The 1965 Immigration Act was pushed by the Left period. Jews, Catholics, Asians, blacks, etc. They wanted to remake America to look like the rest of the world. And some Reps joined them.
"Born of liberal ideology, the 1965 bill abolished the national origins quota system that had regulated the ethnic composition of immigration in fair proportion to each group's existing presence in the population. In a misguided application spirit of the civil rights era, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations saw these ethnic quotas as an archaic form of chauvinism. Moreover, as Cold Warriors facing charges of "racism" and "imperialism," they found the system rhetorically embarrassing. The record of debate over this seismic change in immigration policy reveals that left-wingers, in their visceral flight to attack "discrimination," did not reveal the consequences of their convictions. Instead, their spokesmen set out to assuage concerned traditionalists with a litany of lies and wishful thinking.
Chief among national concerns was total numeric immigration. Senate floor manager and Camelot knight-errant Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, assured jittery senators that "our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually." Senator Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, further calmed that august body, insisting "the total number of potential immigrants would not be changed very much." Time has proven otherwise. Average immigration levels before the 1965 amendments took effect hovered around 300,000 per annum. Yet 1,045,000 legal immigrants flooded our cities in 1996 alone.
Senator Hiram Fong, R-Hawaii, calculated that "the people from [Asia] will never reach 1 percent of the population." Even in 1965, people were willing to admit that we have a reasonable interest in not being inundated by culturally alien foreigners, and it was considered acceptable to say so on the floor of the Senate. Try that today, even as a supposed conservative! (Asians currently account for three percent of the population, and will swell to near 10 percent by 2050 if present trends continue.)
The only remaining Congressman who had voted on the 1920s quotas, Representative Emanuel Celler, D-New York, insisted, "There will not be, comparatively speaking, many Asians or Africans entering this country." Today, the number of Asians and Africans entering this country each year exceeds the annual average total number of immigrants during the 1960s.
Whether the 1800s or the 1900s, or the 2000s.
The American left has always promoted Catholic immigration, just as they are in modern times, for instance the 1965 bill.
Even here, go to the Catholic threads and try to get the supposedly pro-life, conservative, Catholics to agree with you about ending immigration.
Even you in your quoted text, left out this part. The part most relevant to the post you were responding to, post 13.
What was JFK’s and the left’s reasons? They were the same they had been since at least the mid 1800s as they needed a new kind of American that would help them create unions and get a socialist, central authority, oriented voter.
“”Roman Catholics had the twin motivations of still-evolving social justice doctrine and the potential windfall of a mass influx of co-religionists from Latin America. “”