Today, Explained - The law that broke immigration

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

Supporters of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act pledged it wouldn’t radically change immigration. David Leonhardt, author of Ours Was the Shining Future, explains how it instead led to what might be the largest wave of immigration in human history. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The mayor of New York says immigrants could destroy the city. Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an end to. I don't see an end to this. The governor of Texas is putting up razor wire fences and floating barriers. Texans have the backbone and the will to secure a border. Two things that Joe Biden does not have. The leading Republican presidential candidate would like to finish building a wall. The leading Democratic candidate thinks won't do a thing.

Things feel as stuck as ever. But coming up on Today Explained, we're going to take you back to a time where you could pass sweeping immigration law in this country. We're going to look at a 1965 bill that might have led to the biggest wave of immigration in human history, but also maybe broke immigration in the United States in the process. And we're going to ask whether this law can teach us anything about how to fix it. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications.

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but more recently, the author of Ours was The Shining Future, The Story of the American Dream. It's undeniably a book about the modern American economy, but we were more interested in David's writing specifically on immigration because it really helped us wrap our heads around an issue that just feels relentlessly intractable. Immigration's complex because a lot of the claims you hear about immigration's economic effects, I think, are overblown. David says both sides bear some of the blame here. I think you often hear complaints from opponents of more immigration saying that immigration is economically ruinous, that it's the worst thing or one of the worst things happening to Americans who live here now. I think that's wrong. And then on the

other side, you hear people argue saying that basically immigration is a free lunch, that it has no economic cost whatsoever for Native workers and for workers who are already here as immigrants. To me, that's wrong as well. He says a lot of our issues with this issue actually trace back to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. But before we get to that landmark law, we wanted to ask about what things looked like before it was passed. So in the 1920s, the United States passed an extremely restrictive immigration policy. And frankly, the accurate way to describe it is a restrictionist and racist immigration policy. It essentially allotted nearly all immigration slots to just a few countries in Western Europe,

like England. It kept out nearly all people from Asia, nearly all people from Africa, it kept out nearly all people from Eastern and Southern Europe. And the decades from the 1920s through the 1960s were really one of the most restrictionist times for American immigration policy in our history, if not the most restrictionist. And I think it's important to think about that in two different ways. Not only did immigration policy restrict it to just a very few countries, but the levels were very low. So it's not like the United States was admitting huge numbers of Europeans and keeping out everyone else. The United States was actually

admitting very small numbers of people overall. And then within that number, it tended to be a quite racist system. But both halves of that are important. So when does someone decide that they ought to change that? You know, sometimes John F. Kennedy gets too much credit for things during his presidency. And you look at polls and people say he's one of the most successful presidents ever. And then you look at his legislative record and he actually didn't do that much. Happy birthday, Mr. President. Happy birthday to you. But I think immigration is one of these areas where John F. Kennedy legitimately deserves credit for putting it onto the national agenda. million people who left other countries, other familiar scenes, to come here to the United States

to build a new life, to make a new opportunity for themselves and their children. I think it is not a burden, but a privilege. And John F. Kennedy basically becomes one of the early politicians who realizes, you know what, actually, one, our system is unfair, and two, we now have enough descendants of immigrants from the really high immigration levels of the late 19th and early 20th century that it might actually be politically popular, particularly in a diverse state like Massachusetts, which had a lot of Portuguese and Irish immigrants, if I came out for a different kind of system. And so he does, both as a senator and then as president. And he really doesn't move the legislation at all while he is president, but it then

becomes part of this great batch of legislation that LBJ picks up after JFK's assassination and pushes. No words are sad enough to express our sense of loss. No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue the forward thrust of America that he began. He basically pushes a version of JFK's immigration plan. It was called the Immigration and Nationality Act, although colloquially at the time it was also known as the Hart-Seller Act after two people who helped write it.

And he is helped by the fact that there are two Kennedys who are still very much active in politics at the time. By the time the bill is going up for a vote in 1965, Ted Kennedy is a 33-year-old senator, the youngest member of the Senate, and Robert Kennedy is elected senator from New York. This generation did not create most of the conditions and the convictions which have led us to this day. But this generation has a responsibility to resolve them. And so they, among others, really start pushing this bill. And what it sets out to do is get rid of this old racist system.

It gets rid of the system that basically says you have to be from England or a small number of other Western European countries to come here. And they instead say we're going to create a system that is open to the whole world and that treats people from different countries equally. And by the way, stops barring people with disabilities, which the old system also did, which was a personal issue for the Kennedys, in part because their sister had disabilities. And they, we're going to create a new system that's much fairer. A nation that was built by the immigrants of all lands can ask those who now seek admission, what can you do for our country? But we should not be asking, in what country were you born? It's viewed as part of the great civil rights push

of the 60s. In fact, the civil rights bill that had passed before specifically banned discrimination on the basis of national origin. And so when you look at a civil rights bill that bans discrimination on the basis of national origin in this country, it felt deeply hypocritical to have an immigration system that was still based entirely on national origin. Now, LBJ and the Kennedy brothers and the other people who are pushing this bill make two promises. One, they say we're going to get rid of this old unfair system and we're going to open it up to the whole world. And two, they say we are not going to significantly increase the level of immigration. So, they say, we are changing the who comes, we are not changing the how's main shepherd in the Senate. And he said that he welcomed legitimate criticism of the bill, but the notion that it would lead to a large increase in

immigration, he said, was so false that it didn't deserve a place in the political debate. The charges I have mentioned are highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation. In fact, they are out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship. They breed hate of our heritage and fear of a vitality which helped to build America. So Teddy Kennedy is saying, I'm open to legitimate criticisms. How much criticism was there? There was a lot. And this is one of these other ways in which this is such a fraught issue, right? I think a lot of times when we're looking at politics, particularly in our polarized country today, we want to think of there are good people and bad people. There are right people and wrong

people. Now, Americans have very different views about who's right and who's wrong, but we tend to view it through this almost binary lens. What's so tricky about this whole immigration debate is that many of the people who were raising criticisms were Southern segregationists. And they said all kinds of horrible and racist and false things about what would happen if the United States opened up its immigration system to people from Southern and Eastern Europe, or even more so to people from Africa and from Asia. That part of their criticism was really quite vile. The people of Ethiopia have the same right to come to the United States under this bill as the people of England, the people of France, the people of Germany, the people of Holland.

With all due respect to Ethiopia, I don't know of any contributions that Ethiopia has made to the making of America. They also said that the supporters of the bill were wrong when they claimed that it would not lead to any increase in the levels of immigration. 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. When LBJ is signing the bill, he specifically says that this is not going to lead to millions of people coming.

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. And this is where things get tricky. The supporters of the bill repeatedly promised that it was changing only the who comes. It's changing the mix of who comes to make it more fair. It was not changing the levels.

The supporters were completely wrong about that. They were wrong almost immediately. And the opponents of the bill who said this is going to lead to immigration soaring and reaching above a million. They were entirely correct about that. And so you go back and you look at this, and half of what the supporters are arguing looks really good historically. The U.S. should not have a racist immigration system that makes decisions based on where people are coming from. And half of what they argue was just wrong. In fact, they sold this bill to the American people

on a basis that ended up being false. They said this will not increase the level of immigration in this country. It did almost immediately. There's a front page story in the New York Times about it within a couple years, and immigration just continues to rise after that. What this 1965 law did to the politics of immigration? Well, we're back on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family,

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. We are back with David Leonhardt of the New York Times. When we left off, David, you were telling us that the enemies of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act ended up being kind of right in that it led to a massive influx of immigration in the United States. How do LBJ, RFK, Teddy, and their allies get it so wrong? I think there are a couple answers to that question. I don't think they were

lying. I've looked at the historical records on this. Others have as well. There's no evidence in their private correspondence that they secretly thought it would lead to a big immigration increase and were hiding that from the public. They still deserve criticism, I think, for so strongly promising something that turned out to be false. And I think they engaged in motivated reasoning. I think they were so eager to rewrite immigration law for very good reasons. I mean, it is a monumental civil rights achievement to change the country's laws so that they aren't making decisions based on what countries people are coming from. But they were so eager to do that,

that they basically brushed off any criticism of the bill, including much more legitimate criticisms. And the key thing here is that the bill had a whole bunch of categories that didn't count toward entry into this country. They were called, in the jargon of the time, non-quota entries. These non-quota entries ended up basically overwhelming the system. And many of them were family members. And so, if an immigrant was already here, that immigrant's parents and children and spouse didn't count toward the quota. And so what was the effect of, say, one individual's wife and kids and parents coming and not being counted in this cap? What did that mean for the country over the decades? I mean, it means that basically instead of having immigration at the levels that the

bill's authors promised, which was roughly constant, maybe a small increase, you see immigration surge almost immediately. I mean, as a share of the U.S. population, the 1965 immigration law leads to a wave of immigration that resembles the huge wave of the late 19th and early 20th century. And because the country was bigger in the 70s and 80s and decades since then, it may well be the largest single wave of immigration in terms of number of people to a single country in human history. And of course, the question we have to ask here, and I'm sure the answer is very complicated, is, is that wave good or bad for the country? I think for the immigrants themselves,

the answer is overwhelmingly that it has been good. There is an important piece of research, a book called Streets of Gold, by two economists who have studied this question in more depth, really, than anyone else, using big data records from census and from immigration forums and elsewhere. And what they show is that the trajectory of the post-1965 immigrants looks remarkably similar to the trajectory of the Russian and Italian and Irish immigrants from the late 19th and early 20th century. Obviously, it's a big country. There are exceptions. There are immigrants who still struggle. And most immigrants themselves, if they arrive here poor, remain poor for their lives. But their children do extremely

well. And the upward mobility of recent generations of immigrants looks very similar and deeply encouraging. These recent immigrants tend to be from Latin America and Asia, not exclusively, but mostly. And they're doing very well by many, many measures. So a great deal for those arriving to this country, at least their kids. What about for those who are already here? That answer is more complicated. I do think there have been modestly negative economic effects for most American workers of the big increase in immigration. And I know this is a point that many people on the political left take issue with, and frankly, some people on the political right as well. It's practically verboten. You're not allowed

to talk about that. Yes. But I think both logic and the empirical research point to the idea that there have been modest costs. So the empirical research, there is a huge study done by the National Academy of Sciences. It's hundreds of pages. There is one table that summarizes all the relevant studies of the effect of immigration on the wages of people who are already in the United States. You just scan down that chart chart and there are a lot more negative numbers than zeros or positive numbers. And that's the empirical research. I think logic, though, points to the same thing. If you have many more workers competing for the same job, the company can pay those workers less. Now, I don't think that's the main reason why we've had huge increase in economic inequality. I think the decline of labor unions, I think trade policy, I think tax policy, I think all those

things are more important. But I think it's a real mistake when relatively affluent Americans say to working class Americans, oh no, you're wrong, immigration has had no costs. Because I think there's just a wealth of evidence that it has had some economic costs. And that's even before what we've we talk about what it has done to the political atmosphere in our country. So to me, the politics of immigration are a microcosm of the shift of the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party has increasingly become a party of college graduates, and it's increasingly become a party of professionals and more affluent people. I think part of what's happened is that many Democrats have come to view

immigration as a human rights issue, and they have focused overwhelmingly on the effect that it has on the immigrants who are coming. And I understand that. When doing that, though, it's part of the Democratic Party's shift away from the values and the interests of working-class people in this country. If you look at polling, working-class people tend to be more communitarian than college graduates. They tend to be more likely to say that they are patriotic. They are more likely to say they believe the United States

is the best country in the world. They also tend to be in favor of lower levels of immigration. And we basically have this situation in which I think the huge surge in immigration, which started in the 1960s on the basis of false promises from the people who passed the law, that it wouldn't happen. This huge surge in immigration, I think, has been one of the factors that has caused working class people to look at the Democratic Party and say, that party doesn't represent me. And do you see the Democratic Party's approach to immigration in 2023 as monolithic? I don't see it as monolithic, but I do see it as afraid to talk about immigration enforcement in a way that has little precedence in our history. So even Joe Biden, who really tries to cast himself as more of a working class or middle class Democrat, who has had an immigration policy that is more moderate and more restrictive than many parts of the Democratic Party. Matt Iglesias, the old Vox

writer, pointed this out in Substack, which is Biden actually has just announced that he wants to do a bunch of things to try to reduce undocumented immigration. And instead of saying that's because I believe we shouldn't have high levels of undocumented immigration, Biden has said, I had no choice. The law forces me to do that. Border wall, the money was appropriated for the border wall. I tried to get them to reappropriate to redirect that money. They didn't. They wouldn't. And in the meantime, there's nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what was appropriate. I can't stop that. That's an odd thing. Biden there seems to be talking to a group of professional progressive policy people who are quite far left, rather than talking to swing voters,

multiracial swing voters, who polling suggests are quite concerned by the chaos in our immigration system, and the fact that basically, if people arrive here now, they can often stay for years, as long as they set foot in this country, regardless of what American law actually says about how the system works. It sounds like this 1965 law, by your estimation, had the best of intentions. But it sounds like it also might be the reason, if you put all the racism and xenophobia aside, that the argument, make America great again, can be very compelling to some people. Is that fair? I think it is fair. And I would add, I would do yes and, as they say in improv comedy.

I would say it was the start of a way in which immigration was an important contributor to that. I don't want to put it all on that law, but the law is the start of an era. The law, as I've already said, is a great civil rights achievement. It's also fundamentally a failure of democracy. If people sell a bill to the American people by making repeated promises that it won't do something, and then it goes ahead and does exactly the thing that the law's authors promised it wouldn't do, that does breed cynicism. Just as an immigration system in which laws don't seem to matter that much breeds cynicism. And I really do think we have ended up with a system in which people feel like this just isn't really working that well,

and how could it be that as a country we just can't have a policy that does what it says it does? David Leonhardt, to read more about this 1965 Immigration Act, the modern American economy, the American dream, check out his new book. It's called Ours Was the Shining Future. Find it wherever you find your books. This episode of Today Explained was produced by Amanda Llewellyn, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by David Herman. Goodbye for now. you