Effects Of The 1965 Hart-Celler Act

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Essay 2 –

The 1965 Hart-Celler Act remains as a part of the foundation to the United States immigration policy in the modern day. Since its implementation, the law has created both positive and negative effects on the immigration process. The biggest change this law set in motion was a changing relationship with the United States and the other nations within the Western Hemisphere. This law also had global effects, in the hopes that it would promote an immigration policy built on equality for all of those attempting to enter the United States.
Before the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, the United States had an unevenly distributed immigration policy. There were quotas in place for each individual country that limited the number of how many …show more content…

In spite of this, it appears that equality in this capacity was not the correct choice for immigration into the United States. The one factor that appears to be excluded from consideration is the issue of demand. For certain countries, there is a higher demand for a chance to immigrant there. For example, due to economic concerns, many Mexicans feel it is necessary to migrate to the United States. There is a very high number of potential immigrants in Mexico that will never gain legal entry due to the limited capacity. From this law, a 120,000 annual limit was placed on nations within the Western Hemisphere. “Congress backed the ceiling as a part of a necessary effort to thwart a feared mass migration of Latina/o immigrants to the United States” which dramatically changed the relationship nations in the Western Hemisphere had with the U.S. Until this law, the border between Mexico and the United States was fairly unregulated. These restrictions impacted the economic and social relationship that migrants who traveled across the border had with …show more content…

One example of this is attention that was brought to the Border Patrol. When the Border Patrol was created in 1924 in the effort to uphold prohibition, the patrol remained fairly unregulated for many years. However, with time and legislation like the 1965 Immigration Act, an increased need has developed. More regulation, and more officers were added to the Patrol over time and this directly impacted society’s fears over the Latino population as well as the illegal immigrant population. The 1965 Act helped to solidify the Border Patrol as a respected and organized force within the United States. This force and the undocumented immigration that they are employed to crack down on has led to a lot of action from Congress. This includes the possibilities of enforcement measures stemming around illegal immigration. It was the hopes of Congress that “the measures taken in the effort to combat the inability of the immigration laws meet migration demand” and hopefully correct mistakes from the 1965 Immigration Act. However, this has yet to occur due to the continued undocumented immigration that occurs within the United States, and the United States’ inability to change an immigration process that is over fifty years