In my opinion, the most striking and overlooked phenomenon in the United States is the dramatic demographic shift in the American population since 1965. The year 1965 may stand out in current American history books for the march on Selma, the Voting Rights Act and early protests against the US escalation in Vietnam. In retrospect, however, I believe that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 will eventually be recognized in the history books, if it hasn’t already, as a far more transformative event than any of the others from that time period.
That may be overstating it, since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, delivered the legal framework for a crucially transformative period in American democracy. It was exciting for me, as a teenager and young adult, to witness these pivotal enactments that were seeking to establish once and for all that all citizens have equal rights under the law. I remember reading about the debates – and even wandering around the halls of Congress during a spring break from college with a group of youthful “lobbyists”. We were, in any case, pleased that our own Congressman was pro-civil rights.
In the immediate aftermath of these enactments, too, I was an active participant in the turbulent mix of civil rights, anti-war and women’s rights protests and the serious efforts to bring about the changes that these laws envisioned. Nonetheless, I still do think that the Immigration and Nationality Act was a “sleeper” whose impact has been so gradual in the decades since its passage that many of us have tended to dismiss its significance, even today.
Today’s Political Climate
I do recognize that in today’s political climate, immigration is a hot button issue- partly because of the dramatic changes that have resulted from the legal paths that were opened up after 1965. More importantly, though, it is also because of the unusual numbers of people without authorized documents who have been crossing the borders, mostly, of course, the one between Mexico and the United States. And, in more recent years, they have been filing claims for asylum regardless of the merits of their claims, to the point that the backlog in processing these claims has grown out of proportion.
One can even argue that the influx of unauthorized crossings has been aggravated by the success of the original legislation since the dramatic increase in legal migrations has created the diaspora – the networks and chains of ethnic groups that reinforce the appeal of migrating to the US. On the other hand, that ignores the fact that major efforts to reform the immigration laws since then have been blocked, including most recently by the Republicans whose standard-bearer, Donald Trump, has seen this influx as politically to his advantage to criticize.
It was shocking to see populist mob-like behavior at the recent Republican presidential convention of people holding up a sea of placards calling for “Mass Deportation Now”. But then, it is their presidential candidate who has stirred them up so irrationally. And yes, it has become a hot hot button issue. Let us hope that President Biden’s latest steps to control the flows across the borders will help to show a more manageable response than mass deportations to this particular aspect of the situation. And let us hope that more comprehensive reforms will be possible after November.
The Background
Meanwhile, and quite separately from this issue of undocumented immigration, I do think there are positive things to say about the overall transformation in the ethnic composition of the United States since 1965. The legal framework of this Immigration and Nationality Act has produced a remarkable diversity in the US population that is so strikingly different today from what it was in 1965. And while it was not foreseen at the time of its enactment, scholars of US immigration policy now identify it as the pivotal event that enabled the wave of immigrants that flowed into the US in the decades that followed. But who knew?
We are, after all, the country of immigrants, and, furthermore, we had experienced a number of dramatic immigrant waves, albeit in a our more distant past. I was, myself, the grandchild of Scandinavian immigrants – and proud of it. I grew up hearing personal stories about the massive wave of immigrants from Norway and Sweden in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of course, I also heard stories about how difficult it had been for these Scandinavian immigrants to become fully integrated into American society. And the anti-immigrant mentality in the 1920s and 1930s did result in very restrictive laws for new immigrants that continued to limit access well into the 1950s and early 1960s.
Fortunately, the intertwining of civil rights with LBJs Great Society seemed to change the momentum in Congress on immigration as well. Opening up the immigration avenues to other parts of the world seemed to fit into the reforms of the 1960s while the projections were calculated to be quite modest. The surprise came only as the numbers grew unexpectedly large, mostly through the unrestricted right of family members to join those who qualified under the other provisions of the new law but also because of the overall openness to new immigration patterns that the law created. Immigration totals doubled in the first five years of the new law, then accelerated to reach a million a year in the 1990s – and more in the 2000s.
Over the years since 1965, only a small percentage of the new immigrants have come from Europe. Although it wasn’t until the 1980s that Europeans dropped below 50% of new arrivals, it is today below 20% of the total immigrant population. As of 2022, over 80% of the immigrant population is from either Asia or Latin America. (Note: One can surmise that African immigration has gone mostly to Europe.) Not only did we move from a population that was only 5% foreign-born in 1965 (given how few migrants came after the 1920s and 1930s…) to one that is 13.9% foreign-born in 2022. In fact, the total immigrant population in the US in 2022 was a record 46.2 million, the largest in US history.
A Personalized Perspective
I am inspired at this point to relate this particular transformation to a more personalized perspective. 1965 was, for me personally, a pivotal year (although one of many subsequent pivotal years, as it turned out). Most importantly for me, I graduated from Oberlin College that year. It featured a memorable springtime commencement exercise, mostly because our commencement speaker was none other than the Rev. Malcolm Luther King, Jr. Oberlin College after all, had been founded in 1833 as the first coeducational college in the US, and the first to admit a black (i.e. non-white) student in 1836.
Did I remember what MLK had to say? Maybe, maybe not. When I read his commencement address some fifty years later, I did remember his talking about not sleeping through the revolution, as, I recall, he described Rip Van Winkle as having done. But it’s only in later years that I have come to understand the significance of his terminology – don’t sleep through the revolution, he said, as he urged us to “be woke”. Was this commencement speech in fact the origin of the term “wokism”? As in “wake up” to the revolution around you?
And, more to the point, when did I notice anything different about the US vis-a-vis that 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act? Well, in retrospect, I would have to think about it. Back in 1965, as already pointed out, only 5% of Americans were documented in the US census as “foreign-born”. Those of us whose families had fairly recent Swedish or Norwegian origins, for example, were already second or even third-generation native-born Americans. And, again, it was a predominantly white world we lived in – to repeat, the US census for that year showed a whopping 84% listed as “non-Hispanic white”. Only 4% were listed as Hispanic, and 11% as black.
The civil rights movement in the 1960s and the women’s rights movement that shortly followed it certainly had my attention in the years after I left Oberlin. The confluence of the two when I moved to North Carolina (by marriage, not by choice) for a teaching career combined the dynamics of Greensboro’s new reputation as the initiator of the sit-in movement with the older civil libertarian and federalist networks at Guilford College, a Quaker school. Guilford College was late to act on racial integration – only after the World Quaker Congress meeting there in 1967 required it. And slow to embrace the nationally visible Quaker movements for gender equality (unlike my Women’s Temperance League friends at Oberlin). But yes, they were there for decolonization – and racial equality worldwide, if not right there in Greensboro, NC.
I was part of an initiative with the World Federalists and the Quakers to organize a three-part conference in Greensboro on civil rights, women’s rights and human rights in a changing world. What a transformation it was for me, linking these global issues with local ones! It also enabled me to link these global changes to both the immediate challenges of integrating the all-white Guilford College and of relating the women’s rights movements to civil rights. I was the main faculty member called upon by the first cluster of Afro-American students to speak on their behalf to the college administration, and it was the local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union who convinced me to take on the gradually flourishing project to promote gender equality in a very conservative community. But I still wanted a more globally focused career, having written my PhD dissertation on the changing membership and decision-making processes of the United Nations.
I left academia and eventually moved away from North Carolina in 1983 – or some 18 years after the 1965 immigration law. What can I say about any personal impressions about changing immigration patterns during those years in North Carolina? There was, to be sure, the great domestic migration that had significantly altered the dynamics of northern cities. And the opening up of voting and the electing of blacks in both the north and the south. To me, this was more relevant than any INA. In 1982, for example, I was persuaded to work for a black Congressional candidate in North Carolina, a colleague and ally in the NC General Assembly. Sadly, he lost his runoff bid in a racially divided Democratic Party, a bit too early in the change process. But it was just the beginning of a transformational time on the racial front.
The same point is evident in the transformation of society as a result of the women’s rights movement – in jobs, in economic rights, in education, in entertainment, in sports. And I was part of that transformational effort for gender equality, as I chaired the Mayor’s Committee on Women’s Rights in 1972 and succeeded in persuading the Greensboro City Council to establish a Commission on the Status of Women, the first ever for a North Carolina municipality. It was that experience that drew me into elective politics and winning three terms to the NC Senate, where my focus was on eliminating sex discrimination in NC statutes and on voting rights generally. But again, I was restless.
HISPANIC IMMIGRATION
The INA did open up this legal flow of migrants from all over the world, but I did not see this transformation until much later. What I do remember from those 1970s and 1980s has more to do with migrant workers at the US/Mexico border than with these less visible but legal movements that no one seemed to be noticing. In North Carolina, for example, we heard about seasonal workers who were being exploited to work the tobacco harvests and who were being housed in scandalous ramshackle housing. Were these mostly undocumented migrant workers? That probably was the case – although we wondered how migrant workers could be attracted to come so far away from their homes. Other than that, I only knew about but did not experience first-hand the Cuban refugees into Florida or Vietnamese refugees along the West Coast – or even the flow of Mexican workers into California’s agricultural areas.
In 1980, though, I had the opportunity to see the Southern border situation in person. The program for my 1979-80 White House Fellowship year included a field trip to the California/Mexico border to observe the economic and migratory movements that were stirring the political debates of the 1980 Presidential election. We toured the town of Tijuana, Mexico and saw first-hand two of the many “maquiladoras”, manufacturing facilities in duty-free zones for exports into the US – one finishing women’s clothing and the other putting together the parts of new electronic products. These were described as part of an effort to encourage jobs in Mexico (rather than China) but also to keep workers from crossing the border into the US.
On that same field trip, we also visited a night-time patrol center on the US side of the border monitoring the “illegal” crossing of Mexicans into the United States. We heard the director of the patrol center describing how out-of-hand the border movements were as he gave us infrared glasses to see the night-time movements across the distant, dark horizon. Not surprisingly, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, he pushed for tightened border controls. But, interestingly enough, he also signed a significant migration reform bill in 1986 enabling some one million undocumented immigrants, most of them Mexicans, then residing in the US, to apply for citizenship.
The history of US receptivity to Mexican workers has been erratic – encouraged to work in the US in the 1920s, kicked out in the 1930s, brought back in the 1940s, gradually expanded in the 1950s, etc. But I didn’t fully appreciate until recently that the 1965 INA introduced a quota system for immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere that had not existed prior to that act. Prior to that time, Mexicans (and others from Central and South America, I suppose) may have experienced ups and downs in their welcome. They came and went – much like the seasonal workers I remember in North Carolina – based on when there was work to be had – and without any expectation of actually migrating to the US on a permanent basis.
The 1965 Act, it seems, changed all of that by creating a visa system for people from the Western Hemisphere. This had not been part of US immigration law before 1965. The new setup actually limited the numbers of Mexicans (and others from elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere) who could legally enter the US; and it required the presumption of a permanent move to the United States. Although the legislation gave a “free pass” to those already in the US, it wasn’t conducive to anyone who might have been accustomed to informally moving back and forth. Needless to say, the customary cross-border movements for Mexicans in particular became problematic.
Ergo, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act included a provision to “allow” any “unauthorized” migrant to go through a process of becoming a US citizen. So all those millions of unauthorized migrants that we were so scandalized about were actually part of a historical pattern that had allowed far more movement back and forth in the past but now required them to stay or leave. In retrospect, then, the nighttime border monitoring that we witnessed as White House Fellows in 1980 was after the quota system had been put into effect (the 1965 Act) and before the 1986 granting of a path to citizenship. At least for those Mexicans and others who had managed to be on the US side of the border prior to that magical threshold date, the option of US citizenship became the alternative to moving back and forth illegally.
Since then, the proportion of Hispanic Americans has grown from 4% in 1965 to some 19.5% in 2023, or 65 million, as reported in US census data. Of this number, some 24 million are foreign-born (presumably from elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere) or over 50% of the immigrant population in the US. This growth in the proportionate share of the US population is not just because of the pathway to citizenship in 1986 for those who were “undocumented” within the US. It also has to do with the Hispanic share of the INA provisions for work and (especially for) family-related entry visas, as well as the growing resort to applying for asylum by people escaping from repression or climate catastrophes in places like Venezuela or Central America.
Congressional caucuses
Most significantly, it does show that the Hispanic contributions to American diversity have become quite considerable, including in politics. The Hispanic vote is touted as an important voice, even though it is quite diverse. In the US Congress, the Hispanic Congressional Caucus was founded by five members in 1976, and it now has 42 members – four Senators and 38 Representatives. Currently, though, this Caucus has only Democratic members. Since 2003, Hispanic Republicans have operated their own Hispanic Congressional Conference , currently with 20 members, including two Senators (Cruz from Texas and Rubio from Florida).
I don’t intend to go into much detail about these two Hispanic caucuses, but I do note here that they appear to be part of an overall array of ethnic-specific caucuses that are a relatively recent phenomenon in Congress. They do, of course, reflect the growing diversity among the members of Congress – which also, of course, reflects the growing diversity in the US population. It seems that the amazing array of ethnic-specific and country-specific caucuses are a relatively post-1965 phenomenon in the US Congress. That tells me that ethnic and country-specific identities have become more important in the American political culture because of the great diversity in the population.
True, it can also be related to the civil rights reforms of that 1960s period. It was, after all, only in 1971 that the Congressional Black Caucus was initially established – with 13 African-American members of Congress at the time. This caucus has grown to include 55 members today – again, as with the Hispanic Congressional Caucus, all Democrats. (The nine African-American Republicans in the current Congress seem not to have chosen to organize their own “conference”, as it were.) But I suspect that it was the launching of this Congressional Black Caucus in 1971 that served as the precursor for the Hispanic Congressional Caucus a few years later (1976). The more recent Asian Pacific American Caucus came a few years later (1994), and now there are even country-specific Asian caucuses for Iraq, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Korea, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Japan and Pacific Islands!
Asian Immigration
This does take me away from the main point of this commentary – that the US has experienced growth in the ethnic diversity of its population attributable to US immigration policy since 1965 and that it has, furthermore, benefited from this growing diversity. Strikingly, the INA of 1965 provided the basic framework for this to include a stunningly dramatic influx of Asian immigrants. Since 1965, this flow has steadily built up steam until it is now documented that more immigrants are coming into the US from India and China than from Mexico! In fact, then, one can argue that the biggest impact of the 1965 INA was not the steady and substantial flow of Hispanic migration into the US; rather, it was substantial and dramatically escalating flow of Asian migration into the US.
As documented by the Migration Policy Institute, Asian-Americans were less than 1% of the American population in 1965, or only 491,000. This grew to 825,000 in 1970; 2.54 million in 1980; 5 million in 2000; 8.2 million in 2010; and 14 million in 2019! The MPI calls this a 29 times 1960 increase – or 31% of the 44.9 million immigrant total in 2019. This is a very significant 50-year wave; it may have been less visible than the Hispanic wave, but it makes for a big deal in the diversifying of the American population.
One should not ignore the very disreputable history, of course, of how Americans mis-treated different Asian groups that migrated to the US to build railroads and work in plantations. It was, in effect, the very closed doors of the anti-immigration laws of the 1920s (and even earlier) that worked against Asians more than any other group. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there had indeed been immigrant groups, mostly from China and Japan but also from India, who had encountered highly discriminatory sentiment and policies, mostly along the American West Coast. One of the worst cases of this involved the anti-Japanese policies during World War II, when even Japanese-Americans were forced into concentration camps. And it wasn’t until the 1965 act that the barriers were finally removed.
In 1965, most of the Asian Americans were either of Japanese or Chinese origin, although there were also many Filipinos who had been drawn into the US when American expansionist policies brought the Philippines into US jurisdiction. And, of course, we were all aware of the immediate repercussions of American involvement in Vietnam that led to a large refugee flow from Vietnam into the US in the 1970s. From those days, my own personal encounters were with Filipina nurses, Chinatown enclaves and Japanese steak houses. Later, too, Vietnamese refugees operating nail salons or as hairdressers (although my favorite hairdresser in those years was a Thai-American). All with whom I came into contact were hard-working and family-oriented but distinctly Asian.
It is offensive to generalize in this way, and my intention here is to give random examples of how unconnected to the undercurrents of change these isolated encounters were. Today, I know that the Asian immigrant population is better educated and earning more than the American average in either statistic. The big whoosh in the numbers since 2000 especially are penetrating the US economy at much higher levels than any previous immigrant population.
A Korean immigrant who was my student at Guilford College is a high-powered lawyer in a major DC-based law firm; a well-educated Vietnamese immigrant family has been integrated into the life of my Seattle-based cousin; a Chinese-American scientist was a member of my White House Fellows class. Most strikingly to me has been the ease with which Indian-Americans have become top corporate leaders and public officials with whom I have come into contact at the likes of Microsoft or Pepsico or the World Bank and USAID. I recall working with the legal department at Bell Labs in the 1990s, for example, where experts in immigration law concentrated on helping researchers meet the requirements for an H1-B visa.
My own main preoccupation in the early 1990s was to represent (i.e. lobby on behalf of) AT&T in Washington, DC, when an updating of the civil rights law was hotly contested. I have written about this elsewhere – leading an effort by The Business Roundtable to negotiate a compromise with the leading civil rights organizations of the day. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was the main protagonist, but we worked with a combination of representatives from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the National Women’s Law Center, the Women’s Legal Defense Fund and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). These organizations reflected the combined interests of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans (mostly of Mexican origin in those days) and women’s rights. That was in the early 1990s.
It is striking that these organizations still exist in 2024 and that the umbrella group, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, has expanded its mandate to include both civil and human rights. It currently has over 200 affiliated members, including groups that focus on the rights of Asian-Americans and Arab-Americans. One of their recent CEOs was the first woman and first child of immigrants to lead the organization – Vanita Gupta is an Indian-American whose parents emigrated in the 1970s from Uttar-Pradesh province in India. And the work of the Leadership Conference now encompasses immigration reform and advocacy for so many different immigrant groups in addition to the MALDEF group that I negotiated with back in the 1990s.
Conclusion
What might one speculate about all these contrasts? Yes, there still are many immigrants entering the US and filling low-skilled jobs – and a demand for them that exceeds the supply, it seems! But there is also a flow of immigrants, especially from Asia, who are still coming in through the H1-B visa program or advanced academic degrees or other avenues for high-skilled advancement. It is clearly beneficial to the US economy to have both, although it is obviously more difficult for the lower skilled to meet the requirements for an entry visa, other than those set aside for family reunification.
I also have the impression that the flow of undocumented immigrants crossing the Southern border from Mexico is also becoming diversified. With huge backlogs in the processing of visa applicants from Asian countries, for example, the border crossing has become a magnet even for people from India or China. When they are apprehended – or when they turn themselves in at the border, the option is there to claim asylum and hope that the processing can begin for a long but in-the-US backlog.
On the whole, I am very upbeat about the benefits of immigration over the past 50 years and about the prospects for a diversified America to thrive as a result. I like what it has done and hope that it will continue. Yes, there is a need for widespread acceptance of the benefits, and I understand that the large numbers of recent years have encountered some genuine disgruntlement of absorptive capacity. Greater flexibility is needed in the legal framework, though, not just a closing off of border flows. And I will conclude this very long commentary by just observing that the America of today has been transformed by what happened back in 1965 and that I am glad that it did.
Selected Sources:
CRS Reports, “Primer on Immigration Policy », updated July 1, 2021 at https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45020.
International Organization for Migration, “Data and Research” at https://www.iom.int/data-and-research.
Migration Policy Institute, “Research and Reports” at https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/reports.
Pew Research Center, “Immigration and Migration”, https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/immigration-migration/.
US Census, “About the Foreign Born Population” at https://www.census.gov/topics/population/foreign-born.html.
Francisco Cantu. The Line Becomes a River, Dispatches from the Border, Penguin Random House, 2018
David A. Gerber, American Immigration: A Short Introduction, 2d Ed. Oxford University Press, 2021
David Leonhardt, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream, Penguin Books, 2023
Julia Preston, “The Real Origins of the Border Crisis, How a Broken Asylum System Warped American Immigration,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2023
