The president claimed the bill wasn’t revolutionary. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
October 3, 1965: President Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as Hart-Celler Act, putting an end to immigration policies based on ethnicity and race quota systems.
Johnson chose his setting carefully. He signed the bill on Liberty Island, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Then he played it down. “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” he said. “It does not affect the lives of millions.”
He was wrong.
Since the 1920s, U.S. immigration policy had rested on the National Origins Formula. It favored Northern and Western Europeans and discriminated against Southern and Eastern Europeans, Asians, and other groups. Johnson himself said it let just three European countries supply 70 percent of immigrants.
The reform began with President John F. Kennedy, who opposed the formula and sent Congress a draft bill in 1963. Senator Philip Hart and Congressman Emanuel Celler introduced it, but conservative opposition stalled it.
A Second Try
With the Johnson administration’s support, they tried again in 1965.
The bill drew wide support from northern Democrats and Republicans. The strongest opposition came mostly from Southern conservative Democrats.
Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina complained that people from Ethiopia would have the same right to come to the United States as people from England, France, Germany, or Holland. “I don’t know of any contributions that Ethiopia has made to the making of America,” he said.
For Asians, the barriers had run even deeper. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 came first. The 1924 law then shut out almost all Asian immigration. Even after 1952, Asian countries received only token quotas.
A Prediction That Didn’t Hold
Hart-Celler replaced national origin quotas with a seven-category preference system. It gave priority to relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, to professionals and others with specialized skills, and to refugees.
Johnson and many of the law’s supporters did not expect much to change. They believed Europeans would be the most likely to take advantage of the new rules. In 1965, only 5 percent of people in the United States were foreign-born. Non-Hispanic whites made up more than 85 percent of the population. By the 2020 census, that share had fallen to 57.8 percent.
Over the following 50 years, just over half of new immigrants came from Latin America. About a quarter came from Asia.
The country Johnson said would not be reshaped was visibly reshaped.
A Complicated Legacy
Many Japanese Americans lived through exclusion, incarceration, and decades of being treated as perpetual foreigners. The Issei could not become naturalized citizens until 1952.
Hart-Celler opened the door for new Asian American families. Asian America as we know it today has its roots in this law.
The law was not a clean victory for everyone. It set a numerical limit on immigration from the Western Hemisphere for the first time in U.S. history, 120,000 per year. That tension is still part of the immigration debate today.
Johnson called it “not a revolutionary bill.” It turned out to be one of the most consequential laws of the century.