Many Americans want to bring back the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act restrictions on Muslims in public office. The original law recognized that certain ideologies are incompatible with the Constitution.
Public office requires loyalty to the United States, not Sharia.
Are you one of them?
The Democrats sponsored the legislation in 1952. What is the McCarran-Walter Act?
The McCarran-Walter Act is the common name for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA, Public Law 82-414). It remains the basic statutory framework of U.S. immigration and nationality law (codified in Title 8 of the U.S. Code), though it has been heavily amended, most notably in 1965.

Background and Passage
By the early 1950s, U.S. immigration rules were a patchwork of statutes dating back decades. The 1952 Act consolidated them into a single comprehensive law. It was sponsored by Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nevada) and Representative Francis E. Walter (D-Pennsylvania). It passed in the context of the early Cold War and Second Red Scare, with strong emphasis on national security and screening against communist or “subversive” influence. 
President Harry Truman vetoed the bill on June 25, 1952, calling the retained national-origins quota system discriminatory, outdated, and harmful to U.S. foreign policy and ideals.
Congress overrode the veto the next day (House 278–113, Senate 57–26).
The law took effect December 24, 1952. 
Key Provisions
• National origins quota system: It preserved and slightly revised the system created by the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act). Each country’s annual quota was set at one-sixth of 1 percent of the number of people of that national origin living in the United States according to the 1920 census, with a minimum of 100 visas per country. Roughly 154,000–155,000 quota visas were available each year; about 85 percent went to people from Northern and Western Europe. Western Hemisphere countries were generally outside the quota system. 
• End of formal racial bars to naturalization: For the first time, the law eliminated race as a barrier to becoming a U.S. citizen.
Naturalization had been limited since the 1790 Naturalization Act primarily to “free white persons” (later expanded to people of African descent). This change allowed Asian immigrants to naturalize. The Act also ended the absolute exclusion of Asian immigration, assigning each Asian country a small minimum quota (often 100). In practice, an “Asia-Pacific Triangle” racial classification still severely limited total Asian immigration. 
• Preference system: Within the quotas, the Act established preferences favoring immigrants with special skills, education, or close family ties already in the United States. This was an early version of the family- and skills-based preference structure used later.
• Security and exclusion grounds: It expanded the government’s power to exclude or deport people on ideological grounds (including membership in or affiliation with the Communist Party or other totalitarian organizations) and other security-related reasons. The President also received broad authority under what became Section 212(f) to suspend entry of classes of aliens if their entry was deemed detrimental to U.S. interests.
• Other changes: It included elements of labor certification to protect U.S. workers, non-quota status for certain close relatives of citizens (such as spouses), and various procedural consolidations.
Place in Immigration History
U.S. immigration policy had long mixed openness with restriction:
• Early naturalization limited by race (1790 onward).
• Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and later Asian exclusion measures.
• The 1921 and especially 1924 acts introduced numerical quotas based on national origins, sharply reducing Southern and Eastern European immigration and largely barring Asians.
• Post-World War II measures (including limited refugee admissions and the 1943 repeal of Chinese exclusion) began to ease some restrictions, but the national-origins framework remained dominant.
The 1952 Act was both a codification of the restrictive 1920s system and a partial break with earlier racial exclusions. Critics (including Truman) saw the quotas as discriminatory and diplomatically damaging; supporters viewed selective immigration and security screening as necessary during the Cold War.
The national-origins quotas were abolished by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act), which replaced them with a preference system based primarily on family reunification and employment skills, plus per-country limits and a worldwide ceiling. Many of the structural and procedural features of the 1952 Act, however, continue as the foundation of Title 8 today. 
In short, the McCarran-Walter Act modernized and consolidated U.S. immigration law while largely preserving the national-origins preference for Northern and Western Europeans, ending explicit racial bans on naturalization, and strengthening ideological exclusion powers in the Cold War era.
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