Historical Impact
With the growing interest in Medicare and civil rights, everyday Americans no longer paid much attention to immigration, even when the 1965 act passed jointly with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Nevertheless, these laws made it clear that the era of ethnic intolerance had ended. Presidents, Congressmen, and citizens had returned to embracing the American ideal.
A New Wave of Immigrants
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 affected American immigration greatly with its preference for family reunification and special skills, along with its Western Hemisphere ceiling and just treatment of Eastern Hemisphere countries.
Dan Stein, executive director of Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), discusses the problems of family reunification.
Excerpt from Dan Stein on Sen. Kennedy and the 1965
Immigration Law. |
Excerpt from Dan Stein on Sen. Kennedy and the 1965 Immigration Law.
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Professor Alan Kraut, scholar of American immigration at American University, discusses how the hemispheric quotas caused more illegal immigration.
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"Today...our immigration system is broken. Ten million illegal immigrants live in America today. But strong law enforcement alone is not the answer...The fact is...some sectors of our economy are heavily dependent on the contributions of immigrants. Many of them are here illegally, but...deporting them would cause massive disruptions in the economy. Americans don't want borders locked shut or wide open. They want smart borders. We must bring illegal immigrants out of the shadows."
~Senator Edward M. Kennedy, America Back on Track
Eric Foner, Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, discusses how the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 impacted American immigration patterns and race systems.
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The Last Word
Although American immigration remains a work in progress, the 1965 act generally reformed it for the better, abolishing the national origins quota system and allowing immigration policy to reflect American values. Immigrants from specific countries no longer hold unfair advantages, as their chances merely depend on their familial relationship to American citizens and their professional skills. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 brought about these selection preferences after a multi-decade, arduous battle by immigration reformers. The act doesn't just present proof of the United States' systemic issues, but also manifests the country as rapid and willing to react to injustice, revolutionize its mindset, and reform itself.
"Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide. The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples."
~President Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks at the Signing of the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York, October 3, 1965
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"I think it's well to remember [that all of us are descended from immigrants]...the fact is that we need them as much as they need us. It is this new blood and continual regeneration of the original American spirit that has contributed to our strength and kept us from developing national hardening of the arteries. And it is this fusion of races and nationalities and descendants of immigrants old and new that has made us the hope of the world...If we want to keep thinking of ourselves...and want others to look at us in that light, I think we'd better remember how we got that way in the first place."
~Herbert Block, political cartoonist, The Herblock Book
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