The Immigration Act That Inadvertently Changed America

[LiberalArkie]

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, whose 50th anniversary comes on October 3, officially committed the United States, for the first time, to accepting immigrants of all nationalities on a roughly equal basis. The law eliminated the use of national-origin quotas, under which the overwhelming majority of immigrant visas were set aside for people coming from northern and western Europe.

In the subsequent half century, the pattern of U.S. immigration changed dramatically. The share of the U.S. population born outside the country tripled and became far more diverse. Seven out of every eight immigrants in 1960 were from Europe; by 2010, nine out of ten were coming from other parts of the world. The 1965 Immigration Act was largely responsible for that shift. No law passed in the 20th century altered the country’s demographic character quite so thoroughly. But its effects were largely inadvertent. The law’s biggest impact on immigration patterns resulted from provisions meant to thwart its ability to change much at all.

The United States has long struggled to define what it really means to become American and which immigrants qualify. George Washington declared the country was open to “the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions,” but the idea persists that America is a “Judeo-Christian nation,” that being a Muslim American is a contradiction in terms, and that some nationalities are inferior to others.

Such questions should have been settled 50 years ago with the passage of the 1965 Act. For supporters, the intent of the legislation was to bring immigration policy into line with other anti-discrimination measures, not to fundamentally change the face of the nation. “We have removed all elements of second-class citizenship from our laws by the [1964] Civil Rights Act,” declared Vice President Hubert Humphrey. “We must in 1965 remove all elements in our immigration law which suggest there are second-class people.”


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[X_Digger]

1. K&R n/t.