The law belongs to 1965
The Immigration and Nationality Act that reshaped American immigration was not passed in 1967. President Lyndon Johnson signed it on 3 October 1965, in a ceremony at the foot of the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island, and its main provisions took effect on 1 July 1968. It is also known as the Hart-Celler Act, after its sponsors, Senator Philip Hart of Michigan and Representative Emanuel Celler of New York. The title “1967” is a misdating; in 1967 the new system had been enacted but was not yet operating, and the visa rules of the old system were still being applied.
The system it replaced
Since the 1920s American immigration law had been based on national origins. The Immigration Act of 1924 set annual quotas by country, using population formulas that strongly favoured Northern and Western Europe, especially Britain, Ireland and Germany. It excluded most Asian immigrants altogether. Later changes, including the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, kept the quota structure while removing some of the outright racial bars on naturalisation and giving small quotas to Asian countries.
By the 1960s this approach looked out of step with the country’s stated values. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act were part of a wider shift in which official discrimination by race or ancestry was being questioned. Presidents Truman and Kennedy had both criticised the quotas, and Kennedy had proposed reform. After his death, Johnson and a larger Democratic Congress after the 1964 elections were in a position to act.
What the act changed
The act abolished the national origins quotas. In their place it created a system with several main features:
- An overall ceiling on immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere, set at 170,000 a year, with no more than 20,000 from any one country.
- A limit on the Western Hemisphere, set at 120,000 a year, applied for the first time. It had no per-country cap at first. This was a change for Latin America, where immigration had previously not been limited by quotas in the same way.
- A preference system. Most visas were allocated by categories, with priority for family reunification and, to a lesser extent, for skilled workers and those with needed occupations, plus a small allocation for refugees.
- Immediate relatives of citizens, such as spouses, minor children and parents, were generally exempt from the numerical limits.
The family-based preferences proved to be the most consequential feature. Because they allowed citizens and residents to sponsor relatives, immigration tended to build upon itself over time, in what is often called chain migration.
What supporters said would happen
During the debates, supporters argued that the law was a matter of fairness and would not greatly change the country. Edward Kennedy, who managed the bill in the Senate, said that it would not flood the country with immigrants or alter its ethnic makeup, and Johnson, at the signing, called the old system “un-American.” Those predictions were made in good faith, based on the patterns of the time, but they turned out to underestimate the effects.
Effects in the following decades
The effects unfolded gradually. After 1968, immigration from Europe declined relative to the total, while immigration from Asia and Latin America grew substantially. Asian immigration rose from small numbers to become a major component, helped by the family and skilled-worker preferences. Latin American immigration, including Mexican immigration, was also affected by the new hemisphere ceiling, and later amendments in the 1970s imposed per-country limits on the Western Hemisphere as well. The ending of the Bracero programme of agricultural labour in 1964 was also part of the picture for Mexico, and historians continue to argue about how much each factor mattered for later unauthorised migration.
The foreign-born share of the population, which had fallen to a low point in about 1970, rose in later decades. The immigrant population became more diverse in origin, and the law is widely cited as one of the main reasons. How much of the later change came from the 1965 act and how much from other laws, wars, economic shifts and refugee admissions is a matter on which scholars differ.
Why it matters when reading about 1967
The year 1967 sits between enactment and implementation. Americans were arguing about the war, civil rights and urban unrest, and immigration was not near the top of the list; the effects were still invisible to most. Still, the law is part of the same moment as the War on Poverty and the Great Society legislation of 1964 and 1965, and the same Congress that wrote it passed the Voting Rights Act.
For readers trying to place dates: the act was signed in 1965, took effect in 1968, and shaped the American population in the years after. Nothing equivalent was passed in 1967, and the year’s own refugees and immigration questions, such as the status of Cuban arrivals, were handled under earlier laws and the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966.