One of the stubborn realities hanging over all our immigration debates — whether about ICE arrests and deportations, asylum reform, border security, even H-1B visas — is that America today has a sclerotic immigration regime whose basic structure and premises were set down 61 years ago in the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. It’s not too much to say that Hart-Celler is one of the most destructive laws ever passed in this country, and we will never solve our immigration problems until we get rid of it.
Hart-Celler replaced a system based on national origins that favored immigration from Northern and Western Europe, the so-called National Origins Formula devised in the 1920s, with one based on family reunification and employment needs in certain industries. The practical effect of this change was to shift immigration away from Europe to Asia and Latin America, reshaping the demographics of the country in a single generation — despite the insistence of Hart-Celler’s authors that it would do no such thing.
But at the heart of the legislation was an assumption that immigrants from Northern and Western Europe were no more desirable than immigrants from the Philippines or Guatemala or anywhere else. In essence, the new law codified an assertion of multiculturalism, the liberal belief that assimilation to American society had no real cultural component, and that the entire concept of assimilation was racist and backwards. There was no reason, under this view, that immigrants from Europe would be preferable to immigrants from Africa. Understood in this light, remaking the demographics of the country by increasing Third World immigration was the entire point of Hart-Celler.
And that regime is still what we live under. The 1990 Immigration Act modified Hart-Celler slightly by creating the H-1B visa program and adding a diversity lottery to increase immigration from “underrepresented” countries. But other than that, the immigration system established in 1965 remains largely intact.
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