Immigration Act Of 1965 Essay

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, some know it as the Hart Celler Act, changed the face of America as we know it. When President Johnson signed the Act, he called it a “milestone for civil rights”, and many years later, it still is. The bill being signed on October 3, 1965, marked a dramatic break with the past immigration policy, and introduced a new system that would have an immediate and lasting impact. It only took a total of nine months to encat the bill and it was truly bipartisan. The immediate impact of the Immigration Act of 1965 was mainly abolishing the quota system, which had been in place since 1924; this quota system had ensured that immigration to the united states was primarily reserved for European Immigrants. The formula of the system was designed to favor Western and Northern European countries and greatly limit admission of immigrants from Asia, Africa, Middle East, and Southern and Eastern Europe. Finally, around forty years later, this unfair system was replaced with a preference system based on immigrants’ family relationships with U.S citizens or

In the half century since Johnson signed the Hart Celler, America has experienced a wave of mass migration; Fifty-nine million people have made their way to the U.S from almost every nation on the globe. Today, the foreign born account for nearly fourteen percent of the country’s total population; eighty-eight percent of immigrants now come from non-European countries, which is the exact opposite of the situation in 1960. The immigrants who have had the chance to benefit from this system have become essential not only to the life of individual cities but to the country’s long economic expansion. They have supplied labor both at the higher and lower ends of the job market, and added to the nations