The 1965 Law That Gave the Republican Party Its Race Problem

LBJ didn’t think the Immigration and Nationality Act would be revolutionary. He was wrong.

By Josh Zeitz
August 20, 2016

During the long, three-year debate over the immigration act of 1965, members of Congress debated the wisdom and morality of removing 1920s-era quotas on immigration to the United States. Not far from the center of this debate was the nettlesome issue of race.

“The people of Ethiopia have the same right to come to the United States under this bill as the people from England, the people of France, the people of Germany, [and] the people of Holland,” griped Senator Sam Ervin, a conservative Democrat from North Carolina. “With all due respect to Ethiopia, I don’t know of any contributions that Ethiopia has made to the making of America.”

President Lyndon Johnson, hoping to tamp down concerns about the immigration act at a time when Congress was engaged in an even more ferocious debate over the voting rights act, sought to downplay the implications of the proposed immigration law: “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” he said upon signing it. The president, like many other of the law’s supporters, sincerely believed that Europeans were most likely to take advantage of less stringent U.S. immigration policy.

He was wrong.

The Hart-Celler Act, so-called after it’s co-sponsors New York Congressman Emanuel Celler and Michican Senator Philip Hart, opened the floodgates to new immigrants when it went into effect in 1968. But the vast majority of them didn’t come from Europe; they came instead from Latin America, Africa and Asia. In 1965, non-Hispanic whites comprised over 85 percent of the American population. Fifty years later, that portion is just 62 percent, and falling.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/immigration-1965-law-donald-trump-gop-214179#ixzz4HtKzZp2x