Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

Based on Wikipedia: Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

The Day America Changed Its Mind About Who Belongs

On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson stood at the foot of the Statue of Liberty and signed a piece of paper that would transform the United States more profoundly than almost any legislation since the Civil Rights Act. At the time, few people—including the lawmakers who passed it—understood what they had just done.

The bill was called the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, though it's also known as the Hart-Celler Act after its two main sponsors. What it did was simple to describe but revolutionary in consequence: it abolished a system that had explicitly favored white Europeans for nearly two centuries.

Before this law, America had a surprisingly honest immigration policy. It said, in effect: we want people who look like the people already here. The country was 85 percent white at the time, 11 percent Black (most descended from enslaved people), and less than 4 percent Latino. The law was designed to keep it that way.

The irony is that the senators who voted for the new law didn't think it would change much at all.

A Nation Built on Exclusion

To understand 1965, you have to understand what came before. The United States had been restricting immigration based on race since practically the beginning.

In 1790, just a year after the Constitution was ratified, Congress passed a law limiting naturalized citizenship to "white persons." This wasn't a quirk or an oversight. It was the foundation of American immigration policy for the next 175 years.

The pattern of who came to America shifted in the mid-1800s. Chinese workers flooded into the Western states, building railroads and working mines. Irish and Italian and Polish and Jewish immigrants poured into the Eastern seaboard. The existing population—mostly Protestant, mostly from Northern Europe—grew alarmed.

Congress responded with a series of increasingly restrictive laws. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 did exactly what its name suggests: it banned Chinese immigration almost entirely. This was the first time the United States had ever barred a specific nationality from entering the country.

Then came the Immigration Act of 1917, which required new immigrants to pass a literacy test. This sounds neutral, but it wasn't. The test was designed to keep out Southern and Eastern Europeans—Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians—who had lower literacy rates than people from Britain or Germany or Scandinavia.

The real hammer fell in 1924. The Immigration Act of that year established something called the National Origins Formula. Here's how it worked: the government looked at who was already living in America and set immigration quotas to match those proportions. Since the country was mostly Northern and Western European, those countries got the lion's share of slots. Southern and Eastern Europeans got scraps. Asians were largely banned outright.

The explicit goal, according to the Office of the Historian at the State Department, was "to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity."

An Unlikely Admirer

The 1924 law had at least one enthusiastic fan overseas.

Adolf Hitler praised American immigration policy in Mein Kampf, writing that "The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races."

This wasn't casual admiration. The National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation, published in Nazi Germany in 1934-35, devoted a quarter of its discussion on race legislation to American laws—including citizenship requirements, anti-miscegenation statutes, and immigration restrictions. When the Nazis wanted models for their racial laws, they looked to the United States.

This connection would become profoundly uncomfortable for Americans after World War II.

The Civil Rights Era Changes Everything

By the 1960s, the National Origins Formula had become an embarrassment.

The United States was fighting the Cold War, trying to win hearts and minds across Africa and Asia. It was awkward to champion freedom and democracy while maintaining an immigration system that essentially told most of the world's population they weren't welcome.

At home, the civil rights movement was forcing a national reckoning with race. If it was wrong to discriminate against Black Americans at lunch counters and voting booths, how could it be right to discriminate against Italians and Indians at the border?

President Truman had seen this coming back in 1952. He commissioned a study on immigration policy, which produced a report with the pointed title "Whom We Shall Welcome." The report became the blueprint for reform.

But reform didn't come easily. The congressional committees that controlled immigration policy were chaired by Southern Democrats who had no interest in changing a system that kept America white. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, Representative Michael Feighan of Ohio, Representative Francis Walter of Pennsylvania—these men blocked every attempt at reform through the Eisenhower years and into the Kennedy administration.

The Kennedy Connection

In 1958, Senator John F. Kennedy published a pamphlet called "A Nation of Immigrants." The title itself was a political argument: it reframed America not as a white Protestant nation threatened by outsiders, but as a country defined by the experience of immigration itself.

Kennedy didn't write the pamphlet alone. The Anti-Defamation League had encouraged him to take on the issue, and the ideas came largely from historian Oscar Handlin and his student Arthur Mann. But Kennedy put his name on it and made immigration reform part of his 1960 presidential campaign.

His brothers Robert and Ted were deeply involved in the effort. After Kennedy won the presidency, Robert—as Attorney General—helped draft a reform bill. Ted was assigned to shepherd it through Congress.

The bill went nowhere. The same Southern Democrats who controlled the committees continued to block it.

Then Kennedy was assassinated.

Johnson Gets It Done

Lyndon Johnson was a very different kind of politician than Kennedy. Where Kennedy was cautious and cerebral, Johnson was a force of nature who bent Congress to his will through a combination of charm, threats, and the strategic deployment of political debts.

Johnson made immigration reform part of his Great Society agenda. In his 1965 inaugural address, he focused specifically on the issue, creating intense pressure on the committee chairmen who had been blocking reform for years.

The key sponsor in the House was Emanuel Celler, a Democrat from New York who had been trying to reform immigration law since the 1920s. He was now chairman of the House Judiciary Committee—but the bill had to go through the Immigration and Nationality Subcommittee, chaired by Representative Feighan, who remained opposed to reform.

A compromise was reached. Feighan agreed to let the bill move forward, but only if it prioritized "family reunification" over employment-based immigration. His reasoning was tactical: he believed that if new immigrants had to be related to people already in America, and America was mostly white European, then the new immigrants would also be mostly white European.

It was a miscalculation that would reshape the nation.

The Debate

The arguments for and against the bill now seem like artifacts from another era.

Supporters argued that the National Origins Formula was racist and embarrassing—that it contradicted American values and damaged the nation's standing in the world. Secretary of State Dean Rusk testified in favor. Civil rights organizations and ethnic associations threw their weight behind it.

Opponents warned that the bill would harm American workers by flooding the country with cheap labor. The Daughters of the American Revolution and the Baltimore Anti-Communist League testified against it. Agricultural groups worried about losing easy access to migrant workers from Mexico and other Western Hemisphere countries.

What's striking is that almost no one on either side predicted what would actually happen.

Senator Ted Kennedy, arguing for the bill, said: "Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset."

Senator Hiram Fong of Hawaii, addressing concerns about Asian immigration, noted that Asians represented "six-tenths of 1 percent of the population of the United States" and confidently predicted that "the people from that part of the world will never reach 1 percent of the population. Our cultural pattern will never be changed as far as America is concerned."

They were wrong on every count.

What the Law Actually Did

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 established a new system with seven categories of preference. The highest priority went to relatives of American citizens and legal permanent residents. Next came professionals and people with specialized skills. Then refugees.

The law set a limit of 170,000 immigrants per year from the Eastern Hemisphere, with no more than 20,000 from any single country. For the first time in American history, it also capped Western Hemisphere immigration at 120,000 per year—a provision that agricultural interests had fought against.

On its face, this seems race-neutral. Everyone gets the same 20,000 per country limit. Everyone has to qualify under the same preference categories.

But the family reunification provisions created something no one anticipated: chain migration.

Here's how it worked. An immigrant would arrive and become a citizen. Then they could sponsor their spouse, their children, their parents, their siblings. Each of those people, once they became citizens, could sponsor their relatives. One immigrant could eventually bring dozens of family members.

The Europeans who Feighan expected to dominate this process largely didn't need it. Western Europe was prosperous. People weren't desperate to leave. But in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, there was enormous demand. Once a few pioneers arrived and became citizens, they could bring their families, who could bring more families.

The ripples spread outward like circles on water.

The Transformation

In 1965, the United States was 85 percent white. By 2020, it was about 60 percent white and falling.

Asian Americans went from "six-tenths of 1 percent" to over 6 percent of the population—ten times Senator Fong's predicted ceiling. Latino Americans grew from under 4 percent to nearly 19 percent. Immigration from Africa, which had been virtually zero, became substantial.

The sources of immigration shifted dramatically. Before 1965, the overwhelming majority of immigrants came from Europe. After 1965, Europe faded into insignificance. Mexico, China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea—these became the main sources of new Americans.

This wasn't what anyone intended. The conservatives who opposed the bill feared exactly this outcome—but they lost the vote. The liberals who supported the bill sincerely believed it wouldn't change the ethnic composition of the country—they were just eliminating an embarrassing vestige of racism, they thought, not opening the floodgates.

Both sides were operating with the same assumption: that family-based immigration would preserve the status quo. They couldn't imagine how hungry the rest of the world was to come to America, or how effectively chain migration would work once it got started.

The Limits of the Reform

For all its transformative effects, the 1965 act wasn't a complete repudiation of discrimination.

The law said nothing about sexual orientation. The Immigration and Naturalization Service continued to deny entry to gay and lesbian immigrants on the grounds that they were "mentally defective" or suffered from "constitutional psychopathic inferiority."

These provisions remained in force until 1990. For twenty-five years after America officially stopped discriminating based on national origin, it continued to discriminate based on who you loved.

The Symbolism of Liberty Island

Johnson understood the power of imagery. When he signed the bill, he didn't do it in the Oval Office or on Capitol Hill. He went to Liberty Island, with the Statue of Liberty rising behind him.

The choice was deliberate. The statue, a gift from France dedicated in 1886, had become the symbol of American immigration—the first thing millions of immigrants saw when their ships entered New York Harbor. Emma Lazarus's poem on the pedestal, with its promise to welcome "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," was already American scripture.

But for most of the statue's existence, it had presided over an immigration system designed to keep out most of the world. The huddled masses were welcome, as long as they were the right color from the right countries.

By signing the new law at the statue's feet, Johnson was claiming that America was finally living up to its rhetoric.

The Politics of Unintended Consequences

The 1965 act passed with broad bipartisan support. In the House, the vote was 320 to 70. In the Senate, 76 to 18. Among Republicans, 85 percent voted yes. Among Democrats, 74 percent did.

The opposition came almost entirely from Southern Democrats—the same faction that was fighting against civil rights. They understood, perhaps better than the bill's supporters, that this was about more than abstract principle.

But even the Southern Democrats didn't foresee what would happen. They were worried about the immediate effects—about their region's labor markets, about maintaining white political power. They weren't thinking about what America would look like fifty years later.

Nobody was.

Connection to Today's Politics

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 is essential context for understanding modern American politics.

When politicians talk about changing demographics, about whether America should remain a majority-white country, about family-based versus merit-based immigration, about chain migration—they're arguing about the legacy of this law.

States like Florida and Texas have been transformed by post-1965 immigration. Latino voters are now a decisive force in Southwestern politics. Asian Americans have become crucial in California and increasingly elsewhere. The political geography of the entire country has shifted.

Some see this as the fulfillment of American promise—a nation finally becoming what it always claimed to be. Others see it as the destruction of something they valued, a country they no longer recognize.

Both reactions would have surprised the senators who voted for the bill in 1965, confidently assuring each other that nothing much would change.

The Unfinished Story

The 1965 act didn't settle American immigration policy. It opened a new chapter that continues today.

The family reunification system that Feighan insisted upon has created long backlogs—some categories have wait times of over twenty years. The 20,000 per country limit means that someone from India or China or Mexico might wait decades longer than someone from Iceland or Uruguay, simply because more people want to come from populous countries.

The Western Hemisphere cap created a new category of people: those who would have legally entered before 1965 but couldn't under the new system. Some came anyway, without papers. The modern debate over undocumented immigration is partly a consequence of closing a door that had been open.

And the fundamental question at the heart of the 1965 debate—who belongs in America?—remains as contested as ever.

What's remarkable is how confident everyone was in 1965 that they understood what they were doing. Opponents and supporters alike predicted stability, continuity, modest adjustment. What they got was a revolution.

It's a reminder that the most consequential political decisions are often the ones whose consequences no one foresees.