Addressing 'economic need'

To the editor:

(re: “Leftist social programs haven’t worked, and won’t,” July 12)

There are too many falsehoods, half-truths and sweeping generalizations in Lou Deholczer’s recent Point of View to point out.

Here’s just one. He asserts that until the 1960s, “U.S. immigration policy was based on … the economic needs of the country.”

First of all, the recruitment of cheap labor by particular industries going back to the 18th century — and their constant search for desperately poor workers willing to be strikebreakers — is not what defines “the economic needs of the country.”

Were those “needs” addressed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882? Were our “economic needs” behind the Immigration Act of 1917, which was overtly racist, keeping out Italians, Jews, Poles, Russians and Asians? 

And again in 1924, just whose “economic needs” were met by the National Origins Act? Its very name tells us otherwise.

And which “economic needs” were met when we admitted tens of thousands of political refugees from Hungary and Cuba in the 1950s and 1960s?

Maurice Wolfthal