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The Birmingham News · Birmingham, Alabama · 6 November 1977

CP-1977-009

Pressure growing against laxer immigration policies

Dean Reed, News Washington Bureau

Pressure growing against laxer immigration policies — The Birmingham News, 6 November 1977
The Birmingham News · Birmingham, Alabama · 6 November 1977

Transcribed from the clipping

“WASHINGTON — Pressure is growing for reconsideration of new U.S. immigration policies — particularly a recent law change that allows Communist spokesmen and militant Palestinians to travel and speak freely in the United States. The change occurred when Congress approved a legal amendment sponsored by Sen. George S. McGovern, D-S.D., upsetting long-standing U.S. immigration policy barring known troublemakers. Now opposition to the McGovern amendment is coming from such Democratic Party leaders as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. Moynihan, for example, says the amendment is ‘inviting to our country Soviet government agents masquerading as trade union leaders’. The hard-hitting New York lawmaker referred to a U.S. tour by four Soviet spokesmen in October. The group, Moynihan said, promised not ‘to engage in controversy’ — and then in Pittsburgh said that American unions have fewer rights than Soviet unions. ‘A FINE EXAMPLE of what the Soviets mean by reciprocity,’ said Moynihan… Meanwhile, the American Jewish Congress is protesting to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance the granting of a visa permitting an officer of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to ‘roam the country at will’… At issue is a coming trip by Palestinian Mahmoud Salem Darwish. When asked about his affiliation with the PLO, State Department officials said the information was confidential and won’t be released except in case of a court trial…”

Context added by this archive

A Washington column on immigration law, and the man whose visa is being protested is named Mahmoud Salem Darwish. This archive holds the poet Mahmoud Darwish being refused a three-day American visa in 1982 under a McCarthy-era clause of the same body of law. Whether the man named here is the same person is not established by this clipping and is not claimed: the middle name does not match the poet’s usual rendering, and the State Department would not say what his affiliation was. What the clipping does establish is the machinery — a 1977 amendment that let Palestinians speak in the United States, the pressure to reverse it, and the same statute still being used to keep one out five years later. The other half of the column is a comic item about a senator trying to find a room to name after Hubert Humphrey.

Cite this item

"Pressure growing against laxer immigration policies," The Birmingham News, 6 November 1977. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1977-009. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1977-009

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1977-009.

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