Asians will exceed Hispanic immigrants to become the largest immigrant group by 2055 and no racial or ethnic group will constitute a majority of the USA population by then, a new study said on Monday. “A few immigrants never thought they would become a U.S. citizen and have the right to vote in their lifetimes”. The quota structure favored immigration from northern and western Europe, restricted it from eastern and southern Europe, and excluded Asians altogether. White immigrants to America, 80% back in 1965, will hover somewhere between 18% and 20% with black immigrants in the 8%-9% range, the study said.
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Compare that to the 4 million Italians who formed the largest immigrant group in the United States’ previous major wave (1890-1919), or to the 4.3 million Germans who topped the migration wave before that, from 1840 to 1880. “Probably most of the immigration from Mexico was caused by the 1965 Act, but in a perverse way most people don’t think of”, Massey said.
Princeton professor Douglas Massey argues that the 1965 act, which ended the Bracero Program of temporary work visas for Mexicans, also encouraged a lot of illegal immigration.
Looking ahead, new Pew Research Center USA population projections show that if current demographic trends continue, future immigrants and their descendants will be an even bigger source of population growth. But if the law had serious flaws, it was nonetheless the most dramatic rethinking of immigration policy in the last half century and, as such, an effort whose achievements and pitfalls we would do well to study today, as we navigate our own immigration debate.
Another important thing to remember is that having a criminal conviction is often what leads an immigrant to go before the Immigration Court and eventually be removed from the U.S. The vast majority of immigrants are law-abiding, moral and hard-working individuals with so much to contribute to society. The United States will finally live up to its motto.
Overall, concerns about the effects of immigration were highest around crime and the economy. Immigrants actually do much more to fund our welfare state than they do to take from it. Meanwhile, the share of new arrivals who are Hispanic is smaller than it was 50 years ago. What’s more, they have added immeasurably to the nation’s vibrancy, embedding in our culture new literatures, cuisines, music, and businesses. Almost 59 million immigrants have come to the U.S.in the past half century. However, it must be remembered that legal immigrants significantly outnumber illegal immigrants. “The Allies in World War II and the West during the Cold War risked losing support from Third World countries whose peoples were excluded by openly racist immigration laws”.
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Immigration is dominating today’s politics. (About 14 million of the foreigners who came since 1965 have died or left.) The foreign-born share is now 14 percent, approaching the high point of 15 percent during the great European immigration in the early 20th century.
