An alternative analysis of why Trump won by an Indian origin scholar; Historical background of USA immigration law for Indians
This is perhaps an excessively pessimistic article but still worth reading as an alternative analysis of why Trump won: The short arc that led to Donald Trump by Neelanjan Sircar, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/us-presidential-elections-the-short-arc-that-led-to-donald-trump/article9335043.ece, Nov. 12th 2016. The subtitle is "We have lost our ability to understand that politics in the West need not only be about economic issues, it can also be about identity, ethnicity, and race — and it can be ugly."
From http://www.cprindia.org/people/neelanjan-sircar, "Neelanjan Sircar is a senior fellow at CPR [Centre for Policy Research, India]. His research interests include Indian political economy and comparative political behavior with an eye to Bayesian statistics, causal inference, social network analysis, and game theory. .. Mr Sircar is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics and economics from UC Berkeley in 2003 and a PhD in political science from Columbia University in 2014."
The author, Neelanjan Sircar's parents migrated to USA in 1967 (father) and 1972 (mother), and the author was born and brought up in America.
A couple of short extracts from the article are given below.
"Indian-Americans, making full use of these opportunities, soon became the wealthiest and most-educated social group in America. But it wasn’t just economic success for immigrants and for the country as a whole, this period of enhanced American immigration led to a cultural efflorescence that would brand American pre-eminence in terms of openness and diversity. Yet, little did we realise there was growing resentment against people like us that, decades later, would culminate in the election of Republican Donald Trump."
..
"When my parents immigrated, America was building its Great Society; today they face the prospect of seeing it unravel in front of their eyes."
The article traces the history of USA opening up immigration to people like educated Indians (and their relatives, over time). In 1964, the Republican Party nominee, Barry Goldwater, opposed treating black Americans (African-Americans) as equal USA citizens. Some Republican party members opposed Goldwater and supported his opponent, the nominee of the Democratic party, Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater lost in a landslide winning only 6 out of 50 states and getting 38% of the vote. Johnson got a big mandate as he got 61 percent of the vote and, I guess, won all the other 44 states.
That paved the way for President Johnson to introduce civil rights legislation granting full voting rights to Black Americans and also introduce immigration reforms that allowed educated Indians and educated people from some other countries in the world, like some other Asian countries, who had been barred earlier, to migrate to the USA.
The author of the article, Neelanjan Sircar, argues against a simple narrative of working-class whites in Rust-Belt states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voting for Trump to take revenge on the establishment [BTW I understand this to be Michael Moore's main narrative. For more on it, see my blog post: https://ravisiyermisc.blogspot.com/2016/11/michael-moore-had-correctly-predicted.html.]
The author suggests that the rise of "nativism", which he interprets in this context as an aggressive move by white Americans (from the rust-belt states particularly) to take back control of the country's institutions, is the main reason for Trump winning.
The author concludes the article in a perhaps excessively pessimistic tone, by saying that he now lives in India and that on USA election results day, "I found out that I am no longer welcome in the country in which I was born and raised because of the colour of my skin."
I added the following comment (under moderation now) to the article web page, "Poignant, informative and thought-provoking analysis of perhaps the biggest political upheaval event in the 21st century so far. Thanks a ton."
Some other articles/info. related to Lyndon Johnson's immigration reform are given below.
The Overwhelming Barriers to Successful Immigration Reform, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/replicating-lbjs-immigration-success/483908/, May 25th 2016. The article gives a lot of details about how President Lyndon Johnson pushed through his immigration reform.
A short extract from it:
The Johnson administration learned that major reform often hinges upon the formation of “strange bedfellow” alliances that are unstable and demand painful concessions. But they also believed immigrants and refugees served their larger visions for the nation and refused to let nativists use rhetoric against those groups to codify their ethnic, racial, and religious animus. Johnson recognized that failing to spearhead an immigration overhaul would significantly undercut his civil-rights, social-justice, and geopolitical goals. He upended xenophobic policies that had prevailed for half of a century, and his remarkable legislative achievement has had dramatic unforeseen consequences over time, including an unprecedented change in the country’s demographic landscape.
--- end extract from the theatlantic.com ---
Here is some background about USA immigration laws preventing most Asians, including Indians, from immigrating to USA prior to Johnson's immigration reform act in 1965.
Given below is an extract from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790:
The original United States Naturalization Law of March 26, 1790 (1 Stat. 103) provided the first rules to be followed by the United States in the granting of national citizenship. This law limited naturalization to immigrants who were free white persons of good character. It thus excluded American Indians, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks, and Asians.
--- end Naturalization_Act_of_1790 wiki extract ---
Given below is an extract from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1870:
The Naturalization Act of 1870 (16 Stat. 254) was a United States federal law that created a system of controls for the naturalization process and penalties for fraudulent practices. It is also noted for extending the naturalization process to "aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent." Due to anti-Chinese sentiment in the western states, other non-white persons were not included in this act and remained excluded from naturalization, per the Naturalization Act of 1790.
--- end Naturalization_Act_of_1870 wiki extract ---
Given below are extracts from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1917:
Anxiety over the fragmentation of American cultural identity, led to many laws aimed at stemming the Yellow Peril or perceived threat of Asian societies replacing the American identity with a foreign one. Laws restricting Asian immigration to the United States had first appeared in California as state laws. With the enactment of the Naturalization Act of 1870, which denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants and forbade all Chinese women, exclusionary policies moved into the federal sphere. Exclusion of women aimed to cement a bachelor society, making Chinese men unable to form families and thus, transient, temporary immigrants. Barred categories expanded with the Page Act of 1875, which established that Chinese, Japanese and Oriental bonded labor, convicts, and prostitutes were forbidden entry to the U.S. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese from entering the U.S. and the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 was made with Japan to regulate Japanese immigration to the US.
...
On February 5, 1917, the United States Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917 with an overwhelming majority, overriding President Woodrow Wilson's December 14, 1916, veto. This act added to and consolidated the list of undesirables banned from entering the country, including: "alcoholics", "anarchists", "contract laborers", "criminals and convicts", "epileptics", "feebleminded persons", "idiots", "illiterates", "imbeciles", "insane persons", "paupers", "persons afflicted with contagious disease", "persons being mentally or physically defective", "persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority", "political radicals", "polygamists", "prostitutes" and "vagrants".
For the first time, an immigration law of the U.S. impacted European immigration with the provision barring all immigrants over the age of sixteen who were illiterate. Literacy was defined by being able to read 30-40 words of their own language from an ordinary text. The Act reaffirmed the ban on contracted labor, but made a provision for temporary labor, which allowed laborers to obtain temporary permits, because they were inadmissible as immigrants. The waiver program, enabled continued recruitment of Mexican agricultural and railroad workers. Legal interpretation on the terms "mentally defective" and "persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority" effectively included a ban on homosexual immigrants who admitted their orientation. One section of the law designated an "Asiatic Barred Zone", from which people could not immigrate, and included much of Asia and the Pacific Islands. The zone was described on longitudinal and latitudinal lines, excluding immigrants from Afghanistan, the Arabian Peninsula, Asiatic Russia, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, and the Polynesian Islands. Neither Japan nor the Philippines were included in the banned zone. The law also increased the head tax to $8 per person and eliminated the exclusion of paying the head tax from Mexican workers.
--- end Immigration_Act_of_1917 wiki extracts ---
Ravi: So Indians along with some other Asians were barred from immigrating to the USA as per USA law right from the first USA immigration law/act of 1790 until Johnson's immigration reform of 1965! Hmm. While I had some idea of this, reading up info. on these acts has given me the proper picture. Of course, India in 1790 would have been viewed as a kind of exotic land having some European/British trade and even some level of European/British military influence/control. Later when the whole of India came under proper British rule in the 1850s (with some kingdoms having some level of self-rule autonomy but under overall military protection and control of the British), Indians would have been viewed by USA lawmakers as colonial subjects of then superpower Britain. So the USA lawmakers would not have felt any need to welcome Indians as immigrants who could contribute meaningfully to their country!
The immediate post world war II period saw the collapse of the British empire and the rise of independent nations, including nations of Asia, who had freed themselves from the yoke of British or other European power's rule like India. That seismic change in global power structure may have been the key event that led to Johnson's immigration reform opening up USA to immigrants from some previously barred countries of Asia like India, two decades after the end of world war II.
Here's the wiki page for Johnson's immigration reform act, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965. Some extracts from it are given below.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (H.R. 2580; Pub.L. 89–236, 79 Stat. 911, enacted June 30, 1968), also known as the Hart–Celler Act, changed the way quotas were allocated by ending the National Origins Formula that had been in place in the United States since the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Representative Emanuel Celler of New York proposed the bill, Senator Philip Hart of Michigan co-sponsored it, and Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts helped to promote it.
The Hart–Celler Act abolished the quota system based on national origins that had been American immigration policy since the 1920s. The new law maintained the per-country limits, but it also created preference visa categories that focused on immigrants' skills and family relationships with citizens or U.S. residents. The bill set numerical restrictions on visas at 170,000 per year, with a per-country-of-origin quota. However, immediate relatives of U.S. citizens and "special immigrants" had no restrictions.
...
The Hart–Celler Act of 1965 marked a radical break from the immigration policies of the past. Previous laws restricted immigration from Asia and Africa, and gave preference to northern and western Europeans over southern and eastern Europeans. In the 1960s, the United States faced both foreign and domestic pressures to change its nation-based formula, which was regarded as a system that discriminated based on an individual’s place of birth. Abroad, former military allies and new independent nations aimed to delegitimize discriminatory immigration, naturalization and regulations through international organizations like the United Nations. In the United States, the national-based formula had been under scrutiny for a number of years. In 1952, President Truman had directed the Commission on Immigration and Naturalization to conduct an investigation and produce a report on the current immigration regulations. The report, Whom We Shall Welcome, served as the blue print for the Hart–Celler Act. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the restrictive immigration laws were seen as an embarrassment by, among others, President John F. Kennedy, who called the then-quota-system "nearly intolerable". After Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.
The bill still prohibited the entry into the country of "sexual deviants", including homosexuals. By doing so it crystallized the policy of the INS to reject homosexual prospective immigrants on the grounds that they were "mentally defective", or had a "constitutional psychopathic inferiority". The Immigration Act of 1990 rescinded the provision discriminating against gay people.
...
During debate on the Senate floor, Senator Kennedy, speaking of the effects of the act, said, "our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. ... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset".
Michael A. Feighan and other conservative Democrats had insisted that "family unification" should take priority over "employability", on the premise that such a weighting would maintain the existing ethnic profile of the country. That change in policy instead resulted in chain migration dominating the subsequent patterns of immigration to the United States and consequently a more ethnically diverse population.
...
Long-term impact
The proponents of the Hart–Celler Act argued that it would not significantly influence United States culture. President Johnson called the bill "not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions." Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other politicians, including Senator Ted Kennedy, asserted that the bill would not affect US demographic mix. However, the ethnic composition of immigrants changed following the passage of the law. Specifically, the Hart–Celler Act allowed increased numbers of people to migrate to the United States from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Southern and Eastern Europe.
Prior to 1965, the demographics of immigration stood as mostly Europeans; 68 percent of legal immigrants in the 1950s came from Europe and Canada. However, in the years 1971-1991, immigrants from Hispanic and Latin American countries made 47.9 percent of immigrants (with Mexico accounting for 23.7 percent) and immigrants from Asia 35.2 percent. Not only did it change the ethnic makeup of immigration, but it also greatly increased the number of immigrants—immigration constituted 11 percent of the total U.S. population growth between 1960 and 1970, growing to 33 percent from 1970–80, and to 39 percent from 1980-90.
The Latin American population overall has also dramatically increased since 1965, though this was more due to the various unexpected results of this act rather than due to this act itself. One of the main reasons was the introduction of immigration quotas to Latin America, whereas there were previously no immigration quotas for the Western Hemisphere in the National Origins Formula.
It is estimated that by the year 2042, white people not referring to themselves as Hispanic will no longer constitute a majority but rather only a plurality of the population of the United States. Minority groups, led by Hispanic Americans (mainly Mexican Americans), Black Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islander Americans would together outnumber non-Hispanic White Americans.
Since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the new immigrants have encountered both opportunities and challenges. Many immigrants have been able to take advantage of the abundance of opportunities in the United States. However, immigrants also face hostility based on the rapid change of the United States' ethnic and cultural makeup, debates on the economic impact of immigration, and the presence of illegal immigrants.
--- end Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965 wiki extracts ---
Please note that I have a PUBLICLY NEUTRAL informal-student-observer role in these posts that I put up about the USA presidential elections. Of course, as I am an Indian citizen living in India, there is no question of me voting in these elections.
[I thank thehindu.com, theatlantic.com and wikipedia, and have presumed that they will not have any objections to me sharing the above extracts (short extracts from thehindu.com and theatlantic.com) from their websites on this post which is freely viewable by all, and does not have any financial profit motive whatsoever.]
From http://www.cprindia.org/people/neelanjan-sircar, "Neelanjan Sircar is a senior fellow at CPR [Centre for Policy Research, India]. His research interests include Indian political economy and comparative political behavior with an eye to Bayesian statistics, causal inference, social network analysis, and game theory. .. Mr Sircar is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics and economics from UC Berkeley in 2003 and a PhD in political science from Columbia University in 2014."
The author, Neelanjan Sircar's parents migrated to USA in 1967 (father) and 1972 (mother), and the author was born and brought up in America.
A couple of short extracts from the article are given below.
"Indian-Americans, making full use of these opportunities, soon became the wealthiest and most-educated social group in America. But it wasn’t just economic success for immigrants and for the country as a whole, this period of enhanced American immigration led to a cultural efflorescence that would brand American pre-eminence in terms of openness and diversity. Yet, little did we realise there was growing resentment against people like us that, decades later, would culminate in the election of Republican Donald Trump."
..
"When my parents immigrated, America was building its Great Society; today they face the prospect of seeing it unravel in front of their eyes."
The article traces the history of USA opening up immigration to people like educated Indians (and their relatives, over time). In 1964, the Republican Party nominee, Barry Goldwater, opposed treating black Americans (African-Americans) as equal USA citizens. Some Republican party members opposed Goldwater and supported his opponent, the nominee of the Democratic party, Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater lost in a landslide winning only 6 out of 50 states and getting 38% of the vote. Johnson got a big mandate as he got 61 percent of the vote and, I guess, won all the other 44 states.
That paved the way for President Johnson to introduce civil rights legislation granting full voting rights to Black Americans and also introduce immigration reforms that allowed educated Indians and educated people from some other countries in the world, like some other Asian countries, who had been barred earlier, to migrate to the USA.
The author of the article, Neelanjan Sircar, argues against a simple narrative of working-class whites in Rust-Belt states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin voting for Trump to take revenge on the establishment [BTW I understand this to be Michael Moore's main narrative. For more on it, see my blog post: https://ravisiyermisc.blogspot.com/2016/11/michael-moore-had-correctly-predicted.html.]
The author suggests that the rise of "nativism", which he interprets in this context as an aggressive move by white Americans (from the rust-belt states particularly) to take back control of the country's institutions, is the main reason for Trump winning.
The author concludes the article in a perhaps excessively pessimistic tone, by saying that he now lives in India and that on USA election results day, "I found out that I am no longer welcome in the country in which I was born and raised because of the colour of my skin."
I added the following comment (under moderation now) to the article web page, "Poignant, informative and thought-provoking analysis of perhaps the biggest political upheaval event in the 21st century so far. Thanks a ton."
Some other articles/info. related to Lyndon Johnson's immigration reform are given below.
The Overwhelming Barriers to Successful Immigration Reform, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/replicating-lbjs-immigration-success/483908/, May 25th 2016. The article gives a lot of details about how President Lyndon Johnson pushed through his immigration reform.
A short extract from it:
The Johnson administration learned that major reform often hinges upon the formation of “strange bedfellow” alliances that are unstable and demand painful concessions. But they also believed immigrants and refugees served their larger visions for the nation and refused to let nativists use rhetoric against those groups to codify their ethnic, racial, and religious animus. Johnson recognized that failing to spearhead an immigration overhaul would significantly undercut his civil-rights, social-justice, and geopolitical goals. He upended xenophobic policies that had prevailed for half of a century, and his remarkable legislative achievement has had dramatic unforeseen consequences over time, including an unprecedented change in the country’s demographic landscape.
--- end extract from the theatlantic.com ---
Here is some background about USA immigration laws preventing most Asians, including Indians, from immigrating to USA prior to Johnson's immigration reform act in 1965.
Given below is an extract from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1790:
The original United States Naturalization Law of March 26, 1790 (1 Stat. 103) provided the first rules to be followed by the United States in the granting of national citizenship. This law limited naturalization to immigrants who were free white persons of good character. It thus excluded American Indians, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks, and Asians.
--- end Naturalization_Act_of_1790 wiki extract ---
Given below is an extract from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization_Act_of_1870:
The Naturalization Act of 1870 (16 Stat. 254) was a United States federal law that created a system of controls for the naturalization process and penalties for fraudulent practices. It is also noted for extending the naturalization process to "aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent." Due to anti-Chinese sentiment in the western states, other non-white persons were not included in this act and remained excluded from naturalization, per the Naturalization Act of 1790.
--- end Naturalization_Act_of_1870 wiki extract ---
Given below are extracts from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1917:
Anxiety over the fragmentation of American cultural identity, led to many laws aimed at stemming the Yellow Peril or perceived threat of Asian societies replacing the American identity with a foreign one. Laws restricting Asian immigration to the United States had first appeared in California as state laws. With the enactment of the Naturalization Act of 1870, which denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants and forbade all Chinese women, exclusionary policies moved into the federal sphere. Exclusion of women aimed to cement a bachelor society, making Chinese men unable to form families and thus, transient, temporary immigrants. Barred categories expanded with the Page Act of 1875, which established that Chinese, Japanese and Oriental bonded labor, convicts, and prostitutes were forbidden entry to the U.S. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese from entering the U.S. and the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 was made with Japan to regulate Japanese immigration to the US.
...
On February 5, 1917, the United States Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917 with an overwhelming majority, overriding President Woodrow Wilson's December 14, 1916, veto. This act added to and consolidated the list of undesirables banned from entering the country, including: "alcoholics", "anarchists", "contract laborers", "criminals and convicts", "epileptics", "feebleminded persons", "idiots", "illiterates", "imbeciles", "insane persons", "paupers", "persons afflicted with contagious disease", "persons being mentally or physically defective", "persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority", "political radicals", "polygamists", "prostitutes" and "vagrants".
For the first time, an immigration law of the U.S. impacted European immigration with the provision barring all immigrants over the age of sixteen who were illiterate. Literacy was defined by being able to read 30-40 words of their own language from an ordinary text. The Act reaffirmed the ban on contracted labor, but made a provision for temporary labor, which allowed laborers to obtain temporary permits, because they were inadmissible as immigrants. The waiver program, enabled continued recruitment of Mexican agricultural and railroad workers. Legal interpretation on the terms "mentally defective" and "persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority" effectively included a ban on homosexual immigrants who admitted their orientation. One section of the law designated an "Asiatic Barred Zone", from which people could not immigrate, and included much of Asia and the Pacific Islands. The zone was described on longitudinal and latitudinal lines, excluding immigrants from Afghanistan, the Arabian Peninsula, Asiatic Russia, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, and the Polynesian Islands. Neither Japan nor the Philippines were included in the banned zone. The law also increased the head tax to $8 per person and eliminated the exclusion of paying the head tax from Mexican workers.
--- end Immigration_Act_of_1917 wiki extracts ---
Ravi: So Indians along with some other Asians were barred from immigrating to the USA as per USA law right from the first USA immigration law/act of 1790 until Johnson's immigration reform of 1965! Hmm. While I had some idea of this, reading up info. on these acts has given me the proper picture. Of course, India in 1790 would have been viewed as a kind of exotic land having some European/British trade and even some level of European/British military influence/control. Later when the whole of India came under proper British rule in the 1850s (with some kingdoms having some level of self-rule autonomy but under overall military protection and control of the British), Indians would have been viewed by USA lawmakers as colonial subjects of then superpower Britain. So the USA lawmakers would not have felt any need to welcome Indians as immigrants who could contribute meaningfully to their country!
The immediate post world war II period saw the collapse of the British empire and the rise of independent nations, including nations of Asia, who had freed themselves from the yoke of British or other European power's rule like India. That seismic change in global power structure may have been the key event that led to Johnson's immigration reform opening up USA to immigrants from some previously barred countries of Asia like India, two decades after the end of world war II.
Here's the wiki page for Johnson's immigration reform act, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965. Some extracts from it are given below.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (H.R. 2580; Pub.L. 89–236, 79 Stat. 911, enacted June 30, 1968), also known as the Hart–Celler Act, changed the way quotas were allocated by ending the National Origins Formula that had been in place in the United States since the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Representative Emanuel Celler of New York proposed the bill, Senator Philip Hart of Michigan co-sponsored it, and Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts helped to promote it.
The Hart–Celler Act abolished the quota system based on national origins that had been American immigration policy since the 1920s. The new law maintained the per-country limits, but it also created preference visa categories that focused on immigrants' skills and family relationships with citizens or U.S. residents. The bill set numerical restrictions on visas at 170,000 per year, with a per-country-of-origin quota. However, immediate relatives of U.S. citizens and "special immigrants" had no restrictions.
...
The Hart–Celler Act of 1965 marked a radical break from the immigration policies of the past. Previous laws restricted immigration from Asia and Africa, and gave preference to northern and western Europeans over southern and eastern Europeans. In the 1960s, the United States faced both foreign and domestic pressures to change its nation-based formula, which was regarded as a system that discriminated based on an individual’s place of birth. Abroad, former military allies and new independent nations aimed to delegitimize discriminatory immigration, naturalization and regulations through international organizations like the United Nations. In the United States, the national-based formula had been under scrutiny for a number of years. In 1952, President Truman had directed the Commission on Immigration and Naturalization to conduct an investigation and produce a report on the current immigration regulations. The report, Whom We Shall Welcome, served as the blue print for the Hart–Celler Act. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the restrictive immigration laws were seen as an embarrassment by, among others, President John F. Kennedy, who called the then-quota-system "nearly intolerable". After Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.
The bill still prohibited the entry into the country of "sexual deviants", including homosexuals. By doing so it crystallized the policy of the INS to reject homosexual prospective immigrants on the grounds that they were "mentally defective", or had a "constitutional psychopathic inferiority". The Immigration Act of 1990 rescinded the provision discriminating against gay people.
...
During debate on the Senate floor, Senator Kennedy, speaking of the effects of the act, said, "our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. ... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset".
Michael A. Feighan and other conservative Democrats had insisted that "family unification" should take priority over "employability", on the premise that such a weighting would maintain the existing ethnic profile of the country. That change in policy instead resulted in chain migration dominating the subsequent patterns of immigration to the United States and consequently a more ethnically diverse population.
[From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_migration, 'Chain migration refers to the social process by which immigrants from a particular town follow others from that town to a particular city or neighborhood, whether in an immigrant-receiving country or in a new, usually urban, location in the home country. The term also refers to the process of foreign nationals immigrating to a new country under laws permitting their reunification with family members already living in the destination country.
Chain migration can be defined as a “movement in which prospective migrants learn of opportunities, are provided with transportation, and have initial accommodation and employment arranged by means of primary social relationships with previous migrants.”' end Chain-migration wiki extract]On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation into law, saying, "This [old] system violates the basic principle of American democracy, the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country".
...
Long-term impact
The proponents of the Hart–Celler Act argued that it would not significantly influence United States culture. President Johnson called the bill "not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions." Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other politicians, including Senator Ted Kennedy, asserted that the bill would not affect US demographic mix. However, the ethnic composition of immigrants changed following the passage of the law. Specifically, the Hart–Celler Act allowed increased numbers of people to migrate to the United States from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Southern and Eastern Europe.
Prior to 1965, the demographics of immigration stood as mostly Europeans; 68 percent of legal immigrants in the 1950s came from Europe and Canada. However, in the years 1971-1991, immigrants from Hispanic and Latin American countries made 47.9 percent of immigrants (with Mexico accounting for 23.7 percent) and immigrants from Asia 35.2 percent. Not only did it change the ethnic makeup of immigration, but it also greatly increased the number of immigrants—immigration constituted 11 percent of the total U.S. population growth between 1960 and 1970, growing to 33 percent from 1970–80, and to 39 percent from 1980-90.
The Latin American population overall has also dramatically increased since 1965, though this was more due to the various unexpected results of this act rather than due to this act itself. One of the main reasons was the introduction of immigration quotas to Latin America, whereas there were previously no immigration quotas for the Western Hemisphere in the National Origins Formula.
It is estimated that by the year 2042, white people not referring to themselves as Hispanic will no longer constitute a majority but rather only a plurality of the population of the United States. Minority groups, led by Hispanic Americans (mainly Mexican Americans), Black Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islander Americans would together outnumber non-Hispanic White Americans.
Since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the new immigrants have encountered both opportunities and challenges. Many immigrants have been able to take advantage of the abundance of opportunities in the United States. However, immigrants also face hostility based on the rapid change of the United States' ethnic and cultural makeup, debates on the economic impact of immigration, and the presence of illegal immigrants.
--- end Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965 wiki extracts ---
Please note that I have a PUBLICLY NEUTRAL informal-student-observer role in these posts that I put up about the USA presidential elections. Of course, as I am an Indian citizen living in India, there is no question of me voting in these elections.
[I thank thehindu.com, theatlantic.com and wikipedia, and have presumed that they will not have any objections to me sharing the above extracts (short extracts from thehindu.com and theatlantic.com) from their websites on this post which is freely viewable by all, and does not have any financial profit motive whatsoever.]
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