National Public Radio’s All Things Considered is running a three part series this week that takes a look at the 1965 Immigration Act. As mentioned at various times on SM, this is the law which is responsible for many of our parents being allowed to legally enter the U.S., as well as the reason many of us are born citizens. The series by NPR is particularly relevant because one can draw comparisons between the immigration debate then and now. There are three to four million people standing in line waiting to get into America legally right now.

The FULL story is an audio story (and contains rich detail in the form of short interviews-12 min long). I am excerpting the abridged transcript below, although you are much better off listening to the whole story. First, one must remember the immigration laws before the 1965 Act:

“The law was just unbelievable in its clarity of racism,” says Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University. “It declared that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race. The Nordics were superior to the Alpines, who in turn were superior to the Mediterraneans, and all of them were superior to the Jews and the Asians.”

By the 1960s, Greeks, Poles, Portuguese and Italians were complaining that immigration quotas discriminated against them in favor of Western Europeans. The Democratic Party took up their cause, led by President John F. Kennedy. In a June 1963 speech to the American Committee on Italian Migration, Kennedy called the system of quotas in place back then “nearly intolerable…” [Link]

So Kennedy and the Democrats saw the political advantages to updating the racist laws in order to give an equal shot to everyone in the world, but Kennedy died before the ‘65 act was passed. When Lyndon Johnson signed it into law he went out of his way to state that he didn’t think anything would come of it. Neither Johnson, nor most of the government, thought that people would really line up to come to the United States:

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” Johnson said at the signing ceremony. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

Looking back, Johnson’s statement is remarkable because it proved so wrong. [Link]

Congress was after two things. First, they wanted to re-unite American families with their extended family in the old world. This was a popular notion and would be sure to drum up votes. You could almost consider this immigration based upon a system of nepotism. An additional motivation of Congress is that they wanted to crack open the door for highly skilled labor. This is another area where they miscalculated.

“Congress was saying in its debates, ‘We need to open the door for some more British doctors, some more German engineers,’” Klineberg says. “It never occurred to anyone, literally, that there were going to be African doctors, Indian engineers, Chinese computer programmers who’d be able, for the first time in the 20th century, to immigrate to America…” [Link]

Among the most interesting parts of the NPR story is a re-enactment of a Congressional committee interview of Secretary of State Dean Rusk (at the 4min20sec mark). A Senator asks Rusk about what he thinks will be the result of the Immigration Act. In particular he asks if a lot of people from India might use the law to come to America. Rusk replies:

“The present estimate, based upon the best information we can get, is that there might be, say, 8,000 immigrants from India in the next five years. In other words, I don’t think we have a particular picture of a world situation where everybody is just straining to move to the Unites States…” [Link]

Wrong again.

So is it bad that legal immigration in this country has been based upon what one may view as a system of nepotism (in the form of “chain-migration”) for the last 40 years? It depends on where you are standing. You might think that an egalitarian system would better serve the U.S. but chain-migration has a distinct advantage that I am sure many South Asians living in America know well:

… the Asian American Justice Center’s Narasaki thinks the family focus makes sense. She notes that in the Asian community, extended families often function as a close-knit unit. Parents will help raise children, while siblings will pool their money to buy homes and businesses together and to help finance college for the younger generation.

“A family is very important not just to the social and emotional well-being, but also to the economic well-being of these communities,” she says. [Link]