Policy changes in the 1960s had by this point heated up the immigration debate. In 1963, Washington ended the Bracero Program, which for two decades had allowed millions of low-skilled Mexican workers to earn seasonal wages on U.S. farms.18 In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act. Mostly a liberalizing reform, the act is denounced today by nativists for repealing the explicitly racist quota system put into place in 1924. But the new law did also impose, for the first time, a limit on how many migrants could enter from Mexico. Then, in 1968, Congress set up a separate
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