The Immigration Act at 50

National Journal

By Tom Gjelten

October 6, 2015

The Immigration Act at 50

The 1965 Im­mig­ra­tion and Na­tion­al­ity Act, whose 50th an­niversary was Sat­urday, 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.

Only a few sup­port­ers of the 1965 le­gis­la­tion said the coun­try could and should be will­ing to ac­com­mod­ate more im­mig­rants of col­or. “The Amer­ic­an na­tion today stands as elo­quent proof that there is no in­her­ent con­tra­dic­tion between unity and di­versity,” de­clared Rep. Peter Rodino of New Jer­sey, a Demo­crat of Itali­an ori­gin. The more typ­ic­al re­sponse to the nat­iv­ist ar­gu­ments was simply to deny that the pro­posed im­mig­ra­tion re­form would bring any sig­ni­fic­ant shift in the pat­tern of im­mig­ra­tion. Sec­ret­ary of State Dean Rusk, testi­fy­ing in Con­gress, said he saw no in­dic­a­tion of “a world situ­ation where every­body is just strain­ing to move to the United States.”

Such as­sur­ances did not sway con­ser­vat­ive crit­ics of the re­form, but a last-minute change in the le­gis­lat­ive lan­guage did al­le­vi­ate their fears of a massive Afric­an and Asi­an in­flux. The ori­gin­al ver­sion of the 1965 Act, co­sponsored by Sen. Philip Hart of Michigan and Rep. Emanuel Celler of New York, both lib­er­al Demo­crats, favored those im­mig­rants whose skills were “es­pe­cially ad­vant­age­ous” to the United States. Con­ser­vat­ives, led by Rep. Mi­chael Feighan, an Ohio Demo­crat, man­aged to change those pri­or­it­ies, giv­ing visa pref­er­ences in­stead to for­eign­ers who were seek­ing to join their fam­il­ies in the United States. Feighan, who chaired the House Im­mig­ra­tion sub­com­mit­tee, ar­gued that a fam­ily-uni­fic­a­tion pref­er­ence in im­mig­ra­tion law would es­tab­lish, in the words of a glow­ing pro­file in the Amer­ic­an Le­gion magazine, “a nat­ur­ally op­er­at­ing na­tion­al-ori­gins sys­tem,” be­cause it would fa­vor im­mig­ra­tion from the north­ern and west­ern European coun­tries that at the time dom­in­ated the U.S. pop­u­la­tion.

Feighan and oth­ers were wrong. The heightened em­phas­is on fam­ily uni­fic­a­tion, rather than rep­lic­at­ing the ex­ist­ing eth­nic struc­ture of the Amer­ic­an pop­u­la­tion, led to the phe­nomen­on of chain mi­gra­tion. The nat­ur­al­iz­a­tion of a single im­mig­rant from an Asi­an or Afric­an or His­pan­ic back­ground opened the door to his or her broth­ers and sis­ters and their spouses, who in turn could spon­sor their own broth­ers and sis­ters. With­in a few dec­ades, fam­ily uni­fic­a­tion had be­come the driv­ing force in U.S. im­mig­ra­tion, and it favored ex­actly those na­tion­al­it­ies the crit­ics of the 1965 Act had hoped to keep out, be­cause those were the people most de­term­ined to move.

In the end, pas­sage of the law did not re­solve the ques­tion of Amer­ica’s iden­tity, and the de­bate con­tin­ued. Some con­ser­vat­ives sub­sequently ar­gued that the 1965 Im­mig­ra­tion Act had been a scheme to curry fa­vor with lib­er­al spe­cial-in­terest groups or even to es­tab­lish a fu­ture demo­graph­ic base for the Demo­crat­ic Party. But such ana­lyses missed the irony at the heart of a law whose most re­volu­tion­ary pro­vi­sion was ori­gin­ally in­ten­ded to bol­ster the status quo.

The de­bate over U.S. im­mig­ra­tion policy has long fo­cused on what to do about people who come to the coun­try un­law­fully. Even leg­al im­mig­rants face hos­til­ity these days, though, as the pro­spect of a non­white U.S. ma­jor­ity prompts a re­viv­al of nat­iv­ist sen­ti­ment. Xeno­pho­bia was evid­ent as well dur­ing the de­bate over the 1965 Act, but one dif­fer­ence is that the coun­try now has 50 years of ex­per­i­ence suc­cess­fully in­teg­rat­ing non-European im­mig­rants. The 1965 Im­mig­ra­tion Act has nev­er got­ten the at­ten­tion it war­rants as the law that fi­nally made Amer­ica the open na­tion it had long claimed to be. Its 50th an­niversary could be an oc­ca­sion for cel­eb­ra­tion.

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com