How We Got to Here: Immigration

Greetings, readers! After a needed detour into non-political blog topics (Canadian mysteries, American connections to Monet), I have decided to start a new series that is indirectly political. I will be looking at the back stories of post-World War II political events that have been broadly beneficial to American society (and which are under attack in the current administration). I will include: the 1965 immigration act; the Supreme Court’s New York Times v. Sullivan decision (1964- protects journalists from ruinous lawsuits by powerful public figures); Title IX (the 1972 federal law that protects women’s rights, and which has revolutionized women’s sports); and the Americans with Disabilities Act (the 1990 ADA). All of them involved long struggles, and also involved people whose names, let alone contributions, mostly remain remarkably little known today.

The first topic in my series is, not that surprisingly, immigration. It was certainly, with inflation, one of the decisive issues in the 2024 election. The Trump Administration has been the most forcefully anti-immigration American government in decades. Just as it did the first time (2017-2021), it has relentlessly pursued every possible way to push out undocumented immigrants, and, beyond that, to discourage just about all immigration.

Which raises the question: why is immigration perceived so negatively by the Republicans?? In turn that leads me into the historical background: how did the present immigration situation (including the estimated 11 million undocumented), develop? The answer lies in a landmark piece of legislation from the Democratic Johnson Administration: the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known (for its Congressional sponsors) as the Hart-Celler Act. It was this law that, at a stroke, dismantled the 1924 system of national immigrant quotas, which had blatantly and purposefully favored northern and western Europeans over Southern and Eastern ones (plus complete Asian exclusion; importantly, Latin American immigration was then unlimited). The ’65 law replaced that system with one of overall annual caps. It mainly encouraged “family reunification” (that is, admitting relatives of those already here), but also provided admissions on the basis of skills or as refugees (it was passed in the middle of the global Cold War). One historian has called it perhaps “the least known and the most consequential” of the 3 landmark Johnson civil rights bills (with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, both passed just before).

Although not pitched at all at the time as being revolutionary, it actually turned out to be very much so- it opened the figurative “door” to a second “New Immigrant” wave, comparable in scale (in millions) to the famous Ellis Island wave of Southern and Eastern Europeans (1892-1924)- but this time mostly made up of Asians and Latin Americans. Today there are 7 majority-minority states, as well as DC and all the territories. The result of the ’65 law has been a vast increase in American cultural diversity- in other words, it created the society we have today.

The 1965 law happened after a long struggle over immigration policy, going back to the enormous disruptions of World War II (which turned many millions, of many nationalities, into refugees). The quota system originated, and lasted as long as it did, because it had its own reasons and its own powerful supporters. I will focus my story on a surprisingly small number of people- on those who succeeded in opening up our immigration system, and on those who opposed that opening (and who forced some fateful compromises). It will hopefully shed light on why immigration is such a “hot-button” issue now.

Instead of telling this story with a focus on the legislation itself, I’m going instead to highlight the key individuals (really just a small handful!) on both sides: those who sought to defend the quota system, and those who set out to dismantle it (ending up with the 1965 law). On with the cast of characters, starting with the man who did the most to open up our immigration!

That man was Emanuel “Manny” Celler, a Jewish Democratic congressman from Brooklyn. Celler’s political career literally spanned the whole story of the quota system- his first speech was an attack on it, and he was right there next to Pres. Johnson as he signed the law that destroyed it 41 years later!

He was a small man- just 5-foot 2!- but his spirit and dedication to social justice would prove to be mighty indeed. He was born when Brooklyn was still an independent city, in 1888- surrounded by immigrants, and very aware of his own family’s migration. His Jewish maternal grandmother found that, just as her ship arrived in New York from Germany in 1848, it began to sink. A man, a German Catholic, immediately jumped in and saved her- and then married her! Celler’s own father made whisky and wine right in his home’s cellar, and Celler’s first job was selling it on the city streets. He was an academic star early on; he went to a rigorous high school, and then straight on to Columbia College. While there both parents suddenly died, and he found himself running the wine business as well as finishing his degree. Then he went on to Columbia Law School in Manhattan.

By the early 1920s, he was married (with two daughters, one of whom sadly died young from cerebral palsy), and was a successful lawyer, living in a handsome brownstone and solidly in the upper middle class. He observed the Jewish high holidays, but was not particularly religious. It was at this point that he entered politics (against his wife’s wishes!).

The issue that first motivated him was the national Prohibition of alcohol production and trade (deeply unpopular throughout New York City), which had taken effect in 1920. Celler lived in a Republican US House district, but he ran as a “wet” (anti-Prohibition) Democrat in 1922- and won by just 3,000 votes (the first Democrat to win it in memory). He arrived in Washington in the midst of the Roaring Twenties (a decade ruled over by three successive Republican presidents)- deeply homesick, shy, and already balding in his mid-30s. Just a year into his term, though, he found his cause, when the House debated the bill that would become the National Origins Act. It had come about because of rising fears in the English-ancestry elite of the millions of poor immigrants pouring through Ellis Island- that the “natives” would be demographically swamped. The restrictionists found their argument in the eugenics movement- those “scientific racists” who said that the peoples of the Ellis wave were “weakening the Anglo-Saxon stock”. Celler was having none of it; his neighborhood was full of the very nationalities- Jews, Italians, Poles, etc.- that the bill sought to keep out. He personally knew their worth as Americans. Celler rose and delivered his very first speech, one of the few speeches in opposition. The bill cut overall immigration dramatically and effectively, and gave most of what was left to large quotas for just 3 countries (Ireland, Britain, and Germany).

While the bill passed by wide margins, Celler now had his cause, and his voters knew it. For decades, despite the passage of generations and redrawing of districts, they stuck by him, term after term- all the way into the early 1970’s! Celler did not restrict himself to general immigration reform; he spoke up loudly and often about the need to admit more European Jews during Hitler’s time in power, and became a strong advocate for Black civil rights by the 1950s.

Moving on- to the first important restrictionist who stood in Celler’s way. He was Patrick (Pat) McCarran, and he came from a vastly different background. He was born in 1876 to an illiterate Irish sheepherder in Nevada, just recently a state, and the least populated other than Alaska. Given that he had to drop out of college (his father was injured and unable to work), he had many years of struggle before he attained political power. After starting a law practice, he doggedly climbed the ranks of state offices, opposed throughout by the politicians at the top. He got his big break in 1932, the year of the Democratic landslide in the depths of the Depression that swept in Franklin Roosevelt. In McCarran’s case, he was finally elected to the US Senate after 3 tries. Once in, he immediately set about ensuring that he would stay; he appointed loyalists (literally called “McCarran’s Boys”) in every corner of his rural state, right down to janitors in post offices! As a result, he too won term after term for the rest of his life. Like Celler, he benefited from the rigid seniority system of the day: simply by longevity in Congress, one could rise to be the head of a powerful committee. McCarran came to head two of the most powerful of all- Appropriations and Judiciary- such that he was able to face down presidents (including fellow Democrats FDR and Truman). It helped that senators have 6-year terms (compared to the 2-year terms in the House).

McCarran was at the far opposite ideological end of the Democratic Party from Celler- much closer in spirit and values to the (ruthless and racist) Southern Democrats who controlled Congress for most of this time. He hated labor unions, Jews, immigrants, and anyone who didn’t share his unyielding conservatism (lumped together as “Communists”). He was also physically Celler’s opposite; though just 5-foot 7, by his prime he weighed over 230 pounds, with a big shock of white hair. And he feared no one.

Given that Celler was in the House and McCarran in the Senate, it took a long while before they came into direct conflict. That happened in the late 1940s, when Truman and Celler sought to find ways around the quotas in order to bring in large numbers of “DPs”, “Displaced Persons”, Central and Eastern Europeans, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. McCarran and his allies, not surprisingly, were not in favor (and McCarran had become chair of Judiciary in 1944- at that time the committee where most important legislation was sent!).

Nevertheless, Harry Truman (who had just been elected in his own right in 1948) had the benefit of broad public sympathy for the survivors and for refugees fleeing new Soviet Communist oppression; he and Celler got two laws through in 1948 and 1950, admitting a total of 400,000.

McCarran took these defeats personally (he and Truman outright hated each other), and he took revenge in 1950, with the sharp rise of fear of Communism known as the Red Scare (amplified by the Korean War). That climate of fear enabled the rise of an obscure Republican senator, Joseph McCarthy, who set out to bully and ruin careers (in full alliance with McCarran). McCarran got his revenge by pushing through, over Truman’s veto, the harsh Internal Security (McCarran) Act, which created the immigration mechanisms we have today (the federal power of deportation, and document requirements for resident noncitizens, known now as “Green Cards”).

Next came the direct collision between Celler and McCarran, which foreshadowed the one over the ’65 law. McCarran, aware that the quota system was coming under more pressure, decided to reinforce it through an additional law, through an alliance with another powerful restrictionist in the House, Francis Walter (a conservative Democratic congressman from rural Pennsylvania). Walter, unlike McCarran, had supported the DP legislation, and was not a friend of McCarran’s, but he too was against the removal of quotas. The McCarran-Walter bill simply moved the basis for the quotas from the 1890 Census to the 1920 one, after the Ellis wave (thus allowing slightly larger numbers for nations outside western Europe). And it had a cynical and clever gimmick- for the first time, it admitted more than 100 immigrants per nation from the so-called “Asia-Pacific Triangle” (East and South Asia)- though no more than 2,000 overall! That, and its provision for naturalization, gave the bill the support of Chinese and Japanese Americans, who at long last had a chance to become citizens! This support gave the bill a humanitarian veneer (McCarran and Walter even had themselves photographed with an Asian baby named for both!). The other winning argument was that the quotas would not keep out “subversive” people from Communist nations (conveniently still those of Eastern Europe). Celler and his own new ally, Jewish Sen. Lehman of New York, introduced their own bill to eliminate quotas, and the debate was loud and personal.

But McCarran and Walter won in July 1952, including another stunning override of Truman’s veto. As a result, the overall discrimination would last another 13 years (including new tiny quotas for newly independent nations such as Caribbean islands). Ellis Island itself closed in 1954. But while they won the battle, they lost the “war”, as politicians of both parties kept on creating immigration exemption after exemption. It would turn out that, instead of the 2 million the act itself permitted by ’65, the US would actually admit 3.5 million!

McCarran literally died while delivering a campaign speech (at 78, in 1954). But his restrictionist policy was immediately taken over in the Senate by his younger segregationist friend James “Big Jim” Eastland from Mississippi, who took over at Judiciary, and who was also infamous for blocking almost all civil rights bills for African Americans!

Rep. Emanuel Celler (millercenter.org)

Celler, while he didn’t try again to overturn the whole system for a time, did keep up the good fight (he was the equally powerful chair of the House Judiciary Committee!). And he was gradually accumulating public and political support, including from a young Catholic member of Congress, John F. Kennedy. Even though his own Irish base benefited from the quota system, JFK wanted to broaden that base by the time he ran for the presidency in 1960, and therefore supported ending the quota system. His (narrow) victory gave Celler his first hint of hope since 1952.

But Kennedy was faced immediately by a series of major crises, both due to Cold War confrontations in Cuba and Berlin, and to the peaking of the civil rights movement. Francis Walter, who now belonged to a hardline eugenics organization, also kept any changes in immigration from moving out of his House committee. As a result, it wasn’t until the middle of 1963, after Walter had suddenly died, that JFK introduced his immigration bill (posing in the Rose Garden with Italian-Americans, who faced the largest backlog of any European immigrant group). It completely did away with quotas by nationality.

However, Kennedy was far better at inspiring youth and facing down the Soviets than he was at getting legislation passed. Walter was replaced by yet another restrictionist, Michael Feighan, an obscure Democrat from the Cleveland suburbs. Both Kennedy’s civil rights and immigration bills were still stuck in Congress when he made his fateful trip to Dallas that November.

But Johnson was an entirely different politician (when Eastland got the news of JFK’s assassination, he turned to his wife and said: “Good God, Lyndon’s President. He’s gonna pass a lot of this damn fool stuff.”

And that’s just what LBJ did. At first he concentrated on calling upon Kennedy’s memory to cement his own popularity. In his State of the Union speech in Jan. 1964, he made sure to include immigration: “We ought never to ask, “where were you born?”. But his first priority was winning election in his own right (which he did in a massive landslide in Nov. 1964- covered in one of my earlier posts). By Jan. 1965, he was all set to push a blizzard of legislation (the so-called “Great Society” laws). He had the largest Democratic majority in decades, the “Fabulous 89th”, and the longest list of impactful bills since Franklin Roosevelt. And he made sure to let Congressman Feighan know that there was to be no more obstruction. Celler, now 76, was overjoyed!

In February, Celler introduced his reform bill again in the House, and Philip Hart, a liberal Democrat from Michigan, introduced an identical version in the Senate. However, Hart ceded the management of his bill to the youngest Kennedy brother, Edward (known to all as “Teddy”), elected from Massachusetts in 1962. As hearings began in March, LBJ made a backdoor deal with powerful obstructionist Sen. Eastland; in return for letting young Teddy (just turning 33) move the bill forward (with his invaluable name recognition), LBJ would allow the confirmation of a segregationist federal judge in Eastland’s home Mississippi.

Feighan continued to try to delay the process: dragging out the hearings (and prioritizing opponents), and whipping up anti-immigrant feeling in his home district. This time LBJ leaned on him in person, calling him into the Oval Office in May (apparently threatening to run an opponent against him in the next election). That, and LBJ putting loyalists on his committee, ended the hearings, but Feighan had one more (fateful) trick up his sleeve. In June 1965, to general surprise, he introduced his own bill- supposedly getting rid of quotas, yet still allowing just 20,000 maximum from each nation. The key clause was something he’d had in mind for awhile: prioritizing family reunification. This seemed like a clever way to keep the same basic European ethnic mix- new family members would simply join the European majority already here (but now also allowing Southern and Eastern Europeans, the two main groups pushing for change).

LBJ was by now multitasking at a furious rate: he’d already pushed through the Civil Rights Act, the first damaging blow to Jim Crow, and was now well along with passage of the Voting Rights Act, the most important blow (both with invaluable help from Celler). He’d also begun a rapid plunge of the nation into all-out war in Vietnam- committing to a large-scale bombing campaign and hundreds of thousands of ground troops. As a result, he was eager to get this third civil rights bill done. He told his House majority leader to “just shove it [Feighan’s family reunification] in any way you can”.

In August, the House and Senate immigration subcommittees both approved the bills, and on the 24th the full House approved by a wide margin (including 93 Republicans).

With final passage well within sight, one more fateful change came about- thanks mostly to one senator: segregationist and restrictionist Sam Ervin, Democrat from North Carolina. Ervin (who would become nationally famous in the ‘70s as the folksy chairman of the Watergate Committee) said he couldn’t support Hart’s bill unless it included a (first-ever) cap on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere- at just 120,000. Importantly, he recruited Everett Dirksen, the Republican minority leader from Illinois (who had supported the two previous civil rights bills). Faced with this opposition from two powerful senators just before the Senate voted, and unsure that he had the votes to overrule Ervin’s amendment, impatient LBJ gave in- despite loud public objection from liberals (including Celler, Kennedy, and Hart). As a result, the Judiciary Committee, and then the full Senate on Sept. 22, approved the bill (opposed almost solely by Southern Democrats), 76-18.

After a joint conference unified the bills, it was time for the signing and political theater. On Oct. 3, LBJ stood in front of the Statue of Liberty, with Celler and the other supporters in the photo, as he signed the most important change in immigration in generations. Those supporters, Celler especially, had acted (as hard as this is to believe in today’s cynical times) mainly from one motive- a passion to eliminate historic discrimination (just as they did for black civil rights).

Photograph of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Immigration Act, 10/3/1965. (National Archives Identifier 2803428)

The legacy has turned out to be very different from what both supporters and opponents expected. For a few years, after the law took effect in 1968, there was a surge of Southern European admissions (mostly Italians and Portuguese)- people who had been on long waitlists. Then European immigration dropped to a trickle (where it has mostly remained ever since). It turned out that, with European economies doing well (as the present EU developed), people from there generally stayed home. Feighan’s plan failed completely.

What happened instead was two-fold. Asians came in in large numbers by two avenues: skilled workers, such as engineers and physicians, and year after year by bringing in members of extended families. Mexicans, who had been used to seasonal migration of young men into California and the Southwest to do manual labor, now faced a hard choice. With an absurdly small legal quota for the whole Hemisphere, one choice was to stay permanently in the U.S.

Or- they could cross illegally. Never, before the 1980s, had the U.S. seen so many undocumented immigrants. Soon they numbered in the millions, creating the intense political debate we have been living with ever since. And soon the right wing was accusing Democrats of either being too naive in designing the law, or of outright deception (intending covertly to bring in millions of nonwhites to expand their voting base). The “great replacement theory”, the idea of a demographic apocalypse for white residents (the theory which had triggered the original 1924 quotas), has come roaring back to life (with blame put, with no evidence, on the “radical leftist” Democratic Party). It is indeed remarkable that, when the '65 Act was signed, the US population was effectively just two large ethnic groups: 85% white and 11% black. Today, largely due to that act, the largest groups are: 57.8% non-Hispanic white; 20% Hispanic/Latino; 12.6% non-Hispanic black; 6.1% Asian/Pacific Islander; and about 3% "other".

Here's a much more positive view of what the law actually achieved: "Immigration from India was 3 times what the Johnson Admin. had predicted…Few places in America were more transformed- and economically and intellectually invigorated- by these new arrivals than the hubs of the technology industry: Boston, Texas, Seattle, and, especially, Silicon Valley. Skills requirements were not “sanctimonious propaganda” in the world of high tech; immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong, then China, India, and the former Soviet Union became the engineering backbone of hundreds of start-ups and large tech companies. Many of them ended up founding companies themselves. In the 1980s, immigrants from India and China were at the helm of nearly 1/4 of Silicon Valley companies. By the Internet era, the number of immigrant founders in the Valley stood at 40 percent. Nationwide, more than 25 percent of high-tech companies had a foreign-born founder.

The new wave included people just as critical to the scaling-up of the tech phenomenon, even though their faces never appeared on the covers of Fortune or Forbes: assembly-line workers from Mexico and Southeast Asia, who soldered the semiconductors, built the desktops, and fabricated the routers. By the end of the 1980s, over half of Silicon Valley’s blue-collar workforce was Latino or Asian.” (O’Mara 83-84)

What strikes me also about this whole story is: how few people (in the era of powerful committee chairmen) actually made the key decisions behind the passage of this law: a law affecting countless millions, and one whose extraordinary impact is still reverberating 60 years later!

Resources:

n.a. “National Quotas for Immigration to End,” Congressional Quarterly (https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac//document.php?id=cqal65-1259481) Provides thorough legislative history of the ’65 Act.

Anbinder, Tyler. “City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York.” (2016)

Bentz, Adam T. “A Cold War Sentinel: Representative Francis E. Walter- Immigration Hawk, Anti-Communist, and Solon of the Lehigh Valley.” (https://preserve.lehigh.edu/_flysystem/fedora/2023-11/preserve30783.pdf) Ph.D. dissertation, Lehigh University, 2015. The only detailed biography.

Cavioli, Frank J. “ACIM, Italian Americans, and Immigration Reform.” Italian Americana, vol. 32, no. 1, 2014, pp. 6–27. JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/stable/43926705) Accessed 2 Apr. 2025.

Chin, Gabriel J. and Rose Cuizon Villazor, eds. “The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965: Legislating a New America.” (2015) Thorough examination of its impact after 50 years.

Dawkins, Wayne. “Emanuel Celler: Immigration and Civil Rights Champion.” (2020) The only full-length biography.

Gabler, Neal. “Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975.” (2020)

Ngai, Mae. “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.” (2003) Important analysis of the growth of the undocumented population.

Okrent, Daniel. “The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.” (2019) Immigration policy up to 1924.

O’Mara, Margaret. “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.” (2019)

Orchowski, Margaret Sands. “The Law That Changed the Face of America: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.” (2024) Disappointing.

Tichenor, Daniel. “Reluctant Reformer.” (https://millercenter.org/issues-policy/us-domestic-policy/reluctant-reformer) May 25, 2016. LBJ’s role in passage of law.

Yang, Jia Lynn. “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924-1965.” (2020) Really useful on the era of quota restrictions.

Ybarra, Michael J. “Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt.” (2004) A massive overview of a generally forgotten but very important (and very bigoted) legislator.

Zeitz, Josh. “The 1965 Law That Gave the Republican Party Its Race Problem,” Politico Magazine (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/immigration-1965-law-donald-trump-gop-214179/) Aug. 20, 2016.

Zolberg, Aristide. “Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America.” (2008)