Italy, Italian Americans, and the Politics of the McCarran-Walter Act

This chapter reconstructs the eventually fruitless efforts by which the Italian government of Alcide De Gasperi and Italian Americans pursued changes to the U.S. legislation that would have let a larger number of Italian immigrants move to the United States in the early 1950s. It focuses specifically on the exploitation of the anti-communist climate of the Cold War during the Truman administration in a campaign to prevent the passing of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, a measure that reaffirmed the national origins system discriminating against prospective Italian newcomers. The essay concludes that this operation ultimately failed because Washington allowed exceptions to its restrictive immigration laws almost exclusively for expatriates from countries under Communist rule, which was not the case of Italy.