Summary: The 1965 Immigration Act

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The 1965 Immigration Act, which resulted largely from the civil rights movement and Democratic Congress of the 1960s, played a vital role in the change in demographics of the United States (“History of U.S. Immigration Laws,” 2008). Replacing the existing system of assigning specific countries a limit on the number of people that could immigrate to the United States each year, the 1965 Immigration Act established quotas for each hemisphere: 170,000 immigrants a year for the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 a year for the Western Hemisphere (Hatton, 2015). Although the limit was expanded to 700,000 immigrants a year in 1990 and has been adjusted many times in the years since (“History of U.S. Immigration Laws,” 2008), the 1965 Immigration Act has been the most significant of all of the immigration reform legislation because it allowed more immigrants from individual countries to come to the U.S., a …show more content…

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