[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a number of Great Society laws, leading up to a post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]
On one definitively
inclusive thing the 1965 immigration law did, one more complicated effect, and
the bottom line.
I hope
this entire series has made clear just how broad and deep was the Great Society’s
commitment to progressively and positively affecting American society. But I
have to admit that it’s still a bit surprising to me, in the best possible way,
to remember that making federal immigration policies more progressive and inclusive
ended up on that list. As I’ve argued since at least my
third book, the period beginning in the 1920s was the first time in
American history when our foundational diversity was genuinely threatened by
the federal government, thanks largely to that decade’s
quota laws and the restrictive
immigration policy they produced. So it was far from a given that even a
progressive administration would be able to challenge, much less reverse, those
four-plus decades of policy and history—and yet Johnson’s Great Society program
did so, through the Immigration
and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler
Act), which did away with those nationality- and ethnicity-based quotas and
made immigration to the U.S. from much of the world far more possible once
again.
The 1965
law did so by instituting a number of other systems of preference through which
to categorize and admit immigrants. That’s an entirely understandable and even
necessary step, and moreover many of those new preferences made perfect sense,
including an emphasis on family
connections which directly challenged the ways in which immigration restrictions
had for nearly a century sought
to break up American families and through them communities. But at the same
time, I would point to another and far more problematic preference that went
back to the restrictive policies but was deepened by the 1965 law—the overt
preference for wealthy arrivals which has long been enshrined in the “Million
Dollar Visa” policy. I’m not naïve enough not to understand the rationale
behind such a preference, and that particular policy does include an ostensible
requirement that these wealthy arrivals create jobs for other Americans (although
I would be pleasantly shocked if they were indeed required to do so). But at
the same time, my personal preference is still and will always be the same
one enshrined on the Statue of
Liberty’s pedestal—for “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning
to breathe free.”
The division
between wealthier and less wealthy immigrants was on full display in the most recent
presidential election, as illustrated by Elon Musk (himself a self-confessed
undocumented immigrant in his early days in the US) becoming one of our
most vocal cheerleaders for the Trump campaign in general and its xenophobic narratives
in particular. But as telling and significant as such divisions and debates
are, I think they ultimately can be a bit of a distraction from the more
defining question: whether we see immigration as a key aspect of the Great
Society, of the best vision and version of the United States; or whether we see
it as a threat to those things. The 1960s Great Society answered that question
potently through its inclusion of the 1965 immigration law among its programs
and policies; the next four years will test whether and how those of us who
agree can continue to fight for immigration’s and all immigrants’ place in our
great society.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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