Los Angeles Times
(Op-Ed-California)
By Jane Hong
October 2, 2015
Before
1965, the United States was 85% white. Today, racial and ethnic
minorities make up one-third of the population. Before 1965, the
immigrant stream was largely European.
Today, most new arrivals to this country come from Mexico, China and
India. The passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, 50 years ago
this month, made these changes possible.
Contrary
to what pundits often suggest, however, Hart-Celler wasn't an
unmitigated good for all ethnic groups. In fact, it set Asians and
Latinos on divergent paths, with
consequences that continue to reverberate today.
Starting
in the late 19th century, race-based restrictions kept Asian
immigration to a trickle. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act largely did
what the name suggests; by 1924
Congress had barred all Asian groups. Eventually this complete
prohibition gave way to a nominal quota system, but it wasn't until
Hart-Celler that lawmakers finally abandoned blatantly racist
immigration policy.
As
the standard-bearer against communism seeking to consolidate support in
Vietnam, the United States had attracted international criticism of its
racist policies that
it could ill afford. In a nod to U.S. interests in the decolonizing
world, Congress opened the gates to Asians (as well as to Africans and
eastern and southern Europeans) more widely, abolishing Asian quotas and
the national origins quota-system as a whole
in favor of a preference system based on skills and family
relationships.
For
Latinos, by contrast, Hart-Celler made the U.S. less accessible. Before
1965, immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries was
largely unrestricted.
It was Hart-Celler that brought Latino immigration from the Western
Hemisphere under numerical limit for the first time.
It wasn't until [the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act] that lawmakers finally abandoned blatantly racist immigration policy.
-
A
small group of lawmakers, including many longtime advocates of greater
restriction, introduced the cap late in the debate as a condition for
their votes. Mexico's quota
was set at 20,000 annually even though Mexicans seeking permanent
residence had averaged 50,000 a year through the late 1950s.
Around
the same time, Congress terminated the bracero program, a government
guest worker program that, since the 1940s, had permitted millions of
Mexicans to work legally
in the United States. Well-publicized reports of U.S. employers abusing
and exploiting braceros, as well as pressure by organized labor, led to
its dissolution.
But
changes on paper did not have the intended effect on the ground. As
Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey has shown, Mexican migration flows
that had developed over
previous decades continued largely apace after 1968 (when both the
Hart-Celler cap and termination took effect) as employers across the
Southwest and West continued to rely on Mexican labor. The bracero
program's end and the Hart-Celler Act were, then, jointly
responsible for creating the “problem” of undocumented migrants that
inflames political debates today. Whole groups of migrants from Mexico
and Latin America whose entrance to the U.S. would have been considered
legal before 1965 suddenly became illegal.
Despite
the post-1965 divergence, Latinos and Asian Americans today find
themselves in situations more similar than different. Asians make up a
growing share of undocumented
Americans, as the number of would-be immigrants from Asia has
outstripped available visas. Consequently, deportation is not a threat
facing Latinos alone. Indeed, Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders are
deported at a rate three times higher than other groups.
Politicians
would do well to recognize this convergence. Instead they have sought
to pit one group against the other, as in Jeb Bush's attempted
backpedaling on his use
of the charged term “anchor babies” a month ago, when he suggested that
Asian, not Latino, birth tourism was the real problem.
A
strategy of division is a losing proposition for all. Asian Americans,
Latino Americans and others have more to gain by banding together than
fighting among themselves.
And for candidates looking to attract votes, the numbers tell the real
story. In 2013, China and India passed Mexico as the countries sending
the most immigrants to the United States. A report released this week
suggests that by the 2050s, Asians will surpass
Latinos as the largest stream of immigrants to the United States. By
then, Latino Americans will make up nearly one-quarter of U.S.
residents. No one is expendable.
As
they seek to address undocumented migration and related issues, today's
Congress may have reason to envy its 1965 predecessor. One pundit,
writing in 2008, called Hart-Celler
the “most important piece of legislation that no one's ever heard of”
because it created the diverse electorate that put Barack Obama in the
White House. “No one” includes the voters of 1965, few of whom closely
followed the Hart-Celler debate. In the early
1960s, immigration rarely garnered headlines, leaving political elites
to debate and decide the terms of the 1965 act's passage largely among
themselves. Widespread consensus in Washington that the United States
needed some kind of immigration overhaul was
enough to create action. That is clearly not the case today.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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