Essay on "Immigration Policy"

Essay 3 pages (1081 words) Sources: 4

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Immigration Laws

The Immigration Act of 1965 was, in effect, a repeal of the restrictive laws that had been passed previously in the United States, in particular the "Johnson-Reed Act" (also known as the "National Origins Act") of 1924. The Immigration Act of 1965 was also more than just another bill in Congress; it was emotionally and politically linked to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when the country was in a more progressive mood and President Lyndon Johnson was using the legacy of assassinated president John F. Kennedy as momentum to get civil rights-related legislation passed. To gain a full understanding the significance of the Immigration Act of 1965, one needs first to look at the National Origins Act ("Johnson-Reed Act) of 1924, and the history of immigrations policies in the U.S.

The United States Department of State (www.state.gov) published a review of the Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act) in federal web pages; the report explains that the Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants based on a "national origins quota" system. The law created a policy wherein if a person from Germany, say, wished to obtain a visa, that visa was based on the number of German immigrants already in the United States. Only a number of Germans up to 2% of the existing population of German-Americans were permitted each year. If there were 200,000 German immigrants already living in the U.S., then 4,000 new German immigrants would be given visas to come into the U.S.

The legislation also "completely excluded immigrants from Asia," the Department of State explains. An earlier immigration law in 1917 put in place "restrictive" measures that included literacy tests that required immigrants who were older than 16 to prove they could read (in any language). Also the tax that immigrants had to pay upon entering the U.S. was raised in 1917. The fact that Japanese immigrants were not welcome into the U.S. "offended" many Japanese people; and though the Japanese government protested the exclusion of their people the law remained on the books and indeed it resulted in "an increase in existing tensions" between Japan and America (www.state.gov). The number of immigrants welcomed into the U.S. after the 1924 Act (http://historymatters.gmu.edu) from: Iceland (100); Spain (131); Egypt (100); England and Northern Ireland (34,007); Switzerland (2,081); Norway (6,453). So a person can do the math to figure out pretty closely what the number of immigrants from those countries were already in the U.S. At that time.

Meanwhile, President Lyndon Johnson signed The Immigration Act of 1965 into law on October 3 while he stood beneath the Statue of Liberty, Johnson stated that signing the bill into law "…corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American nation" (www.america.gov). Not all Democrats in Congress were willing to go along with Johnson in1965; for example, Senator Sam J. Ervin argued that the existing immigration law was not discriminatory but was instead "like a mirror reflecting the United States" (Daniels, 2008). But Ervin's viewpoint was in the minority in Congress and in the country, as Daniels writes "Americans adopted more cosmopolitan views" in the Sixties than they did forty years previously.

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