By Wayne Dawkins
Sixty years ago on Oct. 3, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Hart-Celler immigration reform act into law. LBJ’s signature ended 40 years of race-based National Origins policy that favored bringing White northern European immigrants to America and restricting immigrants from less-desirable places in Europe, plus additional roadblocks for entry of people from Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
Six decades ago, change meant for immigrants eager or desperate to come to America legally, could apply, without restrictions based on their country of origin.
The visionary legislative architect of this revolution in American demographics and culture was Emanuel Celler, a congressman who served Brooklyn, New York two months shy of 50 years from 1923-1973. I wrote a 2020 biography of Celler [1888-1981] because I was intrigued by his immigration crusade. He represented a district populated with Americans of Jewish, Italian, and Irish descent, plus African Americans who could trace their roots to the 1630s when the land was Dutch-colonized New Amsterdam.
By the 1920s, there was a nativist U.S. backlash to restrict immigrants pouring in from Eastern and Southern Europe, deemed the “wrong White people” to be accepted in America. Celler and a handful of young congressmen representing immigrant-heavy urban districts, waged a gallant but futile fight against the nativist assault. President Calvin Coolidge in 1924 signed National Origins into law.
Celler however was tenacious. He sounded alarms in the late 1930s that Nazis were slaughtering Jews and America should open its doors to refugees. After World War II victory in 1945, America emerged as a freedom-loving, prosperous, capitalist superpower. With such power came responsibility. The USA needed to win the hearts and minds of global people who were not White but could fall into the grips of the communist Soviet Union, aka Russia.
Celler was a key player with collaborator U.S. Rep. Claire Booth Luce in convincing the USA to recognize emerging democracy India.
Through the 1950s, Celler worked with presidents Harry S Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower to engage in “mortgaging,” borrowing from the ample British, German, and Scandinavian-favored immigration slots to bring in immigrants from restricted nations – like India – that had quotas of 100 people per year.
Continued global cold war politics in the 1960s compelled President John F. Kennedy to make a serious push for U.S. immigration reform. Celler was in the thick of the movement. Celler’s conservative adversary, fellow Rep. Michael Feighan, D-Ohio believed he had a scheme to keep American immigration White. During the congressional give and take, the immigration reform proposal favored family reunification with immigrant kin from abroad.
Feighan’s plan, wrote Tom Gjelten in 2015, backfired. By the 1960s, Europeans were not as eager to flock to America as they had been in the early 1900s; Asians and other people of color however were eager to come to America.
In 1960, 75% of foreign-born Americans came from Europe, reported Gjelten. By 1970, a few years into immigration reform, Europe-born Americans slipped to 62%.
By 1980, the numbers flipped: 61% of foreign-born Americans came from somewhere other than Europe, then increased to 77% non-European in 1990, 84% in 2000, and 88% in 2010 [Gjelten, “A Nation of Nations,” p 139]
Those numbers include a substantial number of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa who came to America not enslaved like centuries ago, but voluntarily for opportunity and freedom.
Indeed, demographically transformed 21st century America incurred a new nativist backlash stoked by fear and grievance. Donald Trump alleged that immigrants were taking American’s jobs and importing crime. Trump exaggerated and fear mongered. American citizens in the main didn’t want to do the physically taxing and dirty agriculture and factory jobs immigrants gladly did at low pay.
The 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act signaled a significant positive turning point in American history, away from ethnically based immigration laws and towards the ideal of America, expressed so eloquently by Emma Lazarus in her sonnet, “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.
Today as we observe the 60th anniversary of immigration reform, the bottom-line question is whether it is time for celebration or is it time to return to core principles of America as a welcoming refuge for immigrants. Is this anniversary an urgent call to reinforce the law that has been American governance since 1965?
President Ronald Reagan, the conservative GOP icon, said unequivocally in the late 1980s that immigration was good for America. And author Gjelten cited first president George Washington who said, “The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions, whom we shall welcome to a participation in all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.”
Wayne Dawkins, a professor of journalism and mass communications, is author of “Emanuel Celler: Immigration and Civil Rights Champion.”
