Immigration Reform in the 1960s

Abstract

Abstract It was not surprising that immigration reform should reach the agenda of the civil rights coalition in the 1960s. American immigration policy since the 1920s had rested on a system of national origins quotas that favored immigration from northern and western Europe and that largely excluded Asians. The liberal reformers who dominated the heavily Democratic 89th Congress in 1965 deplored racial and ethnic quotas and banned them in the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. The quota laws of the 1920s, however, had themselves been reform achievements, supported by a broad coalition that included middle-class “Progressives” (both Republicans and Democrats), organized labor, and the most prominent African-American leaders of the day. Immigration restrictionists from the left side of the political spectrum included leaders of organized labor, prominent spokesmen for black Americans, social justice Progressives, and conservationists. They argued that uncontrolled immigration, encouraged by industrial employers seeking docile low-wage workers, flooded the national labor pool, depressed wages, worsened working conditions and tenement housing, weakened organized labor, provided the basis for the corrupt city political machines, and threatened overpopulation. The immigration restriction coalition also included patrician conservatives such as Theodore Roosevelt and Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who sought to maintain the dominance in America of Anglo-Saxon stock. Madison Grant, a Park Avenue patrician, ardent student of the natural sciences and eugenics, and founder of the New York Zoological Society, in 1916 published The Passing of the Great Race, a popular text for “nativist” intellectuals.