Kennedy was a major cog in the '68 and '86 immigration 'reforms'. A major part of his motivation in each case was to buy Irish street cred by making sure the illegal Irish then swamping Boston and other anchor cities were favorably treated. It can be argued that the unintended consequences of giving the Irish preferential treatment the last two times immigration 'reform' was implemented have put us in the mess we're in now.
The democrats have depended on immigration, since the mid 1800s.
The 1965 Immigration Act to replace the American republican voters.
“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.”