Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, all the Southern European countries in particular, are not as desirable as others. What a shameful declaration.

By what distorted principle do we assert that Enrico Fermi, or Conrad Huber, or David Samoff, or Marconi, or George Christopher, or I. M. Pei, Benjamin Cardozo, John Philip Sousa or Senators Fong and Pastore, and Congressmen Mink, Brademas, and Pucinski have not added to the culture and achievement of our land? All these men and women, and millions more whose forebears were immigrants, are stained by a national commitment to restriction, isolation and indifference.

You and I, Mr. Speaker, and the great majority of the Congress know this is wrong. The vast majority of our fellow citizens know this is wrong.

I hope the Congress will act speedily on the Immigration bill as reported by the House Committee, free of any crippling amendments.

Sincerely,

LYNDON B. JOHNSON

[The Speaker, The House of Representatives, Washington, D.C.]