word
05-01-2006, 07:08 AM
A historical background of US Immigration Policy:
Legislative hearings began in the House in summer, 1964, while the Senate was engaged in something more pressing but, some thought, closely related -- passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which barred discrimination on the basis of race, creed, religion, sex, and "national origin." This language in the civil rights legislation attracted frowning attention to the immigration status quo. How could the U.S. exert world leadership, Congressman Emanuel Celler asked, if our current immigration system was "a gratuitous insult to many nations" because of its race-conscious basis?
The national origins system was not based on race but nationality, but in the intense climate of the civil rights crusade the two were easily elided into equivalent evils, impermissible factors in decisionmaking. The law treated nationalities unequally, Senator Paul Douglas said, and while "it would be impossible to draw up a law restricting immigration without discriminating somehow between those who are admitted and those who are not," we should end the "basically unjust criterion of national origin" for a more "equitable formula," presumably discrimination on some more defensible basis. Preference categories for professionals and relatives seemed to him more equitable. We need "an immigration policy reflecting America's ideal of the equality of all men without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin," said Senator Hiram Fong of Hawaii when the Senate opened hearings in 1965. "Theories of ethnic superiority" must no longer be the basis for our immigration law, stated the bill's chief Senate sponsor, Philip Hart of Michigan.
Against such sentiments, an American Legion spokesman countered that "it is in the best interest of our country to maintain the present make up of our cultural and social structure." In the context of the Cold War and the civil rights struggle, there seemed considerably more energy and pertinence in the reformers' arguments. The national origins system was on the defensive now, ironically joined at the hip with Jim Crow.
Yet how could immigration reformers change a policy regime that was widely popular? A Harris poll released in May, 1965 showed the public "strongly opposed to easing of immigration laws" by a 2 to 1 margin (58% to 24%). This must have discouraged immigration liberalizers, but they knew that a burst of Great Society legislation was beginning to pour through Congress in the mid-60s, most of it not generated out of public demand or even understanding but out of the unique circumstances created by Kennedy's death, Johnson's legislative skills, and the intellectual and political collapse of American conservatism.
And the defenders of the national origins system -- those who understood its complexities -- seemed intellectually on the defensive. Few seemed able to match the blunt counterattack made a decade earlier by former State Department Visa Office head Robert C. Alexander in an article in the American Legion Magazine in 1956: "What do the opponents of the national origins quota system want when they glibly advocate action which would result in a change in the ethnological composition of our people . . . perhaps they should tell us, what is wrong with our national origins?"
Still, a major problem for defenders of the existing system was flaws they were forced to acknowledge. Up to 2/3 of the immigration flows after World War II had come outside the quotas, as entrants from the western hemisphere and refugees. The system had become a swiss cheese of loopholes, with the result that annual numbers had been rising and the cultural background of immigrants was not what the system was designed to produce. Complex maneuvering produced a House version of the administration's legislation that ended national origins quotas and shifted to a system of preferences based on family reunification and skills.
Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina was the only member of the Subcommittee on Immigration defending the national origins system during hearings. Ervin met every administration witness with the argument that you could not draft any immigration law in which you did not "discriminate," in that you favor some over others. Why not then discriminate, as the McCarran-Walter Act did, in favor of national groups who historically had the greatest influence in building the nation? "The McCarran-Walter Act is . . . based on conditions existing in the U.S., like a mirror reflecting the United States." To put all the earth's peoples on the same basis as prospective immigrants to the U.S., Ervin argued, was to discriminate against the "people from England . . . France . . . Germany . . . Holland" who had first settled and shaped the country.
On the Senate floor, Senator Robert Byrd (among others) supported Ervin: "Every other country that is attractive to immigrants practices selectivity (in favor of their founding nationalities) and without apology," including Australia, Japan, and Israel, Byrd said. Our system is "just and wise," since "additional population" from western European countries is "more easily and readily assimilated into the American population. . . . Why should the U.S. be the only advanced nation in the world today to develop a guilt complex concerning its immigration policies?"
Whatever the merits of this defense of the existing system made by a handful of legislators, it confronted a large political problem. The American population who would have approved of this argument were mostly dead, and those living, by contrast to their ancestors in 1921-28, had little interest in immigration issues or knowledge of what was being proposed. The patriotic societies, the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, joined by obviously marginal groups such as the Baltimore Anti-Communist League and the League of Christian Women, presented their traditional opposition to enlarged and non-European immigration but did not seem to exert much influence over the average legislator -- especially when so many of these groups showed little knowledge of the legislation and seemed mostly concerned with the threat of communist subversives slipping across national borders.
It was evident that the restrictions of the 1920s had lost important elements of their core support. A chief sponsor of limiting immigration had been organized labor. But in the 1950s AFL-CIO leadership -- though not, apparently, the rank-and-file -- had begun to shift its ground on immigration, and by the economically robust 1960s no longer expressed concerns about job and wage competition of an earlier era. The same was true of another component of the potential restrictionist coalition. African-American leaders in the1960s were beginning a move toward political solidarity with all the world's "people of color" and could not be counted on to take the restrictionist positions staked out by Frederick Douglass, Booker Washington, and A. Philip Randolph.
Even leaders of the patriotic societies seemed to sense the inevitability of some sort of retreat from national origins, and their opposition was not strenuous or skillful. The Senate floor manager of the bill, Senator Edward Kennedy, reported that in his meetings with several patriotic society representatives they "expressed little overt defense of the national-origins system" and indicated their willingness to consider a new framework so long as the numbers were not enlarged. Kennedy assured them that this was not the reformers' intention, and it is clear from the legislative record that "the reformers consistently denied that they were seeking to increase immigration significantly," in the summary of Steven Wagner.
Both historians of the legislative background of the 1965 act, Wagner and Koed, decline to call this outright deception, believing instead that the reformers had not given much thought to the system they were putting in place, for they "were looking backwards more than forwards." Their "main impetus . . . was not practical, but ideological." They were expunging what they took to be a legislative blot on America's internationally-scrutinized record on human rights, more intent on dismantling an inherited system than in the careful design of a substitute.
These assurances left the oddly enfeebled opposition unable to take aim against larger numbers and different source countries since these were not being proposed, and perhaps not even anticipated. There seemed to be a universal miscalculation of the results that would follow from the new emphasis given to family reunification in the new preference system. Everyone appeared to agree with the view of the Wall Street Journal that family preferences "insured that the new immigration pattern would not stray radically from the old one."
It is hard in retrospect to see why it was not obvious that few American citizens had immediate relatives abroad, so that this feature of the new selection system would build streams of family flows from a base in the most newly arrived, which meant Mexicans and whatever new refugees might arrive in an unpredictable future. Family preference was leverage for newcomers, and left long-term residents with diminished influence over immigration streams shaping the nation's future.
A formidable coalition had mobilized behind repeal of the old law and for a vaguely defined "liberalization." The coalition included the numerous "Volags" from religious denominations along with those organizations claiming to represent the ethnic groups associated with the New Immigration, strategically placed politically in the large northeastern and midwestern cities. Joining them were business leaders and organizations, including western "big agriculture." Sympathetic to these lobbying groups with a reasonably direct stake were most liberals, for whom immigration reform had surfaced as a smaller theatre of the civil rights movement and one which did not involve the physical dangers of marching in Mississippi.
Ervin attempted to get the best bargain possible under the circumstances, asking pointed questions of administration witnesses about the legislation's impact on overall numbers and their composition. He was given reassuring and (as it turned out) alarmingly wrong estimates. Administration witnesses predicted that the bulk of new immigrants would come from large backlogs in Italy, Greece, and Poland, and that annual numbers would increase only a modest 50-75,000. On the question of Latin American immigration, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was obviously ignorant of the testimony in the population hearings of 1963 in which experts had testified that Mexico's population had nearly doubled between 1940 and 1960. In the last decade, 400,000 Mexicans had migrated to the U.S. as 3 million braceros crossed the border seasonally. Yet Katzenbach, ignorant of all this, stated that "there is not much pressure to come to the United States from those countries."
Senator Ervin saw the opportunity. Was it not "discrimination" to leave the entire Western Hemisphere without limitation, implying "they were the best peoples of all," and hurting the feelings of those in the Eastern Hemisphere?18 The administration reluctantly agreed to a 120,000 "ceiling" (a leaky ceiling; immediate family and refugee admissions were uncapped) on Western Hemisphere immigration. In 1978, separate hemispheric "ceilings" were merged into a worldwide fake number of 290,000 that legislators persisted in calling a "ceiling" but historians and others should not. It was merely the capped component of a system with no upper limit.
The law of unintended consequences was about to produce a major case study. Reformers were putting in place a new system under which total numbers would triple and the source countries of immigration would radically shift from Europe to Latin America and Asia -- exactly the two demographic results that the entire restrictionist campaign from the 1870s to 1929 was designed to prevent. Yet the two core ideas of the restrictionists, that modern America was better off without large-scale immigration and that the existing ethno-racial makeup of the American people should be preserved, had not been directly challenged. Indeed, they were explicitly reaffirmed. Attorney General Robert Kennedy said in Senate hearings in 1964 that abolishing the restrictions on the Asia-Pacific Triangle would result in "approximately 5,000 [immigrants] . . .after which immigration from that source would virtually disappear."
As a Senator in 1965 he testified that abolishing the European tilt of the national origins system and placing emphasis on family reunification would maintain the status quo as to nations of origins. "The [proposed new] distribution of limited quota immigration can have no significant effect on the ethnic balance of the United States," and "the net increase attributable to this bill would be at most 50,000 a year . . ."
"Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually," prophesied Senator Edward Kennedy: "Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same.
" No one openly recommended what would turn out to be the bill's two chief results, increasing the volume of immigration back to the million a year range prior to 1920s restriction, or the idea that it was time for the nation aspiring to lead the world to be ethno-racially altered so as to resemble that world rather than the nation that had grown out of 13 British colonies augmented by African labor. This latter may be a splendid idea, the grandest of the last half century. We have yet to seriously debate the wisdom of it, for when our national craft was turned in that direction, there was no discussion of the new course.
The Senate bill passed by a vote of 76 to 18, all but two of the negative votes coming from southerners. The South-West coalition of the 1920s had shattered. The West abandoned the restrictionist system it helped build forty years earlier and the South, obsessively defending Jim Crow, was politically isolated and on the losing side of every national issue. Congress had decisively repudiated the old system for managing immigration, replacing it with what turned out to be an unpredictable and radically new regime. That older system had served the nation well by inaugurating a needed and popular restriction of immigration. But its principles of selection had come under criticism as world politics and domestic attitudes toward race relations changed profoundly.
In the new system of 1965, an inherited factor, nationality, still functioned as an element, but no nationalities had a favored position at the outset. Lyndon Johnson had said, "We ought never to ask, "In what country were you born?"", but of course we continued to ask, and the answer could matter. Your nationality could keep you out in any year that your nation's applicants exceeded 20,000, the LIMIT FOR ALL COUNTRIES (after revisions made in 1976.)
Still, "discrimination" was supposed to be thankfully gone, since all nations could send some migrants and the principles of selection did not at first glance seem to have any direct connection to nationality. To select those chosen for entry the law established a new set of preference categories that represented a major retreat from the historic emphasis in American immigration policy on labor market/skills criteria (only two of the seven in the new system) and toward kinship relations said to promote "family reunification" (four of the seven; the last category was for refugees, 17,400 slots). The national interest took a back seat, as selection criteria were shifted strongly (70 per cent of the total) toward the private, kinship interests of citizens who had relatives abroad—or, recent immigrants.
In any event, "discrimination" proved hard to shake. The new system, too, "discriminated," as Senator Ervin had predicted, but now "against" citizens of western Europe and the British Isles, including Ireland, "in favor of" Latin Americans and Asians, because it gave special influence to kinship -- or, nepotism. Ervin and a handful of others had anticipated large population pressures from these regions, and the North Carolina Senator prevailed in the negotiations on one point, insisting that western hemisphere immigration for the first time be placed under a "cap" of 120,000 (the eastern hemisphere quota was 170,000). But the cap was made in Congress, which meant that it was not a cap, as it did not include spouses, minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens.
With adoption of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, legal immigration began a striking rise from both Latin America and Asia. In the decade of the 1970s, Europe and Canada sent 20% of legal immigrants, Latin America and Asia 77%. This reflected "push factors" of poverty below the Mexican border and in Asia, whereas Europe bustled with prosperity. The new system clearly favored those with family ties in the U.S., which western Europeans and residents of the U.K. could rarely show.
The new system, like the old, was also flawed by its rigidity. Congress wrote immigration law as if its judgments should endure for decades. But immigration is a labor flow that should be meshed with the changing needs of the national economy, and a demographic nation-shaper that should be harnessed to national population goals. Recognizing at least the former, Celler pressed for restoration of a feature of Kennedy's original bill, an independent Immigration Board to recommend annual readjustments of skills-related preference categories in light of changes in the economy.
This good idea was lost in the shuffle. The system was not open to administrative realignment in response to economic cycles or demographic trends. Even if it had been, family ties abroad greatly outweighed skills needed in the U.S. The law represented "the transfer of policy control from the elected representatives of the American people to individuals wishing to bring relatives to this country," according to Senator Eugene McCarthy's rueful and later judgment: "Virtually all immigration decisions today are made by private individuals."
"The bill that we will sign today," said President Johnson, "is not a revolutionary bill," and "does not affect the lives of millions." What it did, he thought, was essentially moral and symbolic. It ends "the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system" which was "a cruel and enduring wrong."23 Journalist Theodore White offered a better interpretation, when, years later and with hindsight, he called the new immigration law a "noble, revolutionary -- and probably the most thoughtless of the many acts of the Great Society."
Not revolutionary? The 1965 Immigration Act was not given much contemporary attention in a decade of social upheaval and a war in Vietnam, was not mentioned by Lyndon Johnson in his memoirs, and is routinely allotted one or two sentences in history text books.
This emphasis will change, and attention to the 1965 Immigration Act will grow, for White's word "revolutionary" identifies a demographic turning point in American history. With all due respect to the epochal and invaluable changes made in America when the Jim Crow system was killed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the passage of time may position the 1965 immigration law as the Great Society's most nation-changing single act, especially if seen as the first of a series of ongoing liberalizations of U.S. immigration and border policy extending through the end of the century and facilitating four decades (so far) of mass immigration. For the 1965 law, and subsequent policy changes consistent with its expansionist goals, shifted the nation from a population-stabilization to a population-growth path, with far-reaching and worrisome consequences.
In the words of Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks, this launched an ongoing "vast social experiment" that conservatives inexplicably permit and liberals inexplicably sustain against the interests and sentiments of their working class base.
Legislative hearings began in the House in summer, 1964, while the Senate was engaged in something more pressing but, some thought, closely related -- passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which barred discrimination on the basis of race, creed, religion, sex, and "national origin." This language in the civil rights legislation attracted frowning attention to the immigration status quo. How could the U.S. exert world leadership, Congressman Emanuel Celler asked, if our current immigration system was "a gratuitous insult to many nations" because of its race-conscious basis?
The national origins system was not based on race but nationality, but in the intense climate of the civil rights crusade the two were easily elided into equivalent evils, impermissible factors in decisionmaking. The law treated nationalities unequally, Senator Paul Douglas said, and while "it would be impossible to draw up a law restricting immigration without discriminating somehow between those who are admitted and those who are not," we should end the "basically unjust criterion of national origin" for a more "equitable formula," presumably discrimination on some more defensible basis. Preference categories for professionals and relatives seemed to him more equitable. We need "an immigration policy reflecting America's ideal of the equality of all men without regard to race, color, creed, or national origin," said Senator Hiram Fong of Hawaii when the Senate opened hearings in 1965. "Theories of ethnic superiority" must no longer be the basis for our immigration law, stated the bill's chief Senate sponsor, Philip Hart of Michigan.
Against such sentiments, an American Legion spokesman countered that "it is in the best interest of our country to maintain the present make up of our cultural and social structure." In the context of the Cold War and the civil rights struggle, there seemed considerably more energy and pertinence in the reformers' arguments. The national origins system was on the defensive now, ironically joined at the hip with Jim Crow.
Yet how could immigration reformers change a policy regime that was widely popular? A Harris poll released in May, 1965 showed the public "strongly opposed to easing of immigration laws" by a 2 to 1 margin (58% to 24%). This must have discouraged immigration liberalizers, but they knew that a burst of Great Society legislation was beginning to pour through Congress in the mid-60s, most of it not generated out of public demand or even understanding but out of the unique circumstances created by Kennedy's death, Johnson's legislative skills, and the intellectual and political collapse of American conservatism.
And the defenders of the national origins system -- those who understood its complexities -- seemed intellectually on the defensive. Few seemed able to match the blunt counterattack made a decade earlier by former State Department Visa Office head Robert C. Alexander in an article in the American Legion Magazine in 1956: "What do the opponents of the national origins quota system want when they glibly advocate action which would result in a change in the ethnological composition of our people . . . perhaps they should tell us, what is wrong with our national origins?"
Still, a major problem for defenders of the existing system was flaws they were forced to acknowledge. Up to 2/3 of the immigration flows after World War II had come outside the quotas, as entrants from the western hemisphere and refugees. The system had become a swiss cheese of loopholes, with the result that annual numbers had been rising and the cultural background of immigrants was not what the system was designed to produce. Complex maneuvering produced a House version of the administration's legislation that ended national origins quotas and shifted to a system of preferences based on family reunification and skills.
Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina was the only member of the Subcommittee on Immigration defending the national origins system during hearings. Ervin met every administration witness with the argument that you could not draft any immigration law in which you did not "discriminate," in that you favor some over others. Why not then discriminate, as the McCarran-Walter Act did, in favor of national groups who historically had the greatest influence in building the nation? "The McCarran-Walter Act is . . . based on conditions existing in the U.S., like a mirror reflecting the United States." To put all the earth's peoples on the same basis as prospective immigrants to the U.S., Ervin argued, was to discriminate against the "people from England . . . France . . . Germany . . . Holland" who had first settled and shaped the country.
On the Senate floor, Senator Robert Byrd (among others) supported Ervin: "Every other country that is attractive to immigrants practices selectivity (in favor of their founding nationalities) and without apology," including Australia, Japan, and Israel, Byrd said. Our system is "just and wise," since "additional population" from western European countries is "more easily and readily assimilated into the American population. . . . Why should the U.S. be the only advanced nation in the world today to develop a guilt complex concerning its immigration policies?"
Whatever the merits of this defense of the existing system made by a handful of legislators, it confronted a large political problem. The American population who would have approved of this argument were mostly dead, and those living, by contrast to their ancestors in 1921-28, had little interest in immigration issues or knowledge of what was being proposed. The patriotic societies, the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, joined by obviously marginal groups such as the Baltimore Anti-Communist League and the League of Christian Women, presented their traditional opposition to enlarged and non-European immigration but did not seem to exert much influence over the average legislator -- especially when so many of these groups showed little knowledge of the legislation and seemed mostly concerned with the threat of communist subversives slipping across national borders.
It was evident that the restrictions of the 1920s had lost important elements of their core support. A chief sponsor of limiting immigration had been organized labor. But in the 1950s AFL-CIO leadership -- though not, apparently, the rank-and-file -- had begun to shift its ground on immigration, and by the economically robust 1960s no longer expressed concerns about job and wage competition of an earlier era. The same was true of another component of the potential restrictionist coalition. African-American leaders in the1960s were beginning a move toward political solidarity with all the world's "people of color" and could not be counted on to take the restrictionist positions staked out by Frederick Douglass, Booker Washington, and A. Philip Randolph.
Even leaders of the patriotic societies seemed to sense the inevitability of some sort of retreat from national origins, and their opposition was not strenuous or skillful. The Senate floor manager of the bill, Senator Edward Kennedy, reported that in his meetings with several patriotic society representatives they "expressed little overt defense of the national-origins system" and indicated their willingness to consider a new framework so long as the numbers were not enlarged. Kennedy assured them that this was not the reformers' intention, and it is clear from the legislative record that "the reformers consistently denied that they were seeking to increase immigration significantly," in the summary of Steven Wagner.
Both historians of the legislative background of the 1965 act, Wagner and Koed, decline to call this outright deception, believing instead that the reformers had not given much thought to the system they were putting in place, for they "were looking backwards more than forwards." Their "main impetus . . . was not practical, but ideological." They were expunging what they took to be a legislative blot on America's internationally-scrutinized record on human rights, more intent on dismantling an inherited system than in the careful design of a substitute.
These assurances left the oddly enfeebled opposition unable to take aim against larger numbers and different source countries since these were not being proposed, and perhaps not even anticipated. There seemed to be a universal miscalculation of the results that would follow from the new emphasis given to family reunification in the new preference system. Everyone appeared to agree with the view of the Wall Street Journal that family preferences "insured that the new immigration pattern would not stray radically from the old one."
It is hard in retrospect to see why it was not obvious that few American citizens had immediate relatives abroad, so that this feature of the new selection system would build streams of family flows from a base in the most newly arrived, which meant Mexicans and whatever new refugees might arrive in an unpredictable future. Family preference was leverage for newcomers, and left long-term residents with diminished influence over immigration streams shaping the nation's future.
A formidable coalition had mobilized behind repeal of the old law and for a vaguely defined "liberalization." The coalition included the numerous "Volags" from religious denominations along with those organizations claiming to represent the ethnic groups associated with the New Immigration, strategically placed politically in the large northeastern and midwestern cities. Joining them were business leaders and organizations, including western "big agriculture." Sympathetic to these lobbying groups with a reasonably direct stake were most liberals, for whom immigration reform had surfaced as a smaller theatre of the civil rights movement and one which did not involve the physical dangers of marching in Mississippi.
Ervin attempted to get the best bargain possible under the circumstances, asking pointed questions of administration witnesses about the legislation's impact on overall numbers and their composition. He was given reassuring and (as it turned out) alarmingly wrong estimates. Administration witnesses predicted that the bulk of new immigrants would come from large backlogs in Italy, Greece, and Poland, and that annual numbers would increase only a modest 50-75,000. On the question of Latin American immigration, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was obviously ignorant of the testimony in the population hearings of 1963 in which experts had testified that Mexico's population had nearly doubled between 1940 and 1960. In the last decade, 400,000 Mexicans had migrated to the U.S. as 3 million braceros crossed the border seasonally. Yet Katzenbach, ignorant of all this, stated that "there is not much pressure to come to the United States from those countries."
Senator Ervin saw the opportunity. Was it not "discrimination" to leave the entire Western Hemisphere without limitation, implying "they were the best peoples of all," and hurting the feelings of those in the Eastern Hemisphere?18 The administration reluctantly agreed to a 120,000 "ceiling" (a leaky ceiling; immediate family and refugee admissions were uncapped) on Western Hemisphere immigration. In 1978, separate hemispheric "ceilings" were merged into a worldwide fake number of 290,000 that legislators persisted in calling a "ceiling" but historians and others should not. It was merely the capped component of a system with no upper limit.
The law of unintended consequences was about to produce a major case study. Reformers were putting in place a new system under which total numbers would triple and the source countries of immigration would radically shift from Europe to Latin America and Asia -- exactly the two demographic results that the entire restrictionist campaign from the 1870s to 1929 was designed to prevent. Yet the two core ideas of the restrictionists, that modern America was better off without large-scale immigration and that the existing ethno-racial makeup of the American people should be preserved, had not been directly challenged. Indeed, they were explicitly reaffirmed. Attorney General Robert Kennedy said in Senate hearings in 1964 that abolishing the restrictions on the Asia-Pacific Triangle would result in "approximately 5,000 [immigrants] . . .after which immigration from that source would virtually disappear."
As a Senator in 1965 he testified that abolishing the European tilt of the national origins system and placing emphasis on family reunification would maintain the status quo as to nations of origins. "The [proposed new] distribution of limited quota immigration can have no significant effect on the ethnic balance of the United States," and "the net increase attributable to this bill would be at most 50,000 a year . . ."
"Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually," prophesied Senator Edward Kennedy: "Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same.
" No one openly recommended what would turn out to be the bill's two chief results, increasing the volume of immigration back to the million a year range prior to 1920s restriction, or the idea that it was time for the nation aspiring to lead the world to be ethno-racially altered so as to resemble that world rather than the nation that had grown out of 13 British colonies augmented by African labor. This latter may be a splendid idea, the grandest of the last half century. We have yet to seriously debate the wisdom of it, for when our national craft was turned in that direction, there was no discussion of the new course.
The Senate bill passed by a vote of 76 to 18, all but two of the negative votes coming from southerners. The South-West coalition of the 1920s had shattered. The West abandoned the restrictionist system it helped build forty years earlier and the South, obsessively defending Jim Crow, was politically isolated and on the losing side of every national issue. Congress had decisively repudiated the old system for managing immigration, replacing it with what turned out to be an unpredictable and radically new regime. That older system had served the nation well by inaugurating a needed and popular restriction of immigration. But its principles of selection had come under criticism as world politics and domestic attitudes toward race relations changed profoundly.
In the new system of 1965, an inherited factor, nationality, still functioned as an element, but no nationalities had a favored position at the outset. Lyndon Johnson had said, "We ought never to ask, "In what country were you born?"", but of course we continued to ask, and the answer could matter. Your nationality could keep you out in any year that your nation's applicants exceeded 20,000, the LIMIT FOR ALL COUNTRIES (after revisions made in 1976.)
Still, "discrimination" was supposed to be thankfully gone, since all nations could send some migrants and the principles of selection did not at first glance seem to have any direct connection to nationality. To select those chosen for entry the law established a new set of preference categories that represented a major retreat from the historic emphasis in American immigration policy on labor market/skills criteria (only two of the seven in the new system) and toward kinship relations said to promote "family reunification" (four of the seven; the last category was for refugees, 17,400 slots). The national interest took a back seat, as selection criteria were shifted strongly (70 per cent of the total) toward the private, kinship interests of citizens who had relatives abroad—or, recent immigrants.
In any event, "discrimination" proved hard to shake. The new system, too, "discriminated," as Senator Ervin had predicted, but now "against" citizens of western Europe and the British Isles, including Ireland, "in favor of" Latin Americans and Asians, because it gave special influence to kinship -- or, nepotism. Ervin and a handful of others had anticipated large population pressures from these regions, and the North Carolina Senator prevailed in the negotiations on one point, insisting that western hemisphere immigration for the first time be placed under a "cap" of 120,000 (the eastern hemisphere quota was 170,000). But the cap was made in Congress, which meant that it was not a cap, as it did not include spouses, minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens.
With adoption of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, legal immigration began a striking rise from both Latin America and Asia. In the decade of the 1970s, Europe and Canada sent 20% of legal immigrants, Latin America and Asia 77%. This reflected "push factors" of poverty below the Mexican border and in Asia, whereas Europe bustled with prosperity. The new system clearly favored those with family ties in the U.S., which western Europeans and residents of the U.K. could rarely show.
The new system, like the old, was also flawed by its rigidity. Congress wrote immigration law as if its judgments should endure for decades. But immigration is a labor flow that should be meshed with the changing needs of the national economy, and a demographic nation-shaper that should be harnessed to national population goals. Recognizing at least the former, Celler pressed for restoration of a feature of Kennedy's original bill, an independent Immigration Board to recommend annual readjustments of skills-related preference categories in light of changes in the economy.
This good idea was lost in the shuffle. The system was not open to administrative realignment in response to economic cycles or demographic trends. Even if it had been, family ties abroad greatly outweighed skills needed in the U.S. The law represented "the transfer of policy control from the elected representatives of the American people to individuals wishing to bring relatives to this country," according to Senator Eugene McCarthy's rueful and later judgment: "Virtually all immigration decisions today are made by private individuals."
"The bill that we will sign today," said President Johnson, "is not a revolutionary bill," and "does not affect the lives of millions." What it did, he thought, was essentially moral and symbolic. It ends "the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system" which was "a cruel and enduring wrong."23 Journalist Theodore White offered a better interpretation, when, years later and with hindsight, he called the new immigration law a "noble, revolutionary -- and probably the most thoughtless of the many acts of the Great Society."
Not revolutionary? The 1965 Immigration Act was not given much contemporary attention in a decade of social upheaval and a war in Vietnam, was not mentioned by Lyndon Johnson in his memoirs, and is routinely allotted one or two sentences in history text books.
This emphasis will change, and attention to the 1965 Immigration Act will grow, for White's word "revolutionary" identifies a demographic turning point in American history. With all due respect to the epochal and invaluable changes made in America when the Jim Crow system was killed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the passage of time may position the 1965 immigration law as the Great Society's most nation-changing single act, especially if seen as the first of a series of ongoing liberalizations of U.S. immigration and border policy extending through the end of the century and facilitating four decades (so far) of mass immigration. For the 1965 law, and subsequent policy changes consistent with its expansionist goals, shifted the nation from a population-stabilization to a population-growth path, with far-reaching and worrisome consequences.
In the words of Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks, this launched an ongoing "vast social experiment" that conservatives inexplicably permit and liberals inexplicably sustain against the interests and sentiments of their working class base.