US Law Indifferent to Immigrants

The 1960s saw a wave of immigration reform worldwide, as numerous countries sought to lessen discrimination by implementing inclusive legislation through the United Nations and other international regulatory channels. These international practices spotlighted and exerted pressure on the United States, whose nationalistic immigration system, and particularly the Immigration Act of 1924, was so widely regarded as discriminatory that even Nazi Germany had praised it as a model for institutionalized racism. The Civil Rights Movement provided domestic pressure to reform restrictive immigration laws.

As a result, a new system favoring family reunification and skilled immigrants replaced national origin quotas in 1965. While still placing annual restrictions on the number of immigrant visas that could be issued, this new system was considered a more fair, merit-based approach that better reflected American values.

Fourth Immigration Wave

Demographics: Immigrants came from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The nation’s foreign-born population grew from 9.6 million in 1970 to a record 45 million in 2015. This was accompanied by a steady rise of unauthorized immigrants.

Push/Pull Factors: Difficult socioeconomic and/or security conditions exacerbated by natural disasters, poor governance, and Cold War proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam;  economic opportunities and asylum in the US; abolishment of nationality quotas, prioritizing family reunification and skilled immigrants.

Policy changes codified in 1965’s Hart-Celler Act ushered in a fourth wave of immigration that  has proven to be the largest sustained influx of immigrants, both authorized and undocumented, in the nation’s history. The Population Reference Bureau reports that in the 1960s, the US received an average of about 330,000 immigrants a year; for more than 20 years beginning in the 1990s, annual immigration exceeded 1 million migrants. From 1965 to 2015, according to the Pew Research Center, more than half of US population growth – about 55% – was due to the immigration of 72 million people.

This new wave of immigrants has been dominated by people from Asia and Latin America. Data reported by the Migration Policy Institute shows that almost 75% of the immigrant population in 1960 came from Europe. By 2018, Europeans made up just under 11% of the immigrant population while 52% came from Latin America and 31% from Asia.

The 1965 legislation had several unintended consequences, chief among them was the unprecedented rise in unauthorized, or illegal, immigration. The most-cited and most recent estimates put the number of unauthorized immigrants at 23% of the total immigrant population, or about 10.5 million people. The number of unauthorized immigrants more than tripled between 1990 and 2007, from 3.5 million to 12.2 million people, before dropping to the current level.

Most of these unauthorized immigrants entered the country through the southern border, with the single largest group coming from Mexico. Over the last decade, however, the number coming from Mexico has fallen, accounting for some of the drop in the unauthorized immigrant population. Immigration from Central America has increased during this period. FactCheck.org cites data from the Department of Homeland Security that almost 80% of unauthorized  immigrants have resided in the US for more than 10 years.

As a consequence, US immigration policy over the last few decades has aspired to put into practice the humanitarian ideals expressed by the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal while struggling with how to cope with the great numbers of unauthorized immigrants.