Ted Kennedy’s America: 50 Years After the Law That Changed Everything
Fifty years ago today, Ted Kennedy began changing the face of the United States by ushering the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act through Congress. That legislation resulted in the fundamental transformation of the demographic, economic, social, and political landscape of nation, exactly the opposite of what its supporters promised.
The Kennedy immigration law abolished the national origins quota system, which had favored immigrants from nations with a similar heritage to our own, and opened up American immigration visas to the entire world.
While about nine in ten of the immigrants who came to the United States during the 19th and 20th century hailed from Europe, the 1965 law inverted that figure. Today about 9 out of every 10 new immigrants brought into the country on green cards come from Latin America, Africa, Asia or the Middle East.
The size of the numbers also grew exponentially as well. According to Pew Research Center, 59 million immigrants entered the United States following the Act’s passage. Including their children, that added 72 million new residents to the U.S. population.
In 1965, according to Pew, the country was 84 percent white, 11 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic and less than 1 percent Asian.
In 2015, as a result of Kennedy’s immigration law, the country is now 62 percent white, 12 percent black, 18 percent Hispanic and 6 percent Asian.
Pew projects that in forty years time, “no racial or ethnic group will constitute a majority of the U.S. population,” as “whites are projected to become less than half of the U.S. population by 2055.” Therefore, by 2065, the nation would be 46 percent white, 24 percent Hispanic, 14 percent Asian and 13 percent black.
Moving forward, Pew projects, births to current Americans will be vastly outnumbered by new arrivals unless Congress hits the “pause” button on issuing new green cards. If that doesn’t happen, Pew projects an immigration flow so large that nine-tenths of all new residents will be immigrants or their children. In a 2012 report, the Center for Immigration Studies observed that: “if the level of immigration the Census Bureau foresees in 2050 were to continue after that date, the U.S. population would reach 618 million by 2100 — double the 2010 population.”...
Because foreign workers do jobs for such low pay, their incomes are padded with welfare. A census data report authored by the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies recently found that “immigrant households use welfare at significantly higher rates than native households,” with more than half of U.S. immigrants on welfare.
Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald has observed foreign-born Hispanics and their American-born children use welfare at rates which vastly exceed those of native-born whites. “Native-born Hispanics collected welfare at over twice the rate as native-born whites,” Mac Donald writes...
The impact of the Kennedy-backed bill is also evident on the nation’s education system. After five decades of providing visas to poor nations, a majority of public school students are minorities, a majority of students now qualify for subsidized school lunches, and U.S. test scores have plummeted...
Increased spending, combined with race-based affirmative action policies, have been widely instituted to try to equalize the results between white and soon-to-be-majority students. But the “achievement gap” remains...
Indeed, many of the nations’ violent gangs would not exist in the United States but for immigration. In a Business Insider article perhaps somewhat misleadingly entitled “13 American Gangs That Keep the FBI Up At Night,” eleven of the thirteen listed gangs are in the country solely as a result of immigration...
But an even newer kind of violence has arrived on U.S. shores. Muslim immigrants are the fastest growing group of newcomers. In 2013, the U.S. imported more than 280,000 migrants from predominantly Muslim countries (this figure includes immigrants that were permanently resettled within the U.S., as well as temporary workers, refugees, and foreign students).
As a result of Muslim immigration, Equality Now recently issued a report documenting how half a million U.S. girls are at-risk of the gruesome practice of female genital mutilation .
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act has similarly had a revolutionary impact on the political landscape as well. As Breitbart News reported, Republican voters in Virginia are increasingly finding their conservative ballots disenfranchised by the arrival of newcomers who are voting to impose bigger government on the state’s longtime residents.
Scholars have documented that incoming immigrants overwhelmingly favor big government policies..