Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

During the long, three-year debate over the immigration act of 1965, members of Congress debated the wisdom and morality of removing 1920s-era quotas on immigration to the United States. Not far from the center of this debate was the nettlesome issue of race.

“The people of Ethiopia have the same right to come to the United States under this bill as the people from England, the people of France, the people of Germany, [and] the people of Holland,” griped Senator Sam Ervin, a conservative Democrat from North Carolina. “With all due respect to Ethiopia, I don’t know of any contributions that Ethiopia has made to the making of America.”


President Lyndon Johnson, hoping to tamp down concerns about the immigration act at a time when Congress was engaged in an even more ferocious debate over the voting rights act, sought to downplay the implications of the proposed immigration law: “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” he said upon signing it. The president, like many other of the law’s supporters, sincerely believed that Europeans were most likely to take advantage of less stringent U.S. immigration policy.

He was wrong.

The Hart-Celler Act, so-called after its co-sponsors New York Congressman Emanuel Celler and Michigan Senator Philip Hart, opened the floodgates to new immigrants when it went into effect in 1968. But the vast majority of them didn’t come from Europe; they came instead from Latin America, Africa and Asia. In 1965, non-Hispanic whites comprised over 85 percent of the American population. Fifty years later, that portion is just 62 percent, and falling.

This is also why, 50 years later, Donald Trump is winning 52 percent of the white vote (to Hillary Clinton’s 40 percent) on a platform uniquely unappealing to minority voters—but losing the election, according to almost every poll. The Hart-Celler Bill of 1965 turned out to be not only revolutionary, but perhaps also the most revolutionary act of the 1960s. It is certainly the piece of Great Society legislation that has had the most impact on the presidential election of 2016.

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Between 1820 and 1924, roughly 37 million European immigrants came to the United States, in addition to a much smaller number of immigrants from Asia. (To place that figure in context, it’s helpful to consider that the population of the United States in 1850 was just 23 million.) For the first 60 years, Northern Europeans—Irish and Germans, especially—predominated. The second great wave drew newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe, including large numbers of Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Poles and Jews from the Russian Empire. Smaller numbers of immigrants also came from China and other Asian countries. By the early 20th century, immigrants and the children of immigrants comprised upwards of 75 percent of the population in major cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland and Detroit.

Since 1790, when Congress passed the nation’s first immigration act, prevailing law had restricted naturalized citizenship to “free white persons.” What constituted a white person was by no means clear. While today it is intuitive to classify German-, Irish- or Italian-Americans as white, in the mid-19th century, many native-born Protestants regarded newcomers as unwhite and therefore singularly unfit for citizenship. In establishment outlets like Harper's Magazine, editorialists lampooned Irish immigrants as drunken, lazy and idle, while cartoonists portrayed immigrants as possessing ape-like, subhuman physical attributes.

With “whiteness” being such a crucial attribute, it was little wonder that many immigrants—including many Irish Catholics in large, northeastern cities—worked aggressively to draw a sharp distinction between themselves, on the one hand, and free African-Americans, on the other. Blackface minstrelsy, a popular form of entertainment among new immigrants, enabled racially suspect Europeans to establish that they were, in fact, white (after all, only a white person need “black up” to play the part of an African-American) and to project onto African-Americans the same vicious stereotypes that American nativists ascribed to Catholic newcomers.

By the late 19th century, America’s new cultural and civic diversity—a result of immigration from Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia, and the emancipation of black slaves—resulted gradually in a popular classification of humans along hierarchal lines. In 1911, a government commission broke the population into “45 races or peoples among immigrants coming to the United States, and of these 36 are indigenous to Europe.” Bohemians (which, in today’s terms, would translate to citizens of the Czech Republic), the report determined, were “the most advanced of all” Slavic racial groups. “The ancient Greeks were preeminent in philosophy and science, a position not generally accredited to the modern Greeks as a race … they compare with the Hebrew race as the best traders of the Orient.” Further, “the Gypsy resents the restraint of higher social organization … to him laws and statutes are persecutions to be evaded.” The Southern Italian was “an individualist having little adaptability to highly organized society.” Whereas German and Irish newcomers had seemed distinctly unfit for citizenship in the mid-19th century, scientific racial analysis now considered them a higher category of white than Southern and Eastern European newcomers, most of whom were Catholic or Jewish.



The era’s nativism rested on a complex bedrock of labor competition, religious intolerance and fear of anarchism and communism. But scientific racism was always at its core. It formed the intellectual basis of the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the annual number of immigrants from any given country to just 2 percent of the total number of persons born in that country who resided in the United States in 1890. By using 1890 as a benchmark, the law favored older immigrant groups from Northern and Central Europe. For Jews, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Poles, Croatians and Russians, the door effectively swung shut. (For the Chinese, that door had been closed since 1882, when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.)

The year 1924 was the high-water mark for scientific racism, which became increasingly unpopular in Depression-era America. Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas and his protégés Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict were among the first to blast away at the edifice of “race,” proving in a series of devastating monographs and articles that human behavior and intelligence were products of environment, not blood, and that no “pure” races could even be said to exist.

This shift in thinking also emerged as a response to the excesses of Nazi Germany. Although many Americans in the 1920s regarded eugenics and other forms of racial engineering as simply good science and solid public policy, revelations of Germany’s euthanasia program targeting mentally and physically handicapped children inspired a scientific repudiation of eugenics in the United States. More generally, Nazi race policy and anti-Semitism delegitimized racialist thinking in nearly all of its popular incarnations, influencing works like Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, a celebrated volume that argued race was a scientifically “artificial” and “meaningless” invention. In 1938 the American Psychological Association and the American Anthropological Association broke new ground in formally repudiating scientific racism. Other academic organizations followed, and ever since, biologists, chemists and geneticists have steadfastly maintained that race is, at best, a social phenomenon—at worst, a lie. Certainly, few scholars of any repute continue to believe that race is determinative of behavior, intellectual endowment and physical capacity.

Even as scientific racism came under cultural and academic assault, the 1924 law restricting immigration remained on the books. Ironically, the law may have aided the mainstreaming of ethnic Americans by cutting off the supply of newcomers who spoke in foreign tongues, wore strange clothing and listened to unfamiliar music. The new faces of ethnic America were the children of immigrants who grew up speaking accentless English, became fanatical baseball fans and wore American garb. And that generation’s experience in the 1940s drove a final nail in the coffin of scientific racism.

During World War II, Hollywood churned out countless platoon films—like Air Force (1943), Bataan (1943), Guadalcanal Diary (1943), The Purple Heart (1944), Objective Burma (1945) and A Walk in the Sun (1945)—in which multi-ethnic, multi-religious American units banded together to defeat fascism. Notably, African-Americans were absent from these films, as well as from this equation. This was about establishing the whiteness of ethnic Americans—and thus, their fitness for citizenship.

In 1945, RKO Radio Pictures released a short film, The House I Live In, in which a young Frank Sinatra teaches a group of neighborhood boys the value of inclusion and pluralism. Though Sinatra—who was deeply committed to civil rights—crooned the line, “all races and religions, that’s America to me,” the kids are all white, and anti-Semitism—which, Sinatra explains, is un-American—clearly proxies for racism. (Though the film addresses the then-polarizing issue of allowing African-Americans to donate blood, it did so obliquely.) The paradox exposed a tension in liberal thinking: It was too risky to tether the fortunes of black and ethnic Americans.

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In the postwar years, northern liberals clamored for immigration reform and civil rights. As Jim Crow came under increased fire, it became possible to attack the national origins standard (the very backbone of the 1924 law) for what it was—in the words of the Democratic Party platform in 1960, “a policy of deliberate discrimination” that “contradicts the founding principles of this nation.” The same coalition of churches, liberal organizations, and labor and industry groups that championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also backed immigration reform.

In the wake of Republican Barry Goldwater’s defeat to Democrat Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Democrats controlled 68 seats in the Senate and 295 (of 435) in the House. The “Fabulous 89th Congress” turned out a steady flow of Great Society legislation, including the Voting Rights Act, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Social Security Act of 1965 (which created Medicare and Medicaid), the Higher Education Act—and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

The new law favored newcomers with specialized skills and education or existing family relationships with American citizens or residents and substituted the national origins standard with annual hemispheric limits: 170,000 immigrants from the Eastern hemisphere, 120,000 from the Western hemisphere—a breakdown that reflected lingering bias toward Europe. (That provision was later eliminated and replaced with a simple, annual cap of 290,000 immigrants.) Critically, the bill exempted from these caps all immigrants with immediate family members in the United States.

Support and opposition to the bill fell along the same lines as civil rights legislation that LBJ signed into law in 1964: Southern Democrats and Midwestern conservative Republicans tended to oppose it strenuously, while Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans embraced it. In signing the law, Johnson affirmed that the national origins standard violated “the basic principle of American democracy—the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man.”

While the bill’s champions, including LBJ and Celler, were committed to ethnic and racial pluralism, they anticipated that most of its beneficiaries would hail from Europe.

But the story played out differently. As Europe’s economy finally emerged from the ashes of World War II, fewer residents of Ireland, Italy or Germany moved to the United States, while those residing in the Soviet bloc found it all but impossible to try.

Because of the family exemption, the 1965 act had vast, unintended consequences: Larger numbers of immigrants than expected established roots in the United States legally, and those who did so created a much more diverse population. In the first decade of the bill’s enactment, an average of 100,000 legal immigrants above the cap relocated to the U.S.; by 1980 the annual number soared to 730,000. Today, foreign-born immigrants comprise roughly 13 percent of the total population, approaching the all-time high of 14.7 percent in 1910. Another 20 percent were born in the United States but have at least one foreign-born parent. In other words, first- and second-generation Americans comprise a third of the country.

Moreover, unlike earlier waves, 90 percent of new Americans since 1965 hail from outside Europe—from countries like Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines, Korea, Cuba, Taiwan, India and the Dominican Republic. By 2050, non-Hispanic white Americans will comprise less than half of the U.S. population.

The political consequences, also, have been astonishing.

The statute that put this demographic transformation in motion arrived closely on the heels of a parallel, related development. Writing in 1965, shortly before LBJ signed the immigration act into law, Theodore White, the noted journalist and chronicler of American presidential campaigns, marveled at the striking realignment of black voters. For approximately 75 years following the Civil War, African-Americans had fallen squarely into the Republican camp. Notwithstanding the powerful draw of FDR’s New Deal coalition, even as late as 1960, one-third of “non-white” voters (the vast majority of them, black) supported Richard Nixon, the GOP candidate.

Not so four years later, when the Republicans nominated Goldwater, an arch-conservative who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and whose law-and-order message struck many observers as a thinly veiled appeal to white backlash. That year, Goldwater scored roughly 6 percent of the nonwhite vote. “If the Republicans can do nothing to include the Negroes in their vision of America,” White observed, “they enter any Presidential race with one ninth of the nation locked against them.”

The immigration act vastly compounded this problem for the Republican Party. When White proposed that the GOP faced a stark choice—get right with nonwhite voters, or become the party of white retrenchment—he was thinking strictly of African-Americans. He wondered how a party could write off 11 percent of the electorate and still have a future. It could not have occurred to him that the Republicans would chose to write off 40 percent of the electorate, or more.

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The Republican Party appears to be doing that. It’s a party whose presidential nominee uniformly disparaged Mexicans as “rapists” and “killers” and called into question the impartiality of an American-born federal judge of Mexican ancestry. It’s a party that casts a big enough tent to include congressional luminaries like Steve King (for every immigrant child “who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert”); Michelle Bachman (who claimed that a top aide to Hillary Clinton had family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood); Peter King (who contends that "80 percent, 85 percent of the mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists”); Louie Gohmert (the GOP’s in-House intellectual, who raised concerns that Muslim immigrants might give birth to “terror babies” who “could be raised and coddled as future terrorists”); and Don Young (who apparently didn’t receive the memo explaining that “wetback” is no longer a term used in polite company.)

This attitude is all quite apparent in the poll numbers. Today, Trump is polling at between 0 percent and 2 percent of the African-American vote, and 20 percent among Latinos—dismal statistics that can all be traced back to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and the Republican Party’s failure to adapt to its unforeseen ramifications.

The irony is two-fold.

First, Democrats never anticipated that the 1965 immigration act would create such rich diversity. They certainly never anticipated that it would place them in so advantageous a position heading into the 21st century. Second, and more important, this emerging political alignment never needed to happen. Immigrants who have settled in the United States since 1965 represent vastly divergent faiths and backgrounds. They include evangelical Christians, traditional Catholics, anti-statist refugees and the kind of upwardly mobile, economic strivers whom the GOP courted assiduously in past decades. Had the GOP focused more on ideology and less on skin color, the party could have thrived from the immigrant influx.

The great tragedy of 2016 may well be the full transformation of the GOP from a mainstream political party into a smaller, rump organization dedicated to white retrenchment. That outcome was never foreordained, but rather the unfortunate product of a half-century of resistance to pluralism and demographic transformation. For Democrats, it augurs near-term potential. But it deprives the country of real ideological alternatives at a moment when optionality is key. Lyndon Johnson didn’t visit this upon the Republican Party. The Republican Party visited it upon the rest of us.