President Lyndon Johnson and the 1965 Immigration Act

Ted Kennedy wasn't the only politician who got it wrong about what the 1965 Immigration Act would or wouldn't do to America. The bill was strongly supported and signed into law on October 3, 1965 by LBJ at the Statue of Liberty (Maybe it should be re-named the Statue of Immigration?). Here is an abridged version of his speech that day with some of my comments in bold:

This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power. Wrong - it's one of the most revolutionary bill ever!

Yet it is still one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration. For it does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation. What's so cruel about controlling immigration?

The fairness of this standard is so self-evident that we may well wonder that it has not always been applied. Yet the fact is that for over four decades the immigration policy of the United States has been twisted and has been distorted by the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system. Which you promptly replaced with with another injustice - all but totally ending white, European immigration.

Under that system the ability of new immigrants to come to America depended upon the country of their birth. Only three countries were allowed to supply 70 percent of all the immigrants. Now only three countries still supply the same percentage, just three from the Third World.

Men were denied entrance because they came from southern or eastern Europe or from one of the developing continents. This system violated the basic principle of American democracy--the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. If this were true the Sept 11th attacks never would have happened.

It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country. We can now believe that it will never again shadow the gate to the American Nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege. So you made immigration to America a civil right, not a privilege as it should be.

Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide. The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples. Who no longer are interested in "joining and blending", but instead keeping their cultures intact and expanding them.

The days of unlimited immigration are past. Dead wrong, with illegal immigration included, it's virtually unlimited now.

…and so it has been through all the great and testing moments of American history. Our history this year we see in Vietnam. Men there are dying… Neither the enemy who killed them nor the people whose independence they have fought to save ever asked them where they or their parents came from. They were all Americans. By eliminating that same question as a test for immigration the Congress proves ourselves worthy of those men and worthy of our own traditions as a Nation. Those traditions are dying, now everyone is either a hyphenated-American, or would rather be known as a foreign national who just happens to live in America.

If that wasn't enough, LBJ also made a speech on July 1, 1968, marking the day the 1965 Act actually went into effect:

It was nearly 3 years ago, on one of the proudest days of my Presidency, that I stood at the foot of the Statute of Liberty and signed into the law of this land the Immigration Act of 1965.
Today that act takes full force. The lamp of liberty has never shone brighter. The golden door to immigration has never stood wider. The lamp of liberty is about as dim as it ever has been, and the golden door has been ripped off of its hinges.

Every American can be proud today because we have finally eliminated the cruel and unjust national origins system from the immigration policy of the United States. We have righted a long-standing wrong. Cruel and unjust because it favored white Western Europeans.

So today, any man, anywhere in the world, can hope to begin a new life of freedom and a new life of greater opportunity in the United States. No longer will his color or his religion or his nationality be a barrier to him. The only preferences will be for those who already have relatives here… No longer will only three nations supply 70 percent of America's immigrants. No longer will the people of one nation be less welcome here than the people of another nation. So now we are in danger of losing our white majority, of having Islam become a major threat to Christianity, chain immigration from the third world, dominated by Mexico, and becoming a hundred little nations within one overcrowded country.

This landmark act will work to enrich the heart of America--the people themselves. All who, over the years, have dreamed and labored for its achievement can take great satisfaction today.
Together we have helped to preserve the American dream--and more than that--we have opened its promise equally to all men everywhere. No, you are destroying the American dream, by overwhelming us with Third World poverty and tribalism.

President Lyndon Johnson left office a broken man, thanks to the tragedy of the Vietnam War. His name has been cursed by many tens of thousands of older Americans who lost loved ones in that war. Now, he can also be cursed as the President who signed the bill that gave birth to Multicultural America, and the birth of an era that I call The Great Transformation, the transformation of America into a potential Third World nation, an era that is now past its midpoint with the election of Obama as President.

NPR asks Ted Kennedy why he was so wrong in 1965 about immigration, Kennedy is evasive

In 1965, during the Senate floor debate over the Immigration Act, Ted Kennedy stated that:

"First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually...Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset."

These statements have turned out to be totally false, and it should have become apparent to Kennedy that this was the case way back in the mid to late 1970's. It would have been honorable of him to have come to the Senate floor and stated something like: "We goofed big time on this bill, terribly sorry, and here's a new bill to cut back on our immigration levels, and I urge its passage."

Of course, that never happened. I've often wondered if Kennedy had ever been interviewed about it, and if he would have admitted he was either lying in 1965, or if not, if he might have felt any guilt about how wrong he was. It turns out that NPR did interview him about it in 2006, just as he began to push for another immigration bill that ultimately failed. After a couple of softball historical questions, Jennifer Ludden asks the following, with Kennedy's reply:

Q: What's striking about the debate in 1965 is how so many people did not expect a huge increase in immigration, or a change in the demographics of the nation. You told Congress that immigration levels would remain "substantially the same," and that "the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset." Why weren't these changes foreseen?

KENNEDY: There were enormous changes as a result of illegal immigration. A lot of the antagonism, frustration and anger is better focused at the illegality and the illegals that came here in very significant numbers. [People] are certainly frustrated by the illegality and the explosion of illegals who come here that have impact in terms of the economy, depressing wages, and taking jobs. But on the other hand, they have this incredible admiration and respect for their neighbor, the person at the corner store who is working 18 to 20 hours a day, trying to provide for their family, and whose child is serving in the armed forces of the country. They admire those [immigrants] they see in church, churchgoers who are trying to bring their kids up. So there's a very significant ambivalence in people's minds.

Q: But the level of even legal immigration has increased dramatically since 1965, even though many supporters of the legislation then said it would not.

KENNEDY: Everybody obviously wants to come, because this is the land of opportunity, but we've seen a rather dramatic shift as well in terms of the birthrate here. That was not really foreseen. You're having now the leveling off of the birthrate here among a number of families. You certainly saw that in terms of Europe and Western Europe, where there is an actual decline. I don't think we foresaw that so much at the time, 40 years ago. But that is a fact, and that sends all kinds of messages.
To be energized we need new workers, younger workers, who are going to be a part of the whole economy. We don't have them here in the United States. There are greater outreach efforts being made in terms of trying to keep people in the labor market longer. We need to have the skills of all of these people. The fact is, this country, with each new wave of immigrants, has been energized and advanced, quite frankly, in terms of its economic, social, cultural and political life. And I think that's something that will continue into the future. I don't think we ought to fear it, we ought to welcome it.

Q: Some have suggested it was a mistake to make family reunification the main purpose of our immigration law. They say perhaps we should have a system more like Canada's, which lets people in based largely on their skills. How do you respond to these criticisms?

KENNEDY: I think our tradition of the Statue of Liberty is to be willing to accept the unwashed as well as the highly skilled. There are a lot of people who haven't had opportunities in other places as a result of dictatorships and totalitarian regimes and discrimination. Are we going to say we refuse to let any of those individuals come in because we've got someone who has happened to have a more advantaged situation? I'm not sure that's what this country is all about.

And that was the end of the interview, at least that's all there is on the NPR website. It seems so brief, almost as if Kennedy was getting uncomfortable with the questioning and cut the interview short. And this was an interview from NPR, a friendly liberal network!

Given the chance to be honest, Kennedy instead gives us a typical wishy-washy politicians answer, first blaming the unexpected increase on illegal immigration, which had nothing to do with the 1965 act, which was about giving an equal chance for anybody to immigrate to America legally. He then tries to justify the increase by talking about a completely new subject, America's birthrate, as if the unexpected modest drop in the birthrate of the native born could somehow justify a massive increase in immigration.

The truth of the matter is that the 1965 Act had a provision for unlimited "non-quota" increases for family members in addition to the "quota" or primary part of the Bill. This lead to what has become known as chain immigration, and the overall skyrocketing legal numbers. This provision must have been ignored or overlooked in 1965, but Kennedy and his supporters should have known of its potential. Some people in Washington DID know about it, the same interviewer also reports:

In 1965, the political elite on Capitol Hill may not have predicted a mass increase in immigration. But Marian Smith, the historian for Customs and Immigration Services, showed me a small agency booklet from 1966 that certainly did. It explains how each provision in the new law would lead to a rapid increase in applications and a big jump in workload -- more and more so as word trickled out to those newly eligible to come.

I'd love to see a copy of that booklet from 1966, issued fully two years before the 1965 Act actually went into effect in 1968. It's a shame there wasn't more opposition to the bill back then, for we now know that the 1965 Immigration Act, originally supposed to be a minor addition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, has become one of the most profound and infamous of any legislation ever to come out of Washington.

Classic MSM column 1991: Pat Buchanan "Longing for the good old days when America was mostly white"

Here's a column from August 17, 1991 that is nowhere else on the Internet, it's not even saved in Pat's own web archive. It's another one that would never see the light of day in any print style Op-Ed page today. The title alone would have newspaper editors reaching for the smelling salts! (Click on above image to enlarge.)

After a discussion of the 1985 movie "Back to the Future", comparing the America of 1955 to 1985, the column basically is a review of Lawrence Auster's 1990 booklet The Path to National Suicide, pdf version here a powerful, tightly written 90 pager that was way ahead of its time in explaining just how serious a threat the combined forces of mass 3rd world immigration and multiculturalism is to traditional America. It's a credit to Buchanan, who already was a well-known mainstream conservative pundit, to give a book that must have been rejected by all the mainstream book publishers the exposure it deserved. In fact, I don't recall ever seeing any other book on this subject published by a major publisher at that time, until Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation came out in 1995.

It was this column by Pat that referred me to Auster's book, which after reading it had a major effect on me in my transformation from a 1980's liberal into a 1990's traditional conservative. It was like getting hit on the head with a hammer, the arguments were so clear, a real "Teachable Moment", as a modern day leftist educator would say.

It also had a positive effect on Brimelow as well. In Alien Nation he refers to it as "perhaps the most remarkable literary product of the restrictionist underground, a work which I think will one day be seen as a political pamphlet to rank with Thomas Paine's Common Sense." (Alien Nation, page 76). That's some heavy praise, and I'm glad to be able to upload a copy of what may have been the only MSM column to give the book a positive review.