Oh. I see. Yes, it had indeed been enacted in 1965.
But was it not (famous immigration historian) Roger Daniels in his seminal work “Coming to America”, who called the Hart-Celler Act “the law of unintended consequences”?
IIRC, it had been maintained - amongst other things - by the lawmakers that America’s ethnic mix would not be upset.
It was maintained that the immigration flow to the USA would become just slightly bigger, as well as just slightly more diverse. “Just slightly” being the key phrase here.
If this prediction had become true, we wouldn’t be having this problem in America now, I bet.
We have seen that one of the two momentous changes in the 1965 law was the abolition of the national quotas, which had been first enacted in the 1920s, and later been maintained by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act.
However, the Hart-Celler Act not just did away with the quotas, but also drastically shifted the “immigrant preference system” inherent in the 1952 act:
- the 1952 Act had given priority to skilled immigrants, for whom 50% of all immigrant visa were reserved;
- the 1965 Act massively shifted the preference towards relatives of US citizens and (to a lesser extent) legal permanent residents, for whom no less than 80% of all immigrant visa were reserved.
And this does not even account for spouses, children and (since 1965) parents of US citizens, who were admittable outside of any quota limit (!)
I am nothing more than a maverick in the field of American immigration history, but still I have asked myself whether the shift away from skill-based immigration might not have been the more deleterious of the two “sea changes” which the 1965 brought about...:-(
Oh, I forgot about the third one: the general increase in the number of immigrants due to a generally higher number of immigrant visas, as well as a larger number of nonquota immigrant groups (like the aforementioned parents).
What if the reformers had been more farsighted?
What if the 1965 act had not been enacted, or, at the very least, been crafted far more cautiously, along the lines of Pres. Eisenhower’s proposals in 1953 and 1957 (in his messages to Congress)?
We can only wonder, but I have a gut feeling that it would have been much better for the American nation.
So much trouble and sorrow could have been avoided, I believe...and the worst was the ideology of multiculturalism which came along later, unfolding its full destructive potential.
The late Lawrence Auster’s (yes, he was a controversial author, but I must admit to holding him in the highest esteem for his great erudition) essay “The Path to National Suicide” still makes for insightful reading on this topic.
One could hardly believe that it has been penned 31 years ago, so little has changed.
I cannot recommend it too much.
What you write is correct but I don’t think that the results of Hart-Celler were unintended. They fit the ideology of the staffer who wrote it. Chase down his name and you will find a story.
All that Ted Kennedy did is carry the bill, he was too lazy and drunk to pay attention and probably wouldn’t have cared anyway. The rest of Congress took the claims about the bill at face value and didn’t examine it. If there was any real opposition to the bill I don’t remember hearing of it.
Larry Auster was brilliant. And like the VDare crowd he was banned here. So it was difficult to take on the open borders Bush fools and alert people about what immigration is doing to the country. Here in California we were at ground zero for the massive demographic change that is now hitting the rest of the country. We are probably beyond the tipping point.