Considering History: Remembering the 1965 Immigration Act

This past week, my sons lost their maternal grandmother, and the world lost one of the most wonderful and inspiring people I’ve ever known. Anna (Ting)Tsao was many things: an expert in languages who won speech prizes in college and had worked as an educator and translator, a refugee from the late 1940s Chinese Communist revolution whose family settled in Taiwan, a devoted Catholic and community member who served her Connecticut parish and volunteered at her local hospital for decades, and a phenomenal parent and grandparent who enriched the lives of all in her family and everyone she met in countless ways. But a central part of her and husband Mike’s lives was their experience as immigrants to the United States in the mid-1960s.

Initially unable to immigrate to the U.S. under pre-1965 policies, Anna and Mike first moved to the U.K. But as soon as they were able, they continued their journey, arriving in Pittsburgh in late 1965 and remaining there for a decade before moving to Waterford, Connecticut. In order to support their young family and maintain her prior professional as well as cultural roots, Anna wrote articles for Taiwanese newspapers and worked as a translator for fellow Chinese Americans in both Pittsburgh and Waterford. She also helped other family members immigrate to the U.S., extending her own bridge between China, Taiwan, and the United States to many others in her community, and helping strengthen that Chinese American community’s relationships to one another as well as to their neighbors from every culture.

Every part of their post-1965 immigration experience was made possible by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,  also known as the Hart-Celler Act. Commemorating that groundbreaking law for its 60^th anniversary requires us to engage with its legacies, including discriminatory attitudes toward some immigrant arrivals. But it also lets us remember the human stories behind the law, stories like Anna and Mike’s.

The 1965 Immigration Act was part of the larger group of laws and policies known as the Great Society. President Lyndon B. Johnson had proposed that program in his 1964 speech accepting the presidential nomination, arguing that we should “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” He and his Congressional allies began to create those laws and policies after his January 1965 inauguration, and before the year was out would pass the Voting Rights Act, the Housing and Urban Development Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the Medicare and Medicaid Act.

While most of those Great Society laws were focused on domestic issues, Johnson and his allies recognized that the nation’s immigration policies would likewise have to be reformed if American society was to be made more fully inclusive and more truly great. For the eight decades since the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the four decades since the 1920s Quota Acts, federal immigration policies had been explicitly discriminatory, based on visions of some ethnicities and nationalities as much less desirable than others, and thus in need of limiting if not outright exclusion. Congressional leaders including Representative Emmanuel Celler (D-NY) and Senators Philip Hart (D-MI) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA) had been working on a reform bill for a few years, seeking to create a policy that was more equitable, fair, and inclusive; when Johnson dedicated much of his 1965 inaugural address to the need for immigration reform, the debate ramped up.

That debate was certainly contentious and took up much of the year, but the Hart-Celler Act finally passed the House in late August and the Senate in late September. Its most fundamental shift was to do away with the National Origins Formula quota system that had dominated federal immigration policy since the 1920s, eliminating national origin, race, and ancestry as the bases for policy and making any such discrimination against obtaining visas illegal. As President Johnson put it in his October 3^rd signing ceremony at New York’s Liberty Island, that prior “system violates the basic principle of American democracy, the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. 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.”

Doing away with those ethnic and national discriminations also meant creating a new system of preferences for immigrant arrivals and visas, however. One main category within that new system, family preferences such as parent-child and marital relationships with current U.S. residents and citizens, is certainly more fair and inclusive, as well as more in keeping with an emphasis on building a multi-generational great society. But the other, skill-based preferences, does reflect potential prejudices within Johnson’s “merit as a man.” That is, the system instituted by the 1965 Immigration Act explicitly values some immigrant arrivals more highly than others, based on elements like their educational level, their “extraordinary ability or significant knowledge” in a variety of areas, and even their financial worth (as illustrated by the so-called “Million Dollar Visa” policy through which immigrants who can immediate invest that amount in cash are granted a visa).

Those preferences and potential prejudices have continued to shape immigration debates over the six decades since the 1965 Act and into the present. But we must not lose sight of the fundamental reality of the 1965 Act: that it is focused on people and stories of those who seek to come to the United States.

In the aftermath of the 1965 law, those stories included arrivals from so many places and cultures that had been severely limited if not entirely excluded for many decades: Asian cultures from Southeast Asia to the Indian subcontinent to the Middle East (arrivals that had been previously excluded as part of the “Asiatic Barred Zone”); Eastern and Southern European nations such as Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey (each of which had been among the many national origins limited by the 1924 Quota Act to 100 legal arrivals annually); and all African nations (the entire continent had been limited to 1,200 legal arrivals annually); and many others.

But numbers don’t quite capture the human experiences. For that, we have to focus in further, on impressive and inspiring individuals like Anna and Mike Tsao. We have to remember the fraught backgrounds they carried with them, the courage it took to choose to leave their old countries and come to the U.S., the challenges they faced at every stage of that journey and every moment in their new nation, the prejudice and discrimination that has too often targeted them here, and, most of all, the American families and communities they have built and all they have contributed to the last sixty years of our continued effort to create a great society.