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 Bostons 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 Kennedys 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 JFKs 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.
That is an interesting bit of info.
The Cardinal is gravely misjudging me and millions others.
Just peeked over at drudge, and lo and behold, that Murdoch is yammering that amnesty can’t wait. Who are these freaks???
What the pro-amnesty people forget to mention: There are millions of children in Asia and Africa who also desperately want to come to the United States, but the oceans stop them from doing so.
So is it fair to let these illegal immigrants from Latin America free admission when millions of desperate children in Asia and Africa want to come to the United States also? Sad this Obama administration.