There were two reasons for the McCarran-Act, and both similar to the restriction acts of thirty years before. One was a fear of communism, the other the desire to maintain the ethnic balance of 1920. But now there was a recognition of the needs of political refugees, of the relatives of war brides etc. There was also something you forget: the successful integration of the children of the earlier immigrants, so that the earlier fear of being swamped was lessened. One of the cliches of war movies and movies about the war made afterwards, was the platoon consisting of a Kelly, a Picard, a Krauss, and Polaski, a Martinez. The American power to assimilate seemed strong. The Baby=boom swelled the ranks of the americanized. Who know that the next generation would stop having children?
Evidently you are just a pro-immigration guy.
In the 1960s overpopulation in America was the concern. America was already approaching 200 million and we did not want to become like China and India, which were constantly discussed as having problems due to their huge populations, it was a common discussion in our public schools.
The left knew what they were doing when they changed immigration to non-white, non-Protestant, and endless and functionally unlimited, conservatives fought it but the left controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress.
Americans never wanted to be a nation of a billion stressed out, crowded peoples with no common language or culture, the left knew what they were doing, and why.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin. After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”