The Geopolitical Origins of the 1965 Immigration Act
DAVID FITZGERALD AND DAVID COOK-MARTÍN
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 radically shifted US policy and repainted the face of the nation. Until 1965, national-origins quotas encouraged immigration from countries in northwestern Europe, loosely restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and banned most immigration from Asia, Africa, and the colonized Caribbean. The new law replaced the quota system with selection based on family reunification, high skills, and flight from persecution. The European and Canadian share of legal immigrants fell from 60 percent in the 1950s to 22 percent in the 1970s. By contrast, the Asian share of legal immigration rose from 6 percent in the 1950s to 35 percent by the 1980s, and 40 percent in 2013.1 Much of the demographic diversity in the US population today is a direct result of the 1965 legislation.
Many scholars assert that the US civil rights movement, which sought to end racial segregation and delegitimize racial discrimination in the United States, drove the demise of the national-origins quotas. For example, legal scholar Gabriel Chin (1996) described the 1965 Act as “The Civil Rights Revolution Comes to Immigration Law.”2 The landmark immigration law passed just a year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and in the same year as the Voting Rights Act. Undoubtedly, the ending of the national-origins quotas was affected by the US legislative process, ethnic lobbying, and the civil rights movement. We argue, however, that seismic shifts in world politics created openings for reforms such as the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that sharply reduced racialized laws in the United States and beyond. Between 1803 and 1930, every independent country in the Americas passed laws to explicitly restrict or exclude at least one particular ethnic group. Of the twenty-two countries, twenty discriminated against Chinese, seventeen against Roma (gitanos in most of Spanish America and ciganos in Brazil), sixteen against blacks/Africans, fourteen against Japanese, and thirteen against Middle Easterners. The demise of these restrictions began in Latin American countries long before the United States changed its policy in 1965, beginning with Uruguay (1936), Chile (1936), Paraguay (1937), Cuba (1942), Mexico (1947), and Argentina (1949). Anglophone countries without major civil rights movements later followed suit in removing their race-based policies—Canada in the 1960s, Australia in 1973, Britain in 1981, and New Zealand in 1986. In light of this broader pattern, the narrow focus on the US civil rights movement to explain changes in US immigration law is insufficient. While the civil rights movement influenced the creation of the 1965 act, the ending of the national-origins quota system was primarily driven by geopolitical factors.3
National Origins Quotas
The 1965 act replaced a system of national-origin and race-based quotas. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 limited the annual number of immigrants from any country to 3 percent of the number of residents from that country living in the United States in the 1910 census.4 The policy supported “old-stock” immigration from northern and western Europe at prewar levels and led to a decline of “new-stock” immigration from southern and eastern Europe to a fifth of its prewar level.5
Congress enacted a new quota scheme in the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act).6 The 1924 act amplified the preference for old-stock European immigrants by rolling back the base year for calculating the quotas from 1910 to 1890. It also established that until 1927, the annual maximum quota for each nationality would be 2 percent of the total population of that nationality as recorded in the 1890 census, with a minimum quota of one hundred. In practice, that meant that the share of the quotas reserved for southern and eastern Europeans fell from 45 percent to 16 percent.7 The House committee report adopting the 1890 baseline maintained that “the use of the 1890 census is not discriminatory. It is used in an effort to preserve, as nearly as possible, the racial status quo in the United States.”8
After 1927 the annual quota of 150,000 immigrants was apportioned among countries by the national origin of the US population in 1920, with a minimum quota of one hundred. A Quota Board calculated the size of each national-origin allotment based on how many people of each nationality appeared in the 1790 census, adjusted for later migration. Quotas applied only to the European-origin population and did not include immigrants from the Western Hemisphere and their descendants, aliens ineligible for citizenship and their descendants, descendants of slaves, and descendants of indigenous Americans.9 Ethnic associations campaigned against the national-origins system and delayed its implementation until 1929.10
The 1924 act excluded almost all Asians by stipulating that “no alien ineligible to citizenship shall be admitted to the United States.”11 Its design targeted nationals from Japan, who had not been included in the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone that applied to most of the rest of Asia. The Philippines and Guam were a temporary exception because of their quasi-colonial status.12 Yet the exceptional treatment of the nationals from the Philippines ended when the Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934) restricted Filipino entries to fifty a year.13
The 1924 quotas did not apply to immigrants if they were born “in the Dominion of Canada, Newfoundland, the Republic of Mexico, the Republic of Cuba, the Republic of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Canal Zone, or an independent country of Central or South America.”14 The 1921 Quota Act had exempted residents of the same independent Western Hemisphere countries who had lived there at least one year. This criterion was tightened in 1924 to apply to residents whose birthplace was in the Western Hemisphere. The goal was to prevent Asians from using neighboring countries as a backdoor into the United States. Territories that were not independent, which in practice meant majority-black colonies in the Caribbean, fell under the quotas of their metropoles, primarily Great Britain. The implementation of the 1924 act deliberately restricted the entrance of Caribbean blacks.15
Debates about eliminating the Western Hemisphere exemptions reveal many of the geopolitical considerations that would later play a fundamental role in dismantling the quota system altogether in the 1960s. Would immigration policy express nativist and eugenicist views of the nation or political and economic interests in the region? Nativists like Rep. John Box (D-TX) argued that Mexican immigration created “the most insidious and general mixture of white, Indian, and Negro blood strains ever produced in America” and introduced an unsuccessful bill to include Mexico and other Latin American countries in the quota system.16 Prominent eugenicist Harry Laughlin testified to the House Immigration Committee that immigration from the Western Hemisphere should be restricted to whites.17 Public health agencies, patriotic societies, and organized labor made similar arguments for restriction. On the other side, railroad, farming, and livestock employers in the Southwest opposed quotas on Mexican immigration because workers from the southern neighbor would not assimilate and would return to Mexico when the work was done.18
The president and State Department opposed the inclusion of Latin Americans in the quota system for diplomatic reasons.19 Consular reports warned that governments in the region would view quotas as an unfriendly gesture. Senator David Reed, co-author of the 1924 act, opposed a Western Hemisphere quota because it would harm the “Pan-American idea.” “If we want to hold them to us—and I think we do so as long as we maintain the Monroe Doctrine—we have got to treat them differently from the rest of the world,” he told the Senate.20 Secretary of State Frank Kellogg warned the Senate Immigration Committee in 1928 that Western Hemisphere quotas “would adversely affect the present good relations of the United States with Latin America and Canada” and “would be apt to have an adverse effect upon the prosperity of American business interest in those countries.”21 A congressional majority, however, still demanded restriction of Western Hemisphere immigration. In 1930, Sen. William Harris (D-GA) introduced such a bill that passed the Senate by a vote of 56–11, but the House leadership killed it in the House Rules Committee after President Hoover threatened a veto.22
While the domestic coalition of restrictionists could overcome foreign-policy concerns to exclude immigrants from Asia—where the United States had relatively limited ties aside from the Philippines—and restrict immigrants from parts of Europe, from which the United States was disengaging after World War I—it was not strong enough to override US military, commercial, and diplomatic interests in Latin America under the Good Neighbor policy. Under President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, the United States pulled out of Nicaragua and Haiti, revoked the Platt Amendment in Cuba, gave up financial control in the Dominican Republic, and signed an agreement of non-intervention.23 The US policy of pursuing more amicable relationships with Latin American governments thus linked the maintenance of the Western Hemisphere quota exemption with broad foreign policy and commercial interests.
Foreign Policy Pressures
World War II and Cold War national-security concerns increased pressure on the United States to end the national-origins immigration system. 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. The shift away from ethnic selection in US immigration policy was primarily a response to foreign-policy pressures from the growing number of independent Asian, African, and Latin American countries that sought to delegitimize racism through Pan-American institutions and the United Nations.
In Latin America, a wave of reaction against US military and economic interventions swept the region in the 1930s. Populist policymakers and intellectuals condemned a long history of US occupations and gunboat diplomacy. Throughout the continent, Latin American elites resented the heavy-handedness of US policy-makers who treated Latin Americans as inferiors and threatened to include them in the US national-origins quotas for immigrants. Even though Latin American governments themselves discriminated against their own nonwhite populations, taking up the banner of antiracism was seen as a way to pressure the United States to improve the treatment of Latin American migrants, particularly Mexicans in the US Southwest, Cubans in Florida, and Central Americans and Caribbean islanders in the racially segregated Panama Canal Zone. Antiracism thus became a tool of foreign policy for many Latin American countries in their relationship with the United States.
At the Eighth International Conference of American States in Lima (1938), Latin American countries pushed anti-racist resolutions. One resolution recommended to member states “that they coordinate and adopt provisions concerning immigration, wherein no discrimination based on nationality, creed or race shall be made, inasmuch as such discrimination is contrary to the ideal of fraternity, peace and concord which they undertake to uphold without prejudice to each nation’s domestic legislation.”24 The United States eventually acquiesced in some pronouncements of racial nondiscrimination, while making sure that such provisions were weak and unenforceable.
World War II
During World War II, by broadcasting how blacks were treated in the United States, Nazi propagandists in Europe criticized the United States for justifying its involvement in the war as a fight for democracy. Gunnar Myrdal, W. E. B. DuBois, and many others also revealed the gap between US claims of waging a war for equality and human rights abroad and practicing segregation at home. Myrdal cautioned that racism was harming the US war effort and would create problems for its geopolitical goals after the war.25 All of the independent states in the Western Hemisphere eventually joined the Allies, provided resources for the war, and, in the case of Mexico, sent contracted labor to replace US men sent into battle. The war gave Latin American countries leverage to denounce discrimination against Mexicans living in the United States and Central American and Caribbean islanders working in the segregated Panama Canal Zone, where whites enjoyed US citizenship and a high standard of living, while black workers and their children born there were barred from US citizenship.
The discussion to abolish immigration restrictions of named ethnic groups gained prominence on the hemispheric stage for the first time in October 1943 at the First Inter-American Demographic Congress, which was held to discuss anticipated postwar migrations.26 The congress included delegations from all twenty-two independent countries in the Americas who officially represented their governments and/or attended as prominent demographers. Its resolutions recommended that countries in the hemisphere categorically reject any racially discriminatory policy.
The shift away from racially discriminatory naturalization policies also demonstrates the effects of world politics. The repeal of Chinese exclusion by the United States in 1943 resulted from the interaction between lobbying by domestic interest groups and foreign policy, but the fact that many other countries in the hemisphere ended Chinese exclusion around the same time reflects the primacy of foreign-policy concerns. Japanese radio broadcasts to China, India, and Latin America reminded listeners that “the Chinese are rigidly excluded from attaining American citizenship by naturalization, a right which is accorded to the lowliest immigrant from Europe.”27 A June 24, 1943, editorial in China Daily, the organ of the Reorganized National Government puppet regime, charged, “If the American government does not abolish the discriminatory laws against the Chinese, Asian peoples can never be treated equally.”28 In the United States, diplomats were aware of the propaganda problem in Asia and advocated for a change in nationality policy.29 Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the wife of the nationalist Chinese leader, toured the United States in early 1943 and publicly called for repeal. President Roosevelt supported the repeal, declaring that it would be “important in the cause of winning the war and of establishing a secure peace” and would “silence the distorted Japanese propaganda.”30 Further support came from pro-business lobbies that anticipated postwar advantages of friendlier relations with China, a country of four hundred million consumers, and from even the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).31
Southern politicians, the AFL, American Legion, and Veterans of Foreign Wars opposed repeal.32 Yet foreign-policy considerations prevailed over domestic objections. The 1943 Magnuson Act repealed the Chinese exclusion acts, established an annual quota of 105 for “persons of the Chinese race,” and made “Chinese persons or persons of Chinese descent” eligible for naturalization.33 Racial restrictions further eased in a 1946 act that exempted Chinese wives of US soldiers from the annual quota, as well as a 1947 amendment that allowed all Asians to obtain US citizenship by marriage. A 1950 act allowed immigration outside the quotas of spouses and adult children, regardless of their race.34 As soon as India and the Philippines entered the final stages of independence, their citizens became eligible for naturalization and symbolic annual quotas of one hundred.35 The incremental lifting of anti-Asian restrictions in World War II was clearly a response to international high politics.
Global Anti-Racism
World War II sharply accelerated a process of decolonization that led to a host of newly independent countries in Asia and Africa. While countries of immigration could politically afford to ignore the reactions of colonized peoples and weak states prior to World War II, decolonization and the formation of world institutions such as the United Nations gave postcolonial governments significant influence.36 In the face of opposition from the governments of Anglophone settler countries, many of these new countries joined Latin American republics, as they used the United Nations as a platform to advance nondiscriminatory statements of principle.37
The Dumbarton Oaks meetings that designed the basic outlines of the United Nations in 1944 revealed that the “Big Three”—the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union—strongly opposed mention of human rights as part of the UN charter. Wellington Koo, China’s head delegate, forced human rights and equality onto the agenda. Koo proposed that the new international organization uphold “the principle of equality of all states and all races.”38 The Western participants were categorically unwilling to make any such concessions for domestic and empire-building reasons, and they agreed among themselves that they would “completely eliminate all mention of racial equality.”39
Latin American leaders felt betrayed by their exclusion from Dumbarton Oaks because they had spent a previous decade rallying around US calls for support in the event of extra-hemispheric aggression. They feared a return to unilateral US decision making in the region, US interventionism, and discrimination against Latin American immigrants in the United States. Latin American governments called for an extraordinary meeting to articulate their own postwar policy and to present it as a bloc. In 1945 they held the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace in Mexico City to present a unified front to make “every effort to prevent racial or religious discrimination.”40
When the United Nations Conference on International Organization began its meetings in San Francisco in April 1945, China, India, and the countries of Latin America were prepared to resist the self-serving arrangements made at Dumbarton Oaks by the Big Three. Sensing an opportunity to use the race issue to push a wedge between the First and Third Worlds, the Soviet Union reversed its previously strong opposition to provisions of racial equality and antidiscrimination.41 China, Brazil, Mexico, Panama, Uruguay, Cuba, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic then supported a proposal to prohibit racial discrimination, in the face of united opposition from Anglophone settler countries and all European countries except for France. John Foster Dulles, the US delegate, opposed human-rights language in the charter, out of concern that it could require a member state to change its immigration policy and that there would be an international investigation of “the Negro question in this country.”42 Under tremendous pressure from other countries, the Big Three conceded changes that resulted in a more central role for human rights in the charter.43 Article 1 declared that among the purposes of the United Nations was “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.” Before agreeing to these provisions, diplomats from the United States and other Western countries ensured that considerations of national sovereignty trumped the rights language, that the rights language itself was passive rather than active, and that there was no mechanism to enforce the rights provisions.44 Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States continued to try to block antiracist provisions such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet from its first session, the UN became a forum for governments of most Latin American countries, for the Soviet Union and all of the countries in Africa and Asia and to establish international agencies, treaties, and for other institutions that rendered overt racial discrimination illegitimate.45
The Anti-Racist Movement Confronts US Policy
Under international pressure, Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote to President Truman that “our failure to remove racial barriers provides the Kremlin with unlimited political and propaganda capital for use against us in Japan and the entire Far East.”46 Truman moved civil rights reforms to the top of his domestic agenda.47 His 1947 Presidential Committee on Civil Rights report cited three critical areas where status quo needed to change: harm to US foreign relations, morality, and economic efficiency.48 The committee’s report strongly recommended the elimination of racial prerequisites to naturalization and called the racialized quota system unfair.49 The report cited Article 55 of the UN Charter, which referred to “universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion,” as the potential basis of congressional action to achieve those ends. The president’s commission thus invoked the very article that the US delegation had tried to squelch in 1945.50 In the report’s conclusion, the commission made a critical observation to explain why US policy was opposed around the world:
Discrimination against,or mistreatment of, any racial, religious or national group in the United States is not only seen as our internal problem. The dignity of a country, a continent, or even a major portion of the world’s population, may be outraged by it. A relatively few individuals here may be identified with millions of people elsewhere, and the way in which they are treated may have world-wide repercussions. We have fewer than half a million American Indians; there are 30 million more in the Western Hemisphere. Our Mexican American and Hispano groups are not large: millions in Central and South America consider them kin. We number our citizens of Oriental descent in the hundreds of thousands; their counterparts overseas are numbered in hundreds of millions. Throughout the Pacific, Latin America, Africa, the Near, Middle, and Far East, the treatment which our Negroes receive is taken as a reflection of our attitudes toward all dark-skinned peoples.51
The national-origins quota system did not fall immediately in the face of international pressures. The White House and State Department were more susceptible to foreign policy arguments and international influences than Congress, which remained more inward looking.52
The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (McCarran-Walter Act) continued the symbolic opening toward Asia by including a new annual quota of two thousand for the “Asia-Pacific Triangle” but maintained the basic outlines of the national-origins quota system. Each country in the triangle received a quota of one hundred. The Asia-Pacific token quotas were racialized in a way that was not the case for other countries in the world. An “immigrant who is attributable by as much as one-half of his ancestry to a people or peoples indigenous to the Asia-Pacific triangle” was charged to the country of ancestry’s quota of one hundred, along with immigrants born in that country.53 In practice, the 1952 act also restricted the immigration of blacks from the British West Indies by introducing a provision that limited each colony to a maximum quota of one hundred, charged against the quota for the metropole—normalizing the practice that had been in effect since 1925.54 The act continued the quota exemption for independent countries in the Western Hemisphere.55
Supporters of national-origins quotas in the 1950s typically defended discrimination on the grounds of cultural assimilability rather than biology.56 The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Patrick McCarran (D-NV), argued that it eliminated racial discrimination when it opened quotas for the Asia-Pacific Triangle. Despite its reservations, the Japanese American Citizens League supported the law as an incremental improvement over the humiliation of absolute exclusion of Japanese and the people of most other Asian countries. The league urged Truman to accept the quotas in return for removing the racial prerequisites to naturalization that had been in place since 1790.57 Representatives from northeast districts with large black populations and African American organizations opposed the colonial quotas in the Western Hemisphere as a thinly disguised means of trying to limit black immigration from the West Indies.58
The strongest opponents to the bill spoke out against the international consequences of maintaining the national-origins quota system. Senator William Benton (D-CT) highlighted the folly of spending billions of dollars and sacrificing one hundred thousand US soldiers for the Korean War while enacting a bill that discriminates against Koreans and other Asians.59 Truman vetoed the bill, echoing Benton’s warnings of its dangerous implications for the Cold War. His veto message called for a new bill that would remove “racial barriers against Asians” and warned that “failure to take this step … can only have serious consequences for our relations with the peoples of the Far East.”60 Congress overrode Truman’s veto, and the bill became law.
A decade later, under the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the United States turned away from selecting immigrants by national or racial origin and toward admission based on family reunification, high skills, and humanitarian need. How do we account for this change? A first set of explanations takes an exclusively domestic perspective and views the end of national-origins quotas in 1965 as a response to the civil rights movement, which had pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.61 A second perspective minimizes the domestic pressures for reform and emphasizes how foreign-policy considerations affected the development of immigration policy. Yet this second position still adopts the “methodological nationalism” of a US perspective, from the inside looking out at the world, rather than analyzing the interactions of an entire system of states. For example, Cheryl Shanks summarizes, “During this period, external events precipitated arguments for change.62 Domestic events were relevant when they provided additional evidence supporting reformers’ conclusions.” The foreign-policy perspective falls short of this chapter’s historical institutionalist approach, which shows how previous interactions across a broad, global field of politics and policy diffusion shaped the options of policymakers in 1965.
Two months after McCarran-Walter passed in June 1952, Truman created the Commission on Immigration and Naturalization to hold hearings on immigration reform. The commission report, Whom We Shall Welcome, laid out recommendations that eventually formed the outline of the 1965 Immigration Act.63 While the report acknowledged liberal democratic creeds and the scientific rejection of racism, foreign policy concerns dominated its arguments. The commission endorsed the notion that ethnically discriminatory immigration policies impaired US foreign policy by citing the growth of Japanese militarism directed against the United States after the 1924 exclusion of Japanese immigrants and the blows delivered by various communist countries in the propaganda wars.
Support for the national-origins quota system continued to slide through the early 1950s. By 1956, both the Republican and Democratic Party platforms supported an end to the quotas.64 After the AFL and CIO joined together in 1955; the new organization supported an end to national-origins quotas so long as the total number of immigrants would not increase. Scholars have suggested that the shift from organized labor’s historically restrictionist bent resulted from the booming postwar economy, labor’s alliance with the civil rights movement, the incorporation of the CIO with its disproportionately high representation of southern and eastern Europeans whose co-ethnics abroad were disadvantaged by the quotas, and labor’s commitment to helping the United States achieve its Cold War goals across the globe.65 AFL-CIO president George Meany saw ending the national-origins quota as the organization’s patriotic duty. He declared that “part of our total program to combat world Communism must be a willingness to welcome a reasonable number to our own shores.”66 Organized labor was most eager to limit the immigration of unskilled workers, a position that in part explains why the final 1965 immigration bill focused so heavily on family reunification rather than economic categories.67
By the early 1960s, newly independent countries were on the verge of successfully elevating the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) to the world stage, and US policies were the targets of sustained international criticism. Supporters of ending national-origins protocols echoed the internationalist arguments made against the 1952 immigration bill.68 For example, Rep. John Lindsay (R-NY) noted the paradox of fighting for South Vietnam while continuing to exclude all but token numbers of Vietnamese:
[T]his nation has committed itself to the defense of the independence of South Vietnam. Yet the quota for that country of 15 million is exactly 100. Apparently we are willing to risk a major war for the right of the Vietnamese people to live in freedom at the same time as our quota system makes it clear that we do not want very great numbers of them to live with us.69
Secretary of State Dean Rusk told a congressional hearing that US immigration policy had serious foreign policy implications. “What other peoples think about us plays an important role in the achievement of our foreign policies,” he argued. “More than a dozen foreign ministers have spoken to me in the last year alone, not about the practicalities of immigration from their country to ours, but about the principle which they interpret as discrimination against their particular countries.” Rusk emphasized that “even those [countries] who do not use their quotas … resent the fact that the quotas are there as a discriminatory measure.”70 In the same vein, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach warned that the “national origins system harms the United States in still another way: it creates an image of hypocrisy which can be exploited by those who seek to discredit our professions of democracy.”
Cold War concerns eventually filtered down from the executive branch to the broader public. An August 1963 Harris poll found that 78 percent of white Americans reported that race discrimination in the United States harmed its interests abroad.71A Gallup poll two years later found broad support for changing the quota system to one that preferred immigrants based on their skills.72 White ethnics continued to attack the quota system for discriminating against the Italians, Greeks, Portuguese, Poles, and other Europeans waiting in line for oversubscribed quotas.73 Ethnic Southern European voices became much more influential by 1965 than in previous legislative debates. The 89th Congress (1965–66) was the first in US history to be majority Catholic. Democrats also held a 2-1 advantage over Republicans in both chambers.74
Massey, Durand, and Malone view the 1965 Immigration Act as one of the achievements of the civil rights movement.75 Some legislators at the time specifically mentioned the connection between US civil rights and the end of the national-origins scheme.76 Yet the civil rights movement was primarily framed in the old black/white dichotomous way of understanding US race relations, and the 1965 immigration act was not strongly pushed by US blacks, who were fighting for their civil rights within the United States. Asians in the United States voiced their support through Asian American congressional representatives, but without much effect given their very small numbers. United Farm Worker leader César Chávez was more concerned with ending labor-market competition from the bracero temporary worker program, which gave 4.6 million bracero contracts (mostly to Mexican nationals) between 1942 and 1964, than in changing the whole immigration system.77 Notwithstanding the affinity between civil rights and ending the national-origins system, the 1965 act was fundamentally driven by geopolitics.78
The enacted version of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (Hart-Celler Act),79 resembled legislation proposed by President John F. Kennedy and taken up by President Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination.80 Hart-Celler prohibited preferences or discrimination in the issuance of immigrant visas based on “race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence” except with regard to specified exceptions.81 More concretely, it eliminated the national-origins quotas and replaced them with an annual quota of 170,000 visas for immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere. No country from the Eastern Hemisphere was allowed more than twenty thousand visas. Spouses, minor children, and parents of adult US citizens were exempted from the quotas. Within the quotas, 74 percent of the “preference” categories was reserved for other classes of family members, 20 percent for employment-based visas favoring the highly skilled, and 6 percent for refugees. In keeping with the 1957 refugee legislation, refugees were limited to victims of natural calamities and to those fleeing communism or persecution in the Middle East.
The Western Hemisphere had not been included under the numerical ceiling in the original bills proposed by Senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA), Sen. Philip Hart (D-MI), and Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-NY) from the late 1950s to 1965. During the final negotiations of the 1965 bill, conservative Democrats and Republicans introduced an amendment establishing a quota of 120,000 visas for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere that would take effect in 1968 unless Congress passed a provision to the contrary in the interim. The White House opposed the provision based on its historical concern with protecting US diplomatic interests in its self-described backyard. President Johnson’s assistant, Jack Valenti, relayed to the president the concern of Secretary of State Dean Rusk that a system of limiting all immigrants, including those from the Western Hemisphere, would “vex and dumbfound our Latin American friends, who will now be sure we are in final retreat from Pan Americanism.”82 The opposition to a Western Hemisphere exemption invoked the principle of nondiscrimination, thus taking the civil rights language of equal treatment and throwing it back at the White House.83 Almost all of the Republicans joined conservative Democrats in voting against the Western Hemisphere exemption. Accepting limitations on Western Hemisphere immigration was the political price of ending the national-origins quotas in the Eastern Hemisphere.84 Eliminating the negative discrimination against Asians, Africans, and southern Europeans would relieve a far greater diplomatic problem than would be created by eliminating the positive preferences for the Western Hemisphere.
Intended Consequences?
The 1965 immigration system quickly transformed the ethnic composition of immigration to the United States. The European and Canadian share of legal immigrants fell from 60 percent in the 1950s to 22 percent in the 1970s.85 In the long run, the end of the national-origins quotas and emphasis on family reunification accelerated Asian migration. The Asian percentage of legal immigrants rose from 6 percent in the 1950s to 35 percent in the 1980s. The arrival of Indochinese refugees in the 1970s, made possible through special refugee programs, led to more Asian migration as former refugees sponsored their family members’ immigration through the reunification provisions of Hart-Celler.
Joppke argues that the emphasis on family reunification in 1965 was “meant to minimize the possibility of ethnic change,” as there were relatively few non-whites in the United States who could sponsor family members in 1965. Economist George Borjas, historian David Reimers, and legal scholar Jan Ting make a similar argument.86 Gabriel Chin convincingly challenges the argument that the authors of the 1965 act did not realize that it would lead to increased Asian immigration. Opponents of the 1965 law, the INS, and major media outlets expected at the time that Asians would benefit.87 However, there is a consensus among scholars that the scale of new Asian immigration was unexpected.88
Conclusion
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act marked a profound and highly consequential shift in US policy away from the blatant racial and ethnic selection that had been in place since the early 1800s. As we argue elsewhere, changes in formal laws matter: they shape who is present to legitimately participate in the political process.89 The 1965 reforms led to a transformation in the sources of migration away from Europe and toward Asia, and consequently to a change in the ethno-racial configuration of politics in the United States. From the standpoint of observers whose perspective has been shaped by some of the very political changes that followed the 1965 act, its compromises and shortcomings may be more salient than its accomplishments. Yet the reforms of 1943 to 1965 are deeply significant. It is difficult to imagine laws enacted today that would explicitly ban labor migration from Asia and deny Asians the possibility of naturalization—both of which were prominent features of previous policy.
Passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act was a momentous break from 162 years of continuous legal racial exclusion. This century-and-a-half was a period of liberal democratic governance during which slavery and Jim Crow segregation coexisted with racial exclusions in immigration law. Liberal democracy and racial discrimination in the United States were cut from the same cloth. It would take considerable power to change policy and break with this longstanding history. Foreign policy considerations in World War II and through the Cold War gave less powerful countries the leverage to press principles of antidiscrimination in a way that moved the US executive branch and Congress to change immigration law.
Our argument about the decline in blatant racialization of immigration and nationality policy does not imply that the United States has achieved a post-racial state of affairs. Immigration policy in the United States continues to discriminate surreptitiously in its design, through differential enforcement, and by having disparate effects on people of different origins. For instance, caps in the number of family-preference visas issued by the US government are a means to lengthen the line for immigrants from Mexico and the Philippines, and the so-called Diversity Program is the result of a failed effort to bring in more Europeans. To be clear, we are referring to immigration admissions policies at the border, rather than those aimed at assimilation or integration.
In view of the argument made in this chapter, it is especially important to underscore that the politics of an international system of states continue to matter for domestic immigration policy. A significant number of contemporary anti-immigrant policies in the United States, especially those targeting Latin Americans and Latinos, happen on the state level because it is less susceptible to foreign policy concerns and international norms.
The international field of immigration politics and diffusion of policies continue to matter. This conclusion, however, implies no iron law. As we have shown, there are conditions under which domestic policies may trump international policy considerations. In the contemporary context, countries are more likely to consider categorical discrimination when they perceive immigrants as posing a threat to their basic security through domestic terrorism or the spread of disease. Still, the style of such discrimination has rarely been overt in Western liberal democracies after World War II. More often, discrimination has been surreptitious (calculated to disproportionately affect people by origin) or positive (showing preference for people of particular origins because of their putative cultural affinities to a receiving society or the labor they can provide during a temporary stay). Uncovering the logic and practices of these insidious forms of discrimination represent the next frontier and challenge to students of immigration policy.
Notes
1. Philip Wolgin, “Beyond National Origins: The Development of Modern Immigration Policymaking, 1948–1968,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011.
2. See also Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Free Trade (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002); Kevin Johnson, The Huddled Masses Myth: Immigration and Civil Rights (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).
3. David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín, Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).
4. Emergency Quota Law of 1921, Pub. L. No. 67-5, 42 Stat. 5 (1921).
5. Robert A. Divine, American Immigration Policy, 1924–1952 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), 5–6.
6. The Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act), Pub. L. No. 69-139, 43 Stat. 153 (1924). A complete list of the quotas in 1921, 1924, 1929, 1952, and 1965 is in US Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington, DC, 1966), 92–93.
7. Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 145.
8. Edward P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 484–85.
9. 43 Stat. 153. Sec. 11(d).
10. Ibid.
11. 43 Stat. 153. Sec. 13 (c).
12. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 103; Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946 (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 157, 181.
13. The Philippine Independence Act (Tydings-McDuffie Act), Pub. L. No. 73-127 (1934)
14. 43 Stat. 153. Sec. 4(c). Precedent for favorable treatment of immigrants from neighboring countries had been established at least as early as the Immigration Act of 1907 (34 Stat. 898), which exempted aliens from a $4 head tax if they were citizens of Canada, Newfoundland, Cuba, or Mexico. During the labor shortages of World War I the US government had waived the literacy tests, restriction on contract labor immigration, and head taxes to bring in seventy-five thousand temporary workers from Mexico (Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 169).
15. Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 262; Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2013).
16. 70 Cong. Rec. S2817–2818 (daily ed. Feb. 9, 1928).
17. Immigration from Latin America, the West Indies, and Canada. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, House of Representatives, Sixty-Eighth Congress, Second Session, March 3, 1925, by Robert F. Foerster (Washington, DC: GPO, 1925).
18. Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 171.
19. Patrick D. Lukens, A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights: FDR and the Controversy over “Whiteness” (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 47.
20. 68 Cong. Rec. S6623 (daily ed. Apr. 18, 1924).
21. 71 Cong. Rec. S6925–6926.
22. Michael C. LeMay, Guarding the Gates: Immigration and National Security (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006), 13; Hutchinson, Legislative History, 214–18, 486.
23. Arthur P. Whitaker, “Latin America and Postwar Organization,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 240 (1945): 109–15.
24. 8th Pan-American Conference, Resolution XLV, 1939, 268.
25. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1944), 1016.
26. Acta final del Primer Congreso Demografico Interamericano: Celebrado en México, D.F. del 12 al 21 de Octubre de 1943 (México, DF: S. Turanzas del Valle, 1944).
27. K. J. Leong, “Foreign Policy, National Identity, and Citizenship: The Roosevelt White House and the Expediency of Repeal,” Journal of American Ethnic History 22, no. 4 (2003): 11.
28. Xiaohua Ma, “The Sino-American Alliance during World War II and the Lifting of the Chinese Exclusion Acts,” American Studies International 63, no. 2 (2000): 45–46.
29. Ibid., 49.
30. Divine, American Immigration Policy, 150.
31. Leong, Foreign Policy, 7–8.
32. Ibid., 16.
33. An Act to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Acts, to establish quotas, and for other purposes, Pub. L. No. 78-199, 57 Stat. 600 (1943).
34. Chinese War Brides Act, Pub. L. No. 79-713, 60 Stat. 975 (1946); Act of July 22, 1947, 61 Stat. 401 (1947); Act on Alien Spouses and Children, 64 Stat. 464 (1950).
35. Luce-Celler Act of 1946, 60 Stat. 416 (1946).
36. Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937– 1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 125.
37. Frank Füredi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 14.
38. Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 161.
39. Ibid., 163.
40. Ibid., 171.
41. Mary Ann Glendon, “The Forgotten Crucible: The Latin American Influence on the Universal Human Rights Idea,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 27–39; Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Paolo Wright-Carozza, “From Conquest to Constitutions: Retrieving a Latin American Tradition of the Idea of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2003): 281–313.
42. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 41; Füredi, Silent War, 191; Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 49.
43. See UN Charter and Articles 1, 13, 55, 62, 68, 76 of the initial draft.
44. Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996).
45. Borstelmann, Cold War and Color Line, 269.
46. Gabriel J. Chin, “The Civil Rights Revolution Comes to Immigration Law: A New Look at the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,” North Carolina Law Review 75 (1996): 288.
47. Azza Salama Layton, International Politics and Civil Rights Policies in the United States, 1941–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4.
48. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
49. US President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 1947, 32–33, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/civilrights/srights1.htm.
50. Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 167.
51. US President’s Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights, 147.
52. John D. Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 22.
53. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (McCarran-Walter Act), Pub. L. No. 82-414, 66 Stat. 163 (1952), Sec. 202b.
54. Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill.: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 88–89.
55. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 255–57.
56. Divine, American Immigration Policy, 180–81.
57. Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 191; Zolberg, Nation by Design, 315.
58. Divine, American Immigration Policy, 156; Desmond S. King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 237.
59. Chin, Civil Rights Revolution, 294–95.
60. Reprinted in US President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, “Whom Shall We Welcome,” 1953, 283.
61. Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Free Trade (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), 39–40.
62. Cheryl Shanks, Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890–1990 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 171.
63. US President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, “Whom Shall We Welcome,” 122.
64. Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 39; Shanks, Immigration and Politics, 158.
65. Vernon M. Briggs, Immigration and American Unionism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 122; Tichenor, Dividing Lines, 180; Keith A. Fitzgerald, The Face of the Nation: Immigration, the State, and the National Identity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 226.
66. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 243, 346.
67. Wolgin, Beyond National Origins, 181.
68. Shanks, Immigration and Politics, 165.
69. Chin, Civil Rights Revolution, 299.
70. “Hearings before Subcommittee No. 1 of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 88th Cong. 2nd Session” (Washington, DC: US GPO, 1964) (statement of Dean Rusk, Secretary of State of the United States), 385–408. See the discussion in Robbie J. Totten, “Security and US Immigration Policy,” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2012.
71. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 187.
72. Skrentny, Minority Rights, 54.
73. Wolgin, Beyond National Origins, 42.
74. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 8; Hutchinson, Legislative History, 368.
75. Massey, Durand, and Malone, Beyond Smoke.
76. Cong. Rec. 21783 (August 25, 1965).
77. David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
78. Skrentny, Minority Rights.
79. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act), Pub. L. No. 89-236, 79 Stat. 911 (1965).
80. Hutchinson, Legislative History, 359.
81. 79 Stat. 911, Sec. 202(a)
82. Skrentny, Minority Rights, 55.
83. Christian Joppke, Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 59.
84. James G. Gimpel and James R. Edwards, The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), 103–7; Maddalena Marinari, “‘Americans Must Show Justice in Immigration Policies Too’: The Passage of the 1965 Immigration Act,” Journal of Policy History 26, no. 2 (2014): 219–245.
85. Wolgin, Beyond National Origins, 124.
86. Joppke, Selecting by Origins, 57; David Reimers, “An Unintended Reform: The 1965 Immigration Act and Third World Immigration to the United States,” Journal of American Ethnic History 3, no. 1 (1983): 9–28; George J. Borjas, Friends or Strangers: The Impact of Immigrants on the US Economy (New York: Basic, 1990); Jan C. Ting, “Other than a Chinaman: How US Immigration Law Resulted from and Still Reflects a Policy of Excluding and Restricting Asian Immigration,” Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review 4 (1995): 301–15.
87. Chin, Civil Rights Revolution, 314–16.
88. Ibid., 331.
89. FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín, Culling the Masses.