The greatest legal immigration wave in America’s history started 60 years ago, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1965 immigration law on Liberty Island in New York Harbor.
“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives,” it said.
Oops!
The bill, often called the Hart-Celler Act after its congressional sponsors, changed the 1920s law that had brought the great Ellis Island wave of immigration to an end.
That law had been designed to favor immigrants from northern and western Europe over people from elsewhere, and by the 1960s, it was an embarrassing relic of a bygone age. Supporters of the new bill promoted it as part of the Civil Rights movement, an effort to purge federal law of yet another discriminatory element.
But they repeatedly claimed — I think sincerely — that the new law would not restart mass immigration, just get policy right with the times.
It wasn’t only Johnson who said that the 1965 law would not represent a significant change. Democratic Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy, who ushered the bill through the Senate, assured his colleagues, “The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”
Oops, again.
After six decades of mass immigration, the United States has the largest number of immigrants ever recorded, at well over 50 million, legal and illegal combined. But that’s not too surprising, given that our overall population is also the largest it’s ever been.
The share of immigrants in our population is also unprecedented, at nearly 16%, higher than even during the Ellis Island era, and there’s no natural end in sight. The Census Bureau projected that we wouldn’t reach the current percentage of immigrants in the population until 2042, but it arrived 17 years ahead of schedule.
This historic wave of newcomers has come precisely when our country is less prepared to deal with it successfully. When the 1965 law was passed, our economy was still mainly focused on manufacturing and farming, where people with modest education could still prosper. Today, we have a post-industrial, knowledge-based economy, which limits the opportunities for upward mobility for those with little education. What’s more, today we have historic levels of working-age men who are neither working nor looking for work, hardly a situation where importing more workers is justified.
The welfare state was barely getting started when the 1965 law was passed; today, more than half of households headed by immigrants use welfare. This isn’t because they come here to rip us off, but because with low skills, you earn low wages, making you eligible for taxpayer-funded benefits.
Cellphones, the internet, and cheap air travel didn’t exist in 1965 — even a domestic long-distance call (on a rotary phone!) was a big deal and expense. The shrinking of the world since then, because of cheap transportation and communications, has been a boon to humanity. It has also made assimilation less likely, as people easily maintain ties with their old country and are no longer forced by circumstances to focus their affections on their new country.
Yet, mass immigration continues on autopilot. The growth in the overall immigrant population may well slow for a time, as President Donald Trump’s policies reduce new illegal immigration and cause some illegal immigrants to go home, voluntarily or otherwise.
But unless the changes are enshrined in law by Congress, they can — and will — simply be reversed by the next Democratic administration.
And legal immigration, still essentially based on the outline passed in 1965, will continue to let in a million or more permanent settlers from abroad each year, every year, indefinitely.
BECOMING AN AMERICAN: HOW TO FIX THE LEGAL IMMIGRATION SYSTEM
It’s long past time to combine the best element of the 1965 law — non-discrimination based on origin — with the best element of the 1920s laws: reducing the level of new immigration.
As former Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) wrote a decade ago, “What we need now is immigration moderation: slowing the pace of new arrivals so that wages can rise, welfare rolls can shrink and the forces of assimilation can knit us all more closely together.”
Mark Krikorian is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.