Friday, February 3, 2017

Sessions' Embrace of Racist Law One More Reason to Reject His Confirmation as Attorney General

 
By Mark Potok
Senior Fellow, Southern Poverty Law Center 

When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on Liberty Island, he had no doubt about the perniciousness of the law that it was replacing. The 1924 Immigration Act, which imposed a racist quota system favoring Northern European whites, was a "cruel and enduring wrong," a "harsh injustice" and "un-American in the highest sense," he said at the signing ceremony.

“We can now believe that [the 1924 law] will never again shadow the gate to the American Nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege,” he said. He added that “the American Nation returns to the finest of its traditions today.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican seeking confirmation as President Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general, doesn’t see things the same way.

In an October 2015 interview with Stephen Bannon, then the chief of Breitbart News and now Trump’s chief strategic adviser, Sessions praised the law and said that between 1924 and 1965 it had “created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America,” The Atlantic reported

Click here for the full article.  

Source: The Southern Poverty Law Center

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