The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The Hart-Celler immigration reform of 1965 is sometimes overlooked amid the tidal wave of legislation that flowed through Congress that year. It overturned the “national origins” system, passed under the Immigration Act of 1924 and reaffirmed in 1952, that had aimed to keep the ethnic composition of the United States roughly what it was. Even in the mid-1960s, immigrants from Britain and Germany made up more than half of national “quota” immigration—and those countries plus Ireland, Italy, and Poland accounted for almost three quarters. It is hard to say exactly what the bill’s backers believed they were doing. On one hand, they sang of an America that was triumphing over its historic racism. On the other, they promised even more ardently and solemnly that doing away with national-origin quotas would do nothing to change the American ethnic mix. “Quota immigration under the bill is likely to be more than 80 percent European,” said its House sponsor, Emanuel Celler.