Senator Edward Ted Kennedy
Immigration Explosion
Advocating 1965 Immigration Reform Bill - Act
The House of Representatives voted 326 to 69 (82.5%) in favor of the act, while the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 76 to 18. Opposition mainly came from conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats.
Immigration reform was an important issue for the Irish community, including President John F. Kennedy. For Kennedy's administration, immigration fell under the jurisdiction of second brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. And when third brother Ted Kennedy was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1964, his first assignment was to shepherd the bill through the Senate as Floor Leader for the bill. During debate on the Senate floor, Kennedy, speaking of the effects of the act, said:
"First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same.... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.... It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs."
See Immigration President Johnson (+) Immigration Anchor-Bomb (+)
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." The act became law on July 1, 1968. Along with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, it serves as one of the key parts of the United States immigration code to this day.
By equalizing immigration policies, the act resulted in new immigration from non-European nations which changed the ethnic make-up of the United States. [3] Immigration doubled between 1965 and 1970, and doubled again between 1970 and 1990. [1] The most dramatic effect was to shift immigration from Europe to Asia.
A Boston Globe article attributed Barack Obama’s win in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election to a marked reduction over the preceding decades in the percentage of whites in the American electorate, attributing this demographic change to the Act. [3] The article quoted Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the New Democrat Network, as having said that the Act is "the most important piece of legislation that no one’s ever heard of," and that it "set America on a very different demographic course than the previous 300 years."
