Our Vast Social Experiment

The United States had left regulation of immigration to the coastal states until the Supreme Court in 1875 declared that this was exclusively a national, not a state responsibility. Congress struggled through four decades to create a coherent policy that would bring under control the large-scale and essentially unregulated immigration that commenced in the 1880s. The result was the national origins system created by legislation in 1921, 1924 and 1929. Canada, Australia, Argentina, and Brazil established similar regulatory regimes at about the same time. All were based on selection systems designed not only to limit immigration but also to replicate the nation's historic structure of nationalities. This new restrictionist regime brought the numbers entering the U.S. down sharply from earlier annual inflows which had reached 1 million...

Recorded immigration to the U.S. Averaged 305,000 from 1925-29, under the interim quotas, then dropped sharply in the 1930s to an average of 53,000 a year that hides a virtual negative immigration in 1932. In the 1940s, immigration averaged about 100,000 a year...

Demographer Leon Bouvier has estimated that, assuming no restriction and pre-war levels of one million a year for the rest of the century, the American population would have reached 400 million by the year 2000. This would have meant 120 million more American high-consumption lifestyles piled upon the roughly 280 million reported in the census of 2000, making far worse the dismal figures on species extinction, wetland loss, soil erosion, and the accumulation of climate-changing and health-impairing pollutants that are being tallied up as the new century unfolds...

The curbing of the great wave created a forty-year breathing space of relatively low immigration, with effects favorable to assimilation...

[In 1964] complex maneuvering produced a house version of the administration's legislation that ended national origins quotas and shifted to a system of preferences based on family reunification and skills...

The senate floor manager of the bill, Senator Edward Kennedy, reported that in his meetings with several patriotic society representatives they 'expressed little overt defense of the national-origins system' and indicated their willingness to consider a new framework so long as the numbers were not enlarged. Kennedy assured them that this was not the reformers' intention...

It is hard in retrospect to see why it was not obvious that few American citizens had immediate relatives abroad, so that this feature of the new selection system would build streams of family flows from a base in the most newly arrived, which meant Mexicans and whatever new refugees might arrive in an unpredictable future...

... The 1965 Immigration Act was not given much contemporary attention in a decade of social upheaval and a war in Vietnam, was not mentioned by Lyndon Johnson in his memoirs, and is routinely allotted one or two sentences in history text books.

This emphasis will change, and attention to the 1965 Immigration Act will grow, for [journalist Theodore] White's word 'revolutionary' identifies a demographic turning point in American history. With all due respect to the epochal and invaluable changes made in America when the Jim Crow system was killed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the passage of time may position the 1965 Immigration Law as the Great Society's most nation-changing single act, especially if seen as the first of a series of ongoing liberalizations of U.S. Immigration and border policy extending through the end of the century and facilitating four decades (so far) of mass immigration. For the 1965 law, and subsequent policy changes consistent with its expansionist goals, shifted the nation from a population-stabilization to a population-growth path, with far-reaching and worrisome consequences. In the words of Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks, this launched an ongoing 'vast social experiment that conservatives inexplicably permit and liberals inexplicably sustain against the interests and sentiments of their working class base.