The end of “Asian ban” came bundled with “ban anybody they wanted.”
June 27, 1952: Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, more commonly known as the McCarran-Walter Act.
It was a milestone: for the first time in U.S. history, race was formally removed as a barrier to immigration and naturalization. Japanese and other Asian immigrants — who had been explicitly barred for decades — could finally become citizens of the United States.
But this same law also created something far more enduring: an enormous grant of power to the executive branch. The president could now block any class of non-citizens from entering the country, based on national security, ideology, or simply nationality. That authority would echo for decades.
Before 1952, Asian immigrants were almost entirely excluded by a patchwork of laws, including the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1924. Even those who had lived in the U.S. for decades were denied citizenship. The McCarran-Walter Act changed that. It finally allowed all races to be eligible for naturalization and created small immigration quotas for countries like Japan, China, and the Philippines.
But the law also upheld national-origin quotas favoring northern and western Europeans, while capping Asian countries to token levels (often just 100 people per year). The new system still said who was preferred. Meanwhile, the act gave the government wide authority to exclude or deport anyone suspected of being subversive or a national security threat — with ideological leanings (like communism) as justification. During the Cold War, this was hardly a neutral rule.
In 2017, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation restricting travel to the U.S. from several predominantly Muslim countries. Critics labeled it a “Muslim Ban.” The justification? Section 212(f) of the McCarran-Walter Act — the same 1952 law — which gave the president the authority to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” deemed “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
The case made it to the Supreme Court. In Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the Court ruled 5–4 to uphold the ban, despite evidence of discriminatory intent.
Justice Sotomayor, in her dissent, compared the ruling to Korematsu v. United States (1944), the infamous case that upheld the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. History was not repeating itself, she wrote. It was “repudiated in name but not in spirit.”
The McCarran-Walter Act remains one of the most complicated legacies in U.S. immigration law. It granted long-overdue rights to Asians — but preserved the spirit of white preference. And seven decades later, the same law was still being used to justify discrimination, this time against Muslims.
History does seem to keep repeating itself.