The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act, INS, Act of 1965, Pub.L. 89-236)[1] abolished the National Origins Formula that had been in place in the United States since the Immigration Act of 1924. It was proposed by United States Representative Emanuel Celler of New York, co-sponsored by United States Senator Philip Hart of Michigan and heavily supported by United States Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.
The Hart-Celler Act abolished the national origins quota system that was American immigration policy since the 1920s, replacing it with a preference system that focused on immigrants' skills and family relationships with citizens or U.S. residents. Numerical restrictions on visas were set at 170,000 per year, with a per-country-of-origin quota, not including immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, nor "special immigrants" (including those born in "independent" nations in the Western hemisphere; former citizens; ministers; employees of the U.S. government abroad).[2]
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The 1965 act marked a radical break from the immigration policies of the past. The law as it stood then excluded Asians and Africans and preferred northern and western Europeans over southern and eastern ones. At the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s the law was seen as an embarrassment by, among others, President John F. Kennedy, who called the then-quota-system "nearly intolerable". After Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty as a symbolic gesture.
However, there is evidence the law's proponents did not see it as likely to influence American's culture significantly. While the Customs and Immigration Services did predict increased immigration in general, the political elite, labor unions, and church people expected the numbers of increased immigrants, particularly from Asia, to be minimal. There is some evidence popular support for the law was lukewarm as well. President Johnson called the bill "not revolutionary", Secretary of State Dean Rusk estimated only a few thousand Indian immigrants over the next five years, and other politicians hastened to reassure the populace the demographic mix would not be affected.[3]
The House of Representatives voted 326 to 70 (82.5%) in favor of the act, while the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 76 to 18. In the senate, 52 Democrats voted yes, 14 no, and 1 abstained. Of the Republicans 24 voted yes, 3 voted no, and 1 abstained. Most of the no votes were from the southern belt, then strongly Democratic.[4] On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation into law, saying "This [old] system violates the basic principle of American democracy, the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country".[5]
Immigration did change America's demographics, opening the doors to immigrants from Mediterranean Europe, Latin America and Asia. By the 1990s, America's population growth was more than one-third driven by legal immigration, as opposed to one-tenth before the act. Ethnic and racial minorities, as defined by the Census bureau, rose from 25 percent in 1990 to 30% in 2000. Per the 2000 census, roughly 11.1% of Americans were foreign-born, a major increase from the low of 4.7 percent in 1970. A third of the foreign-born were from Latin America and a fourth from Asia. The act increased illegal immigration from Latin America, especially Mexico, since the unlimited legal 'bracero' system previously in-place was cut.
The waves of immigration has raised both possibilities and problems. Many immigrants have taken advantage of the abundance of opportunities in the US. The Vietnamese refugees from 1975 have an average income above the national average. Asians and Pacific Islanders constituted one-fifth of the students in California's public universities by 2000. Immigration helped stimulate the sunbelt boom. The problems have centered on questions of multicultural identity as opposed to the melting-pot idea, debates on the economic impact of immigration, impact of illegal immigration, and fears of becoming a polyglot nation with English not the primary language.[6]