The Curious History of Chain Migration
For more than 50 years, American immigration law has favored candidates who already have relatives in the country. A result of that policy is what Donald Trump calls “the horrible chain migration,” because of the way it allows lawful immigrants to invite their spouses, parents and even adult siblings to join them in the United States.
Mr. Trump says that he wants instead an immigration system that would award visas to people on the basis of their skills and education, as Canada does. As it happens, the U.S. Congress was on the verge of enacting just such an immigration policy in 1965. But it didn’t come to pass—because of some legislators’ concerns that it would open the doors too widely to immigrants of color. In a classic case of unintended consequences, Congress chose a different approach and got precisely the outcome it thought it could avoid: a flood of immigrants from the developing world.
Before 1965, immigrant visas were allocated primarily on the basis of national origin, with tens of thousands set aside for people from northern and western Europe. Countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East were allocated as few as 100 visas each per year. The discriminatory policy was justified, in the words of Democratic Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, on the grounds that it rewarded “those countries that contributed most to the formation of this nation.”
In 1964, President Johnson proposed replacing the national origin quota system with a merit-based system. “A nation that was built by the immigrants of all lands can ask those who now seek admission, ‘What can you do for our country?’” he said. “But we should not be asking, ‘In what country were you born?’”
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The fate of immigration reform in the House lay with the Judiciary Committee and the chairman of its immigration subcommittee, Rep. Michael Feighan (D-Ohio), a stalwart conservative who was allied with those members who favored national origin quotas. Under intense pressure from President Johnson himself, Feighan finally agreed to support a new immigration law, but only after insisting on a key change.
Rather than prioritizing candidates whose skills and education were considered “especially advantageous” to the U.S., as the Johnson bill stipulated, Feighan demanded that priority be given instead to those who already had family ties here. He told his allies that such a revision would insure that the ethnic profile of the U.S. population would remain largely unchanged. So revised, the “Immigration and Nationality Act” was passed and signed into law in October 1965.
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Critics of this approach were dismayed. The Japanese American Citizens League pointed out that Asians constituted just one half of one percent of the total U.S. population. “Thus,” the league complained, “it would seem that although the immigration bill eliminated race as a matter of principle, in actual operation, immigration will still be controlled by the now discredited national origins system.”
Neither side realized, however, how the world was already changing. Europe had largely recovered from World War II and was booming economically, so fewer Europeans were interested in moving to the U.S. In Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, however, the pressures to migrate were increasing, fueled by violence and poverty and facilitated by vast improvements in transportation and communication. One young African, coming to America on a student visa, or an engineer from South Asia with a U.S. job offer, could within a few years be responsible for the migration of dozens of relatives.
In 1960, seven of eight U.S. immigrants were white people from Europe. By 2010, nine of ten were from outside Europe, and the vast majority had come under the family unification provisions that were originally intended to keep them out.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-curious-history-of-chain-migration-1516376200
