The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart–Celler Act and more recently as the 1965 Immigration Act, is a landmark federal law passed by the 89th United States Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The law abolished the National Origins Formula, which had been the basis of U.S. immigration policy since the 1920s. The act formally removed de facto discrimination against Southern and Eastern Europeans as well as Asians, in addition to other non-Western and Northern European ethnic groups from the immigration policy of the United States.
The National Origins Formula had been established in the 1920s to preserve American homogeneity by promoting immigration from Western and Northern Europe. During the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, this approach increasingly came under attack for being racially discriminatory. With the support of the Johnson administration, Senator Philip Hart and Congressman Emanuel Celler introduced a bill to repeal the formula. The bill received wide support from both northern Democratic and Republican members of Congress, but strong opposition mostly from Southern Democrats, the latter mostly voting Nay or Not Voting. President Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 into law on October 3, 1965. In opening entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than Western and Northern Europeans, the Act significantly altered immigration demographics in the country for the first time since it was founded.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 created a seven-category preference system that gives priority to relatives and children of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents, professionals and other individuals with specialized skills, and refugees. The act also set a numerical limit on immigration (120,000 per annum) from the Western Hemisphere for the first time in U.S. history. Within the following decades, the United States would see an increased number of immigrants from Asia and Africa, as well as Eastern and Southern Europe.
Background
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 marked a radical break from U.S. immigration policies of the past. Since Congress restricted naturalized citizenship to "white persons" in 1790, laws restricted immigration from Asia and Africa, and gave preference to Northern and Western Europeans over Southern and Eastern Europeans. During this time, most of those immigrating to the U.S. were Northern Europeans of Protestant faith and Western Africans who were human trafficked because of American chattel slavery. This pattern shifted in the mid to late 19th century for both the Western and Eastern regions of the United States. There was a large influx of immigration from Asia in the Western region, while Eastern and Southern European immigrants settled more in the Eastern United States.
Once the demographics of immigration were changing, there were policies put in place to reduce immigration to exclude individuals of certain ethnicities and races. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to stop the inflow of Chinese immigrants. Then in 1917, Congress passed the Immigration Act; this act had prevented most immigration of non-North Western Europeans because it tested language understanding. This act was followed by the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, that placed a quota on immigration which used the rate of immigration in 1910 to mirror the immigration rate of all countries. The Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 had helped bring along the Immigration Act of 1924 had permanently established the National Origins Formula as the basis of U.S. immigration policy, largely to restrict immigration from Asia, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe. According to the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Department of State, the purpose of the 1924 Act was "to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity" by limiting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. At the time the U.S. had been recognized by many as the global leader in codified racism. The National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–35, edited by the lawyer Hans Frank, contains a pivotal essay by Herbert Kier on the recommendations for race legislation which devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. legislation, including race-based citizenship laws, anti-miscegenation laws, and immigration laws. Adolf Hitler wrote of his admiration of America's immigration laws in Mein Kampf, saying: