This trajectory is rooted in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
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It was considered a symbolic move when President Lyndon Johnson went to the Statue of Liberty on October 3, 1965, to sign an immigration bill that gave people from every part of the world an equal chance to come to America. It ended a long-standing quota system based on national origin that heavily favored Western Europeans such as the English, Irish and Germans. This study was initiated by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service and the National Science Foundation.
The consequences have been vast. Hispanics will increase from 17.4 to 28.6 percent, the Census Bureau estimates. He contrasted that to the period between 1860 and 1920, where it was between 13 and 15 percent and where we are now, at 14 percent.
The best way to tackle this is to clear a few of the most common misconceptions and to educate people on the truth regarding immigrants and the immigration process.
Another result could be damaging the prospects of Republicans in presidential elections, where the turnout of minority voters is crucial.
Although it would certainly be easier for anyone that wanted to come to the United States to simply move here, that’s not how the immigration process works.
And there is an additional lesson for policymakers and the country at large: One never truly knows how a major change in national policy will turn out. 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. “It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives”.
The act replaced the quotas with a system geared more toward people’s individual qualifications, skills and family ties in the United States. As a result, apprehensions along the border began to rise, signaling the rise of a new phenomenon known as “illegal migration”.
“We have been taking about illegal immigration for 25 years”, Carly Fiorina said. Since then, almost 59 million immigrants have come to live in the U.S. Along with their children, they make up more than half of America’s population growth in the last 50 years, literally reshaping the face of the nation. Sometime in the 1980s that started to shift, with the workforce becoming increasingly immigrant, predominantly Hispanic. However, it must be remembered that legal immigrants significantly outnumber illegal immigrants. “By cutting off avenues for legal entry in 1965, the Act produced mass undocumented migration, which set off a chain of events leading to border militarization, which backfired by promoting settlement rather than circulation”. “That may have been the promise of the founding fathers, but it took a long time to realize that”.
The American immigration system is complex and confusing.
“The shift away from ethnic selection in US immigration policy was primarily a response to foreign policy pressures emanating from the growing number of independent Asian, African, and Latin American countries that sought to delegitimize racism through the United Nations and other, particularly Pan-American, multilateral institutions”, immigration scholars David S. FitzGerald and David Cook Martin write for the Migration Information Source journal. Populist policymakers and intellectuals decried a long history of US occupation and gunboat diplomacy.
“The 1965 Act [changed the kind of people who could come] through a series of complicated rules to bring in people from cultures as different from ours as possible and as poor as possible”, said conservative author Ann Coulter in a recent interview on C-SPAN’s Book TV. It urged Congress to end the national-origins quotas, especially what the report called “racist provisions” discriminating against Asians and Caribbean blacks.
Such questions should have been settled 50 years ago with the passage of the 1965 Act. The Visa Bulletin is updated monthly and has different wait times by immigrant categories, as well as country of origin. It also imposed a new limit on immigrants from independent countries in the Western Hemisphere of 120,000 visas annually. Once they were in, they also made use of the family preferences to bring over their parents, children and siblings.
The results were dramatic. Eighty-five percent of the population was white, and 7 out of 8 immigrants were coming from Europe. A country that was nearly entirely native-born in 1965 has a significant foreign-born population; demographic diversity has spread to every region, expanding a black-and-white racial paradigm into a multi-colored one.
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A review of the debates that took place on the floor of Congress reveals that none of the assurances made by the backers of the Act regarding the levels of immigration, or its effect on American society, turned out to be correct.
