federal aid to education, Medicare, voting rights, and immigration reform. The fourth and least heralded bill would replace the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 among others back to the nation’s first immigration law in 1790, all heavily restricting immigrants by race or nationality to the favored “stock” of northern Europe. Johnson’s reform sought to limit newcomers by number but not by origin, which promised slowly to absorb all the world’s faces and cultures under the Constitution.
