>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC.
>> Jason Steinhauer: My
name is Jason Steinhauer.
I'm a program specialist
at the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
Before we begin today's
program, please take a moment
to check your cell phones
and other electronic devices
and please set them to silent.
Thank you.
I will also make you aware that this
afternoon's program is being filmed
for placement on the Kluge
Center website as well
as on our YouTube and
iTunes playlists.
I encourage you to
visit our website,
LOC.gov/kluge to view
other lectures delivered
by current and past Kluge scholars.
Today's lecture is presented
by the John W. Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress.
The Kluge Center is a vibrant
scholar center on Capitol Hill
that brings together scholars and
researchers from around the world
to stimulate and energize
one another to distill wisdom
from the library's rich
resources and to interact
with policy makers and the public.
The center offers opportunities
for senior scholars,
post-doctoral fellows and Ph. D
candidates to conduct research
in the Library of Congress
collections.
We also offer free public
lectures, conferences, symposia
and other programs such as this one.
And we administer the Kluge Prize,
which recognizes lifetime
achievement in the study
of humanity, and which
we recently awarded
to philosophers Jurgen
Habermas and Charles Taylor.
For more information about
these and other events,
please sign our email list on
the way out or visit our website
at LOC.gov/kluge and sign
up for our RSS list there.
Today's lecture is titled
The Struggle for Fairness:
National Origin Quotas and
the Immigration Act of 1965.
Our speaker is Ruth Wasem,
this year's Kluge staff fellow
at the Library of Congress
Kluge Center.
Ruth's research at the Kluge Center
this past year has used the Library
of Congress collections to
retrace the legislative debate
that culminated in the
passage of the Immigration Act
of 1965, 50 years ago this month.
A landmark piece of legislation
that 50 years later has profoundly
altered the composition and makeup
of our nation and our
immigration system.
Her work examines the past
toward the passing of that act,
as well as the act's
legacy 50 years later.
Ruth is the latest example of the
work that Kluge staff fellows do
in changing our understanding
of the world around us.
The Library staff is full of
brilliant and esteemed experts
who are passionate about
their areas of expertise.
And the Kluge staff fellowship
allows one or sometimes two
of such staff members
the opportunity
to pursue their scholarship
using the resources here
at the Library of Congress.
The fellowship is funded by the
gift left by the late John W. Kluge,
who founded the Kluge Center.
And a staff fellow is one of
nearly 100 scholars who pass
through our walls each year,
creating a vibrant scholar's
center on Capitol Hill.
And for information about additional
fellowships that we offer and how
to conduct your own research at the
Library of Congress, please take one
of the handouts on your way out that
says Opportunities for Research.
About our speaker.
For the past 25 years Ruth Wasem has
been a domestic policy specialist
at the library's congressional
research service,
focusing on immigration and
social welfare policies.
Since 2012 she has been an
adjunct professor of public policy
in the Washington program
of the University of Texas,
Lyndon B. Johnson School
of Public Affairs.
She has researched, written
and led seminars on immigration
and social welfare policies.
She has testified before
the US Congress,
most recently on asylum policy and
trends, on human rights protections,
immigration law and on the push/pull
forces on unauthorized immigration.
Her recent publications
include Tackling Unemployment:
The Legislative Dynamics of the
Employment Act of 1946, and Welfare
and Public Benefits in American
Immigration: An Encyclopedia
of Political, Social and
Cultural Change, second edition.
She is now concluding her tenure
as the 2014-2015 Kluge staff fellow
at the John W. Kluge center.
And we have been most delighted,
eager, happy to have her with us.
A quick word about today's
program and how it will go.
Following Ruth's talk we are very
privileged to have commentary
and discussion from two
distinguished scholars
of immigration, Susan F.
Martin and Marta Tienda.
Dr. Martin is Donald G. Herzberg
professor of international migration
and director of the Institute for
the Study of International Migration
at Georgetown University.
And Dr. Tienda is Morris P. During
professor in demographic studies,
professor of sociology and public
affairs, and director of the program
in Latino studies at
Princeton University.
Ruth Wasem will deliver her lecture.
We will have commentary from
Dr. Tienda and Dr. Martin.
The three of them will engage in a
short Q&A and then engage with you,
the audience and we will
conclude at about 5:30.
So without further ado, please
join me in welcoming Rith Wasem.
[ Applause ]
>> Ruth Wasem: Thank you
so much for coming today,
particularly on a beautiful
day to be inside rather
than enjoying the world around us.
I especially want to thank
the John Kluge Center
for this year, this opportunity.
I've worked in the
library for 25 years,
have enjoyed all of those years.
But this year at the Kluge Center
I found treasures and experiences
that I had no idea
were in this library.
So I thank the staff of the Kluge
Center and the scholars in terms
of enriching my research project.
And I thank you for coming.
So this is the 50th anniversary
of when Lyndon B. Johnson signed
the Immigration Act of 1965.
It's, as Jason mentioned
at the onset,
it's a legislation that's
had a profound effect
on what America looks like today.
At the time they weren't
as convinced
that it was going to
have that effect.
They were really struggling just
to have fairness in the system.
And that's why I chose that
as the title of my talk.
It was a legislative battle to try
to remove race and national origins
from the criteria that we
use to admit immigrants.
And I have a really long lecture
that you're not going to hear.
You can applaud now.
[Laughs]. And I've reduced my
research into three concepts.
And the first of the three concepts
of course is race and
national origins.
Because that's the
subject of my research.
But you can't talk about these
in the context of immigration
without also dealing with two
other very fundamental concepts.
One that I'm calling the
ideology of the deserving.
That's the selection process,
the selectivity in immigration.
And the other is what I'm
calling apportionment politics
or power politics.
There we go.
When we talk about race and
national origins, when we're talking
about the early 20th
century, the concept of race
and national origins
was very different
from what we would have
today, the 21st century view.
The government had over
39 different categories
of race and national origin.
And I chose this cartoon from
the library's collections.
It's by the famous cartoonist
Thomas Nass from Harper's Weekly.
And Nass did it right
after the passage
of the Chinese exclusion laws.
And there's two points that I
want to make about this cartoon.
Because they illustrate
fundamental points of my talk.
The first one is that it's talking
about what color will
be tabooed next.
It's an open acknowledgement
that there was a perception
that the immigration
law that was passed
in the Chinese exclusion
laws were fundamentally based
on color and race.
But it also shows if you look at
the depiction of Pat the Irishman,
it's not exactly the most
favorable depiction of the Irish.
He has a monkey-like quality.
And Fritz, the German in the
cartoon, has thick glasses
and is also you might
say racially stereotyped
or ethnically stereotyped
in this cartoon.
So that's the first point, is to get
the sense of how tribal the views
on race and nationality were in the
late 19th and early 20th century.
They weren't just black,
white, Asian, Indian.
They were much more specific
in how they viewed people.
The second point, and this
gets to the selectivity,
some might say class element
that I'm talking about.
It's harder to see in the cartoon,
but it points out that Chinese
laborers shall not come.
And the Chinese exclusion acts
are wonderful illustration
of the overlay of class
in selectivity
on race-based admissions.
Because the Chinese exclusions
laws excluded Chinese laborers.
But if you go through
the congressional record,
when they talked about
the legislation,
they wanted to get
Chinese merchants.
They wanted the wealthy
elite Chinese.
It was the laborers
they didn't want.
So there's no question that they
were aimed at racial exclusion,
but the overlay of class
was most certainly present
from the earliest days
of these exclusion laws.
Now the other way that
you see the selectivity,
and I chose this classic picture
that Siglex took from first class,
looking at the immigrants coming
on the passage across the Atlantic,
was that there was a range
of different people who came
as immigrants to the United States.
But there was a concern
about what groups came in.
And I stand on the shoulders
of the two people that --
Marta Tienda and Susan Martin,
who were introduced at the onset
and who will be talking shortly --
because both of their
research points
to these fundamental
elements of my research.
Susan in her book A
Nation of Immigrants
in 2009 developed how the selection
of immigrants were modelled
as either a Virginia
model, a Pennsylvania model,
a Massachusetts model and how these
different concepts were interwoven
throughout our history in terms
of how we selected immigrants.
Marta's work that I'm
stealing or building on comes
from a 2002 speech she
gave when she was president
of the American Sociological
Association.
And that was on demography
and the social contract.
And this is where the
apportionment power politics element
that I have been looking
at really comes into play.
Because in that speech
which was later published,
she talks about how people are
counted, how immigrants are included
in the census, how fundamental that
is to the defining of our democracy.
The point I am taking from Professor
Tienda is that in the writing
of the 1924 Immigration Act, because
it's very clear from my reading
of the materials that a lot of
the legislators were concerned
about how the wave of immigrants
was going to affect reapportionment.
That they could even reapportion
Congress based on the 1924 census.
Because it would have shifted the
power around the country so much.
And they also, I think, I argue --
one of the reasons they
did the exclusions,
the national origins exclusions of
the '24 act was because they wanted
to try to have a little more control
over the distribution of power
so that rural and southern
areas wanted to retain
as much electoral power,
legislative power that they could.
And so controlling immigration was
seen as one of the ways to do that.
This slide just gives
you a quick snapshot
of the features of the 1924 act.
This was when Asians
were formally barred
because they could naturalize.
I'm not even -- we could talk
about this if you have questions,
but it's pretty complex
to get into now.
The eastern hemisphere was
limited to the 1890 census
and this is the part of
the law that led to norther
and western Europe dominating in the
numbers and minimizing the numbers
from southern and eastern Europe
because it was scaled back
to go before the great wave
at the turn of the century.
Also, the western hemisphere, all
the migrants from this hemisphere,
were not held to any
numerical limits.
But they were still held to
qualitative restrictions based
on what we call in the immigration
world, the ground for exclusion.
So if you were a criminal, likely
to be indigent, or more importantly,
coming to work without
proper authorization
as contract labor,
you would be barred.
So that was the way we
controlled migration
from this hemisphere in 1924.
This gives you a sense of
how that actually was playing
out by the post-World War II era.
And as you can see, the
allocation of visas to northern
and western Europe was much
greater than their actual usage.
Whereas the other parts
of the world were pressing
against the numerical limits.
You can also see from this figure
just how small the numbers were
that could come in from these
other parts of the world.
Now initially in the
postwar period, those who --
there had always been people opposed
to the national origins quotas.
Emanuel Celler, and it was his
papers that are the kind of the body
of work that I have relied on
here at the Library of Congress.
Emanuel Celler was a new congressman
who argued against the 1924 act.
In 1952 he offered an amendment
as an alternative to that act.
And he was chairing the
judiciary committee, by the way,
when the 1965 act passed.
So this man, he was
from New York City.
He spent his entire career
fighting against race
and national origins admissions.
They thought originally
after the war
that they could get rid
of the national origins.
That it was the right time.
We were coming out of World War II.
The public diplomacy aspects of
having national origins were seen
as a liability when we dealt with
other countries around the world.
The economy was roaring.
We had a full employment economy.
We were sending marshal
plan money to Europe.
And it looked like a good time.
However, even with the displaced
persons after World War II,
it was very clear the public did
not support increasing immigration.
And when Congress was trying
to deal with displaced persons,
they were still wedded
in that process
to the national origins
quotas in terms
of how they responded to refugees.
So in 1952, Congress
took up the McCarran Act.
And I want to just
read some quotes to you
to give you a flavor for the times.
Because I must admit, when
I was doing my research some
of these things surprised me and I
didn't think I would be surprised
at this point in my career.
There was a senate
report on immigration
that was almost 1,000 pages long.
And it had an amazing, amazing --
it drew an amazing
conclusion from my perspective.
Maybe you'll share my view.
The Senate report criticized
national origins quotas
for not admitting the
proper mix of white people.
More precisely, the report
stated, "Only about half
of the anticipated proportion of
immigrants have come from northern
and western Europe, while twice the
contemplated proportion have come
from southern and eastern Europe."
The report concluded, "As a method
of preserving the relationship
between the various elements
in our white population,
the national origin system
has not been effective."
Interesting.
McCarran also -- Senator McCarran,
Patrick McCarran was a
democrat from Nevada.
He was also quite concerned
about illegal immigration.
And before you think
this sounds contemporary,
when he did a press conference
on 5 million illegal aliens
that had poured into the country,
let me give you a little more
of a sense of who he
was talking about.
McCarran referred to these
5 million illegal aliens
as "militant communists,
Sicilian bandits, criminals,
and he warned that they were
a readymade fifth column
for the enemy.
And potentially more dangerous
than an armed invasion."
That's Pat McCarran, 1951.
He was joined by Senator Herbert
O'Connor who was from Maryland,
who pointed out that these
unauthorized illegal aliens
as they called them were coming
into the United States
from Canada and Cuba.
I had to pause for that.
[ Laughter ]
There were alternative views at the
time and a Senator, Herbert Layman
of New York, he took a
totally different tack.
And he said on the senate floor,
"This philosophy is a
xenophobic philosophy.
It is a racist philosophy.
It is a philosophy of fear,
suspicion and distrust
of foreigners outside our country
and of aliens within our country.
It is a philosophy which is plainly
prejudiced against immigration."
Emanuel Celler put it this
way in debating the '52 act.
He said, "What is America?
It is not so much that
you were born in America.
The important thing is that
America has been born in you."
So these were two very
different streams struggling
for control over immigration policy.
Herblock. The Library of Congress
has the Herblock collection,
so that was another
great fun this year.
Herblock was quite pointed in his
conclusions about the 1952 act.
And he ran this cartoon
shortly before Harry Truman,
President Harry Truman
vetoed the act.
And I want to just do one quick
excerpt from Truman's veto,
again to give you a
flavor of the 1950's.
"In no other realm of our
national life are we so hampered
and stultified by the dead hand of
the past, the dead hand of the past,
as we are in this field
of immigration.
We do not limit our cities
to their 1920 boundaries.
We do not hold corporations
to their 1920 capitalizations.
We welcome progress to meet the
changing conditions in every sphere
of life except in the
field of immigration.
It's the time to shake off this
dead weight of past mistakes.
The time to develop a decent policy
of immigration, a fitting instrument
for our foreign policy
and a true reflection
of the ideals we stand
for at home and abroad."
I did a fair amount of
analysis on the '52 act
because I got a little too sucked
into it, considering I was supposed
to be working on the 1965 act.
But I wanted to point
out how this graph,
which is of the Senate vote -- but
the House vote is almost identical
when you do this graph -- shows
what I'm talking about in terms
of apportionment politics.
And the regional distribution
of power and the foreign born.
And I want to point out to you are
what I would call the two deviants.
The two deviants -- I shouldn't
probably say that word --
but they are the Republicans
who supported Truman's veto
and the Democrats who
didn't support it.
These were the people that
broke with their parties.
You can see that the Republicans,
and there were a sizeable number
of Republicans throughout
the 1950's and '60's
who supported very
strongly immigration reform.
Jacob Javitz, Hugh Scott,
Kenneth Keading, Prescott Bush.
A large number.
And they are the ones that you see
from the high immigration states
and the top immigration
states who crossed over
and supported Truman's veto
of the McCarran-Walter Act.
Similarly, the democrats
who voted for McCarran
and supported the veto
override were from the south.
And I want to point out -- I pulled
Texas and Florida out separately
because they're not
low immigration states.
But they were solemnly against
immigration reform at that time.
And also show the dark purple in
the high column, that's Arizona.
Those are the two senators from
Arizona who were democratic senators
but they supported the
McCarran-Walter Act.
So this gives you kind of a feel for
what I'm talking about when I talk
about the political power
and apportionment dynamic
of immigration.
All through the '50's of course,
after the McCarran-Walter Act,
there was a lot of legislative
activity on trying to come
up with alternatives to immigration,
the current immigration law.
And the Truman commission
made a series
of recommendations including
increasing immigration
to 250,000 a year and totally
eliminating the national origins
quotas and putting
everybody under one ceiling.
And that was very similar to
what Senator Herbert Layman
and Hubert Humphry and Congressman
Emanuel Celler introduced in '53.
President Eisenhower
also came out strongly
for immigration reform in 1956.
It was featured in his
state of the union.
He had a proposal that while
it retained national origins,
it would have substantially
increased legal immigration
in the United States,
thereby through that increase
addressing the suppressed treatment
of southern and eastern Europe.
That was how Eisenhower was
responding to the backlogs
in that part of the world,
was to increase the numbers.
Needless to say, those
proposals didn't go anywhere,
but the new senate majority
leader, Lyndon B. Johnson,
was cooking up something on the side
with Everett Dirkson the Republican
and minority leader, who
was also quite sympathetic
to immigration reform
throughout this period.
They came up with an amendment that
they brought to the senate floor
at the very last day, next
to last day of the session.
And it passed.
And it was similar to the
Eisenhower, picked some things
from the Eisenhower proposal
from some of the Humphry,
Layman and Celler proposals.
It was a compromise.
This is going to sound
familiar to you.
It passed the Senate
but died in the House.
Very little was known
about that since it kind
of disappeared from our history.
In the late '50's there were
also some incremental revisions
to the law that actually were
quite substantial in the long run.
But really nibbling on the edges
from the broader perspective.
And in the early 1960's Emanuel
Celler introduced a new bill.
And his bills were getting
shorter, by the way.
They started in 1953 at over 200
pages, and covered the full range
of immigration reform
that you can think of,
including administrative
efficiencies
and naturalization reforms, changes
to the grounds for admissibility,
as well as elimination
of national origins.
By the end, it was
down to about 12 pages.
Also new on the scene was Senator
Phil Hart from Michigan who came
with a very strong record
on civil rights and labor.
And he embraced immigration reform
and introduced a very important bill
that included features that
were subsequently picked
up in the Kennedy administration
proposal.
When I talked about
selectivity at the onset,
I want to also give you
a data way to look at it.
And this is not necessarily
something
that the legislators
of that time looked at.
And that is they set
these priorities.
Half were supposed to be
high-skilled immigrants.
But when you look at the pie
chart for actual admissions,
you see that only 6%
were high-skilled.
And the parents of US citizens,
which was supposed to be 30%,
well they were 4% and so on.
And it rolled down.
The overwhelming proportion
of immigrants that came
in under the McCarran-Walter Act
were what we call non-preference.
They were largely from
northern and western Europe.
And they were you know, not
coming in under the priorities
that had been set by Congress.
So you can see there
was already a mismatch
between what the Congress had wanted
and how it ultimately played out.
Well in 1963 Senator -- well,
he had been Senator Kennedy.
He had chaired the immigration
subcommittee when he was
in the senate and been instrumental
in pushing for immigration reform,
and was truly the champion of
the immigration reform movement
in the late '50's and early '60's.
He did not introduce
his administration bill
until the summer of '63.
And it was not nearly as
ambitious as people had expected.
It did not immediately
repeal national origins.
It was a phase-out over five years.
It emphasized high-skilled
immigration,
much like McCarran-Walter.
And instead of increasing overall
immigration levels to 250,000
which had been pretty much the
standard throughout the alternatives
of the 1950's, it only increased
immigration by about 10,000.
And these were largely aimed
at refugee populations.
So there was not to be an
increase overall in immigration.
Now tragically, as we all know,
President Kennedy was
assassinated in the fall of 1963.
And it was very unclear what
was going to happen next.
The immigration reformers
were suspicious of Johnson.
He had not been seen as
someone they were close to.
But similarly, the defenders of
the status quo were also suspicious
of Johnson because they had worked
with him in the Senate and they knew
that they were up against
a very effective adversary
in terms of getting things done.
And that proved to be right.
And Johnson came up with a strategy.
It was fascinating.
I went to the LBJ library and went
through a lot of his materials.
And a strategy to get the votes,
to get the bill through and I guess
in Texas they call that
giving them the Johnson.
One of the things I found in the
collections that gives you a sense
of how they did it back then,
50 years ago, is Myer Feldman,
who was a wonderful political
strategist who had been
with Kennedy -- and Johnson
kept him on for good reason --
developed all these
different targeting maps based
on the populations of foreign
born where the votes would be.
They used it in the '64 campaign.
They also used it in '65 --
much more elaborate things
that this -- to win the vote.
Having detailed information
about the congressional districts'
foreign born population in order
to buttonhole people that
they needed to support.
Now public opinion at this time
was deeply divided on immigration.
And I think almost
all the polling --
and I was quite fortunate
to get access to a wealth
of historic polling data.
The public did not support
increases in immigration.
And I believe that's why, though
I have no direct evidence,
I think that's why the Kennedy
drafters of the bill chose not
to increase immigration
beyond 10,000.
Because it was so strongly
opposed by the public.
What is interesting though is how
it shifted in terms of the support
from the national origin system.
And Lou Harris did a
survey in May of 1965.
You can see from the first
pie that the populace
that they interviewed was divided
up what I would say into thirds.
A third that supported, 29%
that supported keeping
the country quotas.
36% that supported
basing it on scales.
And then 35% that were either unsure
or didn't think it
made a difference.
A month later, Gallop did a survey,
but they framed the questions
a little differently.
So don't read a whole lot into
this as a substantial change
in public opinion, though there
was a concerted public relations
campaign that was kicked off
in May and June of that year.
But what you can see
happening is those opposed,
and Gallop said there was a
hardcore group of about a third
of the population -- because they
did much more detailed analysis --
that opposed increasing immigration
and also supported the race
and national origins-based
exclusion.
What started happening
though was the shifting away
of the no opinions.
More of the undecided no
opinions were coming in support
of basing the admissions on merit,
rather than country of birth.
Well there were still a
lot of people opposed to it
in a lot of these tracks.
I'm just putting this pamphlet up.
I know you can't read it.
But you can probably read
what's in the bold type in red.
And that's where you can see this
really sums up most of the arguments
that were for the status quo.
And I'll just run through them.
How are we doing time-wise?
Okay. I'll run through
them very quickly.
The mirror of America was one
that was used throughout
the 20th century.
And that's basically that northern
and western Europeans were the
people that settled the country,
that arguably they made the
country great and it's only fair
that they get a disproportional
number
of the visas issued every year.
This was the status quo
argument of fairness.
And then the corollary
that it was much easier
to assimilate these immigrants
because they were more
like us, so to speak.
Now anti-communism was a very
important issue in the 1950's.
But it really waned by the '60's
and didn't come up as much.
But the issue that really
came up even more was
that looking out for the little guy.
And you see this in the pamphlet.
They talk about immigrant
workers that would be competing
with US workers and
taking jobs away.
Another argument that
was just emerging
in the '50's was population
explosion.
And House immigration subcommittee
had hearings on population
and immigration, which spent
a lot of time looking at this.
And this was right about -- for
some of you that might remember,
this is right about the same
time the book The Population Bomb
came out.
And so there was concern
about that issue.
But at the end of the day, what
I found time and time again
in the research is that race
was still the driving force.
And even when you look
at this pamphlet,
if you look at that last page,
shuffling quotas to admit Asians
and unlimited nonquota orientals
and Negros will be admitted.
That came up again
and again and again.
And I'll just do a
couple quick quotes.
The Daughters of the
American Revolution warned
against the proliferation of
African immigrants coming.
Senator Sam Irwin of South Carolina
said the legislation discriminated
against northern Europeans
because it treated them
the same as Ethiopians.
"And I don't know of any
contributions that Ethiopia has made
to America," Senator Irwin said.
Willis Robertson, who is
Pat Robertson's father,
was a senator from
Virginia at the time.
He was the first one that I
found to publicly build the case,
which I then started finding
everywhere in the primary sources,
that because -- and this
is a very technical point,
but it turns out to
be quite important.
The western hemisphere, as I
told you, had been exempted.
But not the colonies, if you were
a French of a British colony.
Well, Jamaica, Trinidad and
Tobago had become independent.
And this legislation
would have treated them
like any other western
hemisphere country.
It would have allowed
them to be unlimited.
People went ballistic about the
Negroes that would be coming
in from Jamaica, Trinidad
and Tobago.
So much so that it became one of
the most compelling arguments used
to try to put a cap on
the western hemisphere.
And it's interesting, because --
well, I don't have that much time.
[Laughs]. Suffice to say, I was
surprised about that finding.
Then the other issues
that came up --
and this came out in the
hearings that the house had.
But it also was becoming much
more commonplace knowledge
as they led into the final debate.
And that was that the limited quota
immigrants weren't the major portion
of people coming into the country.
The western hemisphere was
the largest single category.
And that nonquota, which I
have depicted in gray here,
but that's mostly at this point
in time immediate relatives
of US citizens, was also sizeable.
So this was leading to the push
to put all immigration
under a worldwide cap.
And so when the time came
to be working on this,
the issue of how many were we going
to let in became quite important.
And I'm just sharing with you
Congressman Celler's handwritten
notes as he was calculating, "Well,
how many people will
my bill let in?"
And if you look over in the
far corner, I don't expect you
to be able to read his handwriting
on the monitor, but he was guessing
that it was about 366,000
that would be coming in.
The Immigration Naturalization
Service did formal estimates
and they're depicted
in the yellow bar here.
And this is based on when
the bill was introduced,
which was a five-year phase out
of the national origins proposal.
So you can see they anticipated
an increase in immigration
and they anticipated
an increase from Asia.
But they did not, as it turns out,
anticipate the levels
that we actually had.
Again, they were using
different legislative language.
But there are some other things
we can talk about in the Q&A
if you want to, because I've
taken a pretty long look at this.
So here are the key features
of what Congress passed.
They repealed national origins
and gave a per-country
cap, 20,000 at that time.
They expanded family-based.
The employment-based, the push
for high-skilled didn't happen.
It was set at only 10%.
So it was a cutback
from current law.
And the compromise on
the western hemisphere,
which was a hard-fought
battle ended up --
they didn't put the
western hemisphere
under the preference system
at that point in time.
But they capped it at 120,000.
The selectivity, I
showed you some pie charts
of how the McCarran-Walter
Act priorities played out.
They were a little
better matchup in '65.
But again, you can see first
preference, US citizens,
unmarried sons and
daughters were allocated 20%.
And the first five years used 1%.
The numbers rolled down.
And this is the beginning of where
you can see the growth in brothers
and sisters, which were given --
for the first time they were added
in the preference category.
They were given 24% and because of
the roll down they ended up at 28%.
And over time this
number would grow.
So this is how the
selectivity was playing out.
In terms of the western hemisphere
caps, it did have an effect.
This is just two quick slides.
You can see that Mexican
migration shifted
from the western hemisphere
category,
which was largely employment-based
because you pretty much had
to have a job to come here.
To being much more family
oriented and spouses and children
and other preference categories.
Similarly, what you see with the
Caribbean and Central America --
and these numbers at this point
in time are mostly Caribbean.
You see the Caribbean
was a big winner.
Their numbers went up substantially
after the '65 act passed.
And they particularly took advantage
of the new preference categories.
I'm going to drill through
these rather quickly
but we can come back
to them if you want.
This is the non-preference
category, which you know
from the pie charts mopped
up a lot of unused numbers.
You can see that as that shrunk
the employment-based numbers
weren't recouped.
And so employment-based of all
kinds was much smaller post-'65
than it had been before.
When you look at professional
and exceptional ability by region
of the world, again this is not
news, but it points out how Asia
and opening up Asia, which
had been barred before 1965.
Asian migrants, Asian
immigrants took full advantage
of the employment-based
high-skill category.
And US employers were happy to
recruit and hire Asian workers.
And in fact, the only thing that
really had those numbers shrink was
when they put everyone
under the caps,
when they added the
western hemisphere.
And when enough of the
family members started coming
in that they started bumping
against their per-country caps.
In terms of unskilled
workers and shortage workers,
the other 10% of the preference
system, it's interesting.
This kind of plays out like
I think people had intended.
You can see it's a fairly diverse
flow from all regions of the world
that were coming in
in this category.
Family-based is the other big one.
And when you begin to understand
why did the numbers seem
to lowball future flows.
If you look throughout the
'50's, spouses and children
of US citizens were unlimited then.
But the numbers were
pretty constant.
After the '65 act, you see a
growth in immediate relatives.
And I also pulled out the two
categories that were added
to immediate relatives
in the 1965 act.
Most importantly the
parents of US citizens.
When you look at how the
continuous pattern of spouses
and children play out, again you
can see Europe stayed pretty much
the same.
But you see growth in
Asia and also the shifting
of the western hemisphere to coming
in through the family-based
categories.
Now this one is a key,
because you see parents.
And I think it's important to
note here that a large portion
of the growth in parents
of US citizens that came
after the '65 act were
Asian parents.
Asian families were much more likely
to bring their parents
to the United States.
Other parts of the
world followed suit,
but never in the numbers
that Asian families.
So this gets into a
fundamental concept.
So here we are.
This is the flow today.
It's much more diverse
than it had been,
and a lot has been made
about the diversity.
But I would argue we still
have issues of fairness today.
They're just not framed
in the context
of race and national origins.
They're framed in different ways.
And they're tough choices, just like
they were in the '50's and '60's,
to decide what is the proper
balance that we should have
in our immigration policy.
Who should we select?
How will that affect
apportionment and politics?
And so I am going to conclude
my remarks and turn it
over to Susan Martin and Marat
Tienda to offer some commentary.
[ Applause ]
>> Susan Martin: Hi.
Congratulations.
>> Ruth Wasem: Thank you.
>> Susan Martin: It was excellent.
>> Ruth Wasem: Thank you.
Go ahead.
>> Susan Martin: Me first?
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you so much to the
Kluge Center for hosting Ruth,
because this is a phenomenal
project.
And when Ruth told me that she
was applying for this fellowship
and wanted to work on the
1965 act, I was very excited
because there really hasn't been
the type of analysis of the act
that she has been able to do.
And seeing the results now,
I'm absolutely delighted
that she spent the
last year doing this.
And great use of cartoons too.
That was one thing
Ruth mentioned to me
when she was developing
the proposal,
that she had cartoons
and wanted to use them.
But hearing the way in which she
was able to tease out the thoughts
of the time and the concerns from
those graphics is just fantastic.
I really want to congratulate
you on this.
I agree with most of the
assessment, or just about all
of the assessment of
the core issues.
I think the three areas are
perfect ones in terms of the role
of prejudice and xenophobia.
It's not that everyone who's opposed
to immigration is xenophobic.
And I think that's an
important point to carry away.
There are a lot of good
reasons for being concerned
about that aspect of immigration.
The problem is that the
emotions that are carried
because of this fear of the other
is what makes it so difficult
to have a rational discussion
about those very concerns.
And as a result, it becomes a binary
action of you're for or against.
Not one where you can actually
talk about what are the strengths
and weaknesses and
what are good policies.
And I think we saw that very much
in that period leading up to 1924
and then continuing
through until 1965.
Selectivity is a major issue
in today's debate as well
as it has been historically.
Prior to the Nash Largins
quote is the US mostly tried
to regulate immigration from
the 1870's to '24 by determining
who had the qualities
we wanted to admit.
And it was issues that I think
everyone could agree with:
not to admit people
with criminal records,
certain contagious
diseases, things of that sort.
But then it got to
very, very shaky grounds
like who is of good moral character.
That's very, very subjective.
And I remember also
there were crimes
of moral turpitude
and what that means.
And there's a famous case in which
there was a British aristocratic
couple who had a divorce and
each had accuse the other
of adultery as the basis for it.
They were coming to the
US on different boats
at almost precisely the same time.
He was admitted and she was barred
because she committed a
crime of moral turpitude.
So you've got very interesting
ways in which the policies play
out when you're talking
about selectivity.
And then the importance of power
and apportionment is
absolutely right on,
as we can see today in the debate.
But I must say quickly in my time
also, what I see as the lessons
of the 1965 act and what preceded it
for today's debate on
immigration reform.
The first key issue I think is
that it takes an awfully long time
to get immigration reform.
And it's been since 1990 that
there's been the last major reform
in legal admissions to the US.
1986 was the major
reforms for dealing
with unauthorized illegal
immigration into the country.
And the last series
of serious debate
on immigration started
about 10 years ago.
So we've had 25 years
since the last reforms.
We've had 10 years of bills
being introduced, debated,
passing sometimes one
house, never both on that.
But as we've heard from Ruth,
the same thing exactly happened,
both in terms of getting
to the '24 legislation.
It took 50 years or
so of debate to decide
on the national origins quotas.
And then from '24 to '65
before we could get the change
in those policies.
Although there were incremental
changes in the interim.
But the fundamental changes
really take a long, long time.
And so we shouldn't be surprised
that we're having difficulty today.
That's part of our -- almost the
DNA of immigration in this country.
Part of the reason for that is we
are so ambivalent about immigration.
I think if most people realized
that what they are saying today
about immigrants is exactly
what was said against them
when their forefathers came,
they'd be absolutely shocked.
They don't see that connection,
although it is so strong.
We always look with rose-colored
glasses at our forebears
and deep suspicion about the
people who are coming in today.
And so that's a problem.
The second problem is there
have always been bedfellows
on the immigration issue.
As that chart showed,
you can't predict
in very easy ways who's
going to be in favor
and who's going to be opposed.
And one of the divisions that
I've written a lot about --
and Ruth mentioned some
of the work I've done --
is that there are always
divisions between what people think
about immigration -- meaning how
many people should be admitted --
and what do they think about
immigrants, meaning what kind
of right people should have.
And these coalitions
change depending on which
of those issues you're
really talking about.
And the selectivity issue
gets into play on both levels
of immigration and of immigrants.
And we're still seeing
strange bedfellows.
Although I think today we're
seeing more partisan politics
on immigration than at
least historically was true.
And I've been working on public
policy issues on immigration
since 1979 and it's more
partisan than I have ever seen it.
And that makes it very,
very difficult
to get to where we want to hit.
And that means another point that
came out of Ruth's talk is the need
for political leadership.
It's those political figures
particularly presidents
that really have to lead the way.
But what's difficult about that
in the context of immigration is
that immigration is a congressional
prerogative and is seen as being
in the purview of Congress.
And presidents generally,
executive branches have not had
much influence.
So trying to pull that influence
into the debate can
be very difficult.
And so you also need strong
congressional leadership
which is willing to take on a
lot of interest to get there.
Final point that came out
of Ruth's presentation is
that there are always
unintended consequences
of whatever legislation
is developed.
She mentioned that there was a shift
from national origins
to per-country quotas.
And those per-country quotas after
a certain period of time then led
to huge backlogs and problems
in having an efficient
system for immigration.
One of the solutions to that, the
one that has not been a part of much
of the legislative debate is
having more flexible policies
that can be changed
as conditions change,
as we have new economic conditions,
new technology, new everything else.
Instead we have this
written in concrete
and not change for
decades and decades.
The signs I don't think are very
promising today for having any kind
of comprehensive immigration
reform in the near future.
Perhaps after the next election,
depending on where it goes.
But depending on where it goes it
could be super good or to the bad,
depending on where you're sitting
as to what actually happens.
I think incremental changes,
as was true in the '50's
and other periods, are more likely.
But they have to be
carefully tailored
to make the system more effective
but not become the barrier
themselves to further reform.
That's the more fundamental nature.
But you know, it did
take 40 years to get rid
of the national origins quotas.
I'm an optimist by nature and
I really hope that the kind
of information that is coming
out of Ruth's project can be used
by policy makers as well as
advocates to press for the type
of immigration reform
that we need now.
Which ultimately is going to have
to be as fundamental as the reform
in 1965 that she's describing.
Thank you for your work.
>> Ruth Wasem: Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Marta Tienda: So I want
to thank you for inviting me.
I had the privilege of sitting
with Ruth this summer when she was
in the MUD library of
Princeton University.
So we connected and
talked about the project.
And it's an honor that you would use
my paper, my presidential address.
But you know, the balance is
clearly where I'm taking from you.
I use all of your reports
for my classes.
And they're so clearly
written, so intelligible
that even my undergraduates
use them and pass them on.
So they're all over Australia.
They're all over.
Anybody who shows up and they want
to know US immigration, read this.
And she updates them all the time.
So the rake has -- I
mean I'm in your debt.
And it's very refreshing to see
that this act that has been written
about so much will have a
refreshing lens imposed on it,
which is what you've done.
I didn't know about the
Caribbean blacks bee
and the basis for the ceiling.
So that was a new one.
And this framing of fairness
is really an important lens
for thinking not only of
the past, but of the future.
Because that future we can't see
yet, any more than the framers
of this legislation could
anticipate the future
in which these consequences are
playing out, intended or not.
And so there are many critics of
the broken immigration system,
and they point out these
unintended consequences
to pick up where you left off.
And I was a piece of that.
It was not going to
change the racial mix.
Well, it sure did.
It won't displace US
workers, and we made sure
by restricting the unskilled visas.
Except that there's a back door
and human ingenuity
always trumps legislation.
It won't raise the level.
Well, yes, if you think
it's a linear process.
But by design, by design,
the legislation was actually
designed to have a multiplier.
Immigration is not a linear process.
You could set the ceilings,
but when you're allowing --
or you change it with family
reunification, families don't come
in packages of one or two.
They come in multiple packages.
So one could argue that in many ways
the legislation did exactly what it
was supposed to do.
We made family reunification,
put our values on the table.
Civil Rights.
You cast this in the
context of the Civil Rights.
We were hoping not to be racist.
So that context turns out
to be really important
about what was acceptable
at the time.
So family reunification
is actually working.
Two-thirds of our admissions
are family-based immigrants,
whether they're within
cap or out of cap.
That's just the opposite of what
happened in Australia or Canada.
They deliberately made sure
when it was going toward family,
they deliberately changed
their policies
so that they would have had
the skill mix and be two-thirds
and the other be one-third.
Because they were going
in the same direction.
So they took legislative acts
and we can learn from them,
because they learned from us.
And they said, "Oh, we
don't want to do this.
We're going to fix it."
And they did.
They didn't fight.
I mean, it wasn't easy there either.
But I just published a paper
-- well it just got accepted.
I've done a couple of
them that focus a bit
on the unintended consequences.
One that's just going
to be forthcoming is called
Multiplying Diversity.
And what I've done is actually
compute the immigration multipliers
by the family categories
to show why it is
that the Asians surpassed
the Latin Americans.
Not recently, as many people write,
but actually much before
the Immigration Reform
and Control Act allowed
the legalization program.
But the Asian multiplier
took off big time.
But it was by design.
You could argue that
it was by design.
They didn't expect it.
They were thinking linear,
but they crafted multiplier.
So they did not anticipate how many
people were going to naturalize.
If you made citizenship a
requirement to sponsor relatives,
well how do you become a citizen?
You naturalize.
Bring in immigrants, let them
naturalize and then they bring
in their relatives, right?
So you could put caps
on certain categories.
We did. But that didn't stop
the uncapped categories.
And those uncapped categories turned
out to be a really important driver,
but also the family caps.
So this expansion, I've
written about the expansion
of the definition of
immediate family relatives
that you highlighted in your
presentation to include parents.
I mean, who's against grandparents?
You want to bring them in to
take care of your children.
That's what they told me
when I was presenting some
of these materials early
on at the PA meeting.
And I said, "You know, one of
the unintended consequences --
we wanted to reunite family.
That was a design.
But the default has
been that we have a rise
in late-age immigration."
We want immigrants to
be in the labor force,
but the share that are ages 50
and over has increased from 11%
in 1980 to I think it's 17% now.
That's a big change.
You say, "Well, 17%
ages 50 and over.
At 50 you still have a
lot of working life."
Maybe. You have to learn English.
You have to see if
you can be certified.
You have to see if you can earn
your social security credits.
We move on.
So this is an issue.
This linear extrapolation
was an oversight.
I don't think that
they had anticipated,
and you mentioned that
in your address.
So how does it matter?
Well, Congress did legislate
this, but recall 1965 --
what else was going on
besides the Civil Rights Act?
We were in a great mood.
We were reeling from the baby boom.
That would be moi.
So the Congress was really from the
baby boom, and schools and states
and localities were all fussing
about these classrooms of 36.
We weren't worried
about population aging.
So we modified Social Security Act
to create Medicare and Medicaid.
Today, 50 years later we're not
saying, "Ooh, wait a minute.
We've got to think
this through again."
So at the time, at the time it made
sense, but it was done in a way
that has not been modified.
And these unintended consequences
which were not intended
continue to play out.
So times have changed.
The world has changed.
The desired sending
countries, they didn't pan
out from the very beginning because
of the Martial Act and other changes
that were taking place in
Europe in the postwar period.
They've aged even faster
than the United States.
So they're not going to be
coming here any time soon.
We have aged as a nation
less quickly
than our other OECD competitors,
thanks to immigration,
because the immigrants
are having children
and they had higher fertility.
So that's kept us a little younger.
It's intensified our
diversification.
So if we're all over
the diversity issue,
well that's a program
that's already in process.
And that's not going to
change any time soon.
So there's a glaring age
divide also in the world
with the southern nations are very
young and they're growing rapidly.
Some of them have still
very high fertility.
The north is aging quite rapidly.
So these are the facts.
So future immigration
is not going to come
from our former sending countries
and it never did really
when we expected.
Spain, Italy and Germany, they're
now countries of immigration
and they've had this really
rapid turnaround from sending
to being receivers of immigration.
So if we're going to have
immigration, let's face it,
it's going to come mainly from
Asia and Africa, Latin America.
But Latin American
fertility has slowed.
Mexican immigration
today is net zero.
It has been for several years.
And a lot of people find
that really hard to believe
because they're looking
in the rearview mirror.
We should tell our politicians
when they open their mouths
to look forward and not in
yesterday's projections.
So demography is not destiny.
That is certainly not
the position I take.
But it's highly relevant
for understanding the future
contours of our immigration.
And the question is, will
those contours result
from deliberate rational
policy decision making?
Which Susan and I haven't
lost hope for and I won't,
as long as I'm still writing.
Or the default of a failure to act?
The default of a failure to act.
Not to decide is to decide.
So what I asked my students when
I teach as a policy exercise,
I love this Legomsky paper
called Immigration from Scratch.
And I tell them from the outset that
all sovereign nations have the right
to decide who to admit, how many,
when and under what auspices.
The balance of family,
humanitarian and skills.
Every nation has that as sovereign.
That's what national
boundaries are for.
So they exist and that's
why we have immigration.
That said, abiding by international
conventions for refugees,
which is always still
a dicey challenge.
So that said, given
your lens of fairness,
how will fairness then
play out in the future?
If 50 years from now
we wanted to project
and have your protégé looking back
and doing the same Kluge lecture,
what would they say 50 years from
now about fairness and our adherence
to our democratic ideals through
immigration, through inclusion.
We can either harness and
manage immigration by design,
as we have tried to do, and
it's a very difficult one
when you're dealing
with human ingenuity
and moral and ideological issues.
Broadening the front door,
strategically, deliberately.
Acknowledging the current realities.
Or are we going to manage it by
default and allowing the back door
to swing back and forth and going
in a circle the way we're doing?
That's to do nothing, to be frozen.
And not to decide is to decide.
So proactive versus incremental
reactive, which is what we've done
with little legislation and raising
the ceiling on temporary workers
and raising the caps here and there
without doing the fundamental
questioning of what is it
that we're expecting from
our immigration policy?
And I will go with one
final thought about the need
to also consider integration policy.
I am on the National
Academy Panel on Fiscal
and Economic Impacts of Immigration.
But the twin panel is on
immigrant integration.
It shows that immigrants
are integrating,
but we could do a much better job
and really harness the immigration
dividend going forward instead
of having the default option
and sub-optimally let immigrants
contribute to this great nation.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Ruth Wasem: I want to
add a little bit more just
for clarification and understanding
about how the Civil
Rights legislation
and the Civil Rights movement
affected immigration reform.
And in part, in response
to Susan's comment.
Because the Civil Rights
movement heightened the conscious
of Americans about racism.
>> Susan Martin: Exactly.
>> Ruth Wasem: And a lot of --
and I read some of the quotes of
the people who were the defenders
of the status quo that
used racist rhetoric.
And by doing that, they really kind
of forced out some of the people
that Susan referred to who would
have wanted to moderate immigration.
But they didn't want to be
associated with these other people.
And this was true in both parties.
People that would have been
kind of more moderate or middle
of the road went over to doing
the reform because of the rhetoric
of racism that became pervasive in
the debate over national origins.
So it's not that everybody
was racist.
That was probably a small portion.
And I think that some of the people
used to rally their base, frankly.
I'm not sure in the 1920's and
the 1950's and in the '60's.
Some of the people that used that
rhetoric clearly were doing it
to rally their supporters.
Now the bad public opinion data that
I only touched on kind of flew back
in their face, because by
the time the '65 act passed
when they did a survey in December
of '65 it was overwhelmingly
popular.
Everybody jumped on the
bandwagon after the fact.
But I think it really had to
do with the behavior of some
of the key groups that were against
changing the law that forced --
that really kind of
helped reform it.
Because nobody wanted to
be associated with it.
Or few people did.
>> Susan Martin: Yep.
>> Ruth Wasem: We have
some questions.
Diane, hi.
>> Thank you.
This has been wonderful and thank
you for the comments as well.
My question is this.
I've been holding a thought
that I haven't heard you say
and I may have missed it, but I
thought it was pretty important.
I thought that in passing the
1965 act there was an important,
like a compromise that ironically
by today's standards came
from those status quo people
who favored the family reunification
feature as a way to pass the bill.
I mean, the other people
wanted them to pass it.
But they favored family
reunification as a way of slowing
down the change in the
demography of our country.
>> Ruth Wasem: Yes.
That was certainly -- the Wall
Street Journal actually said,
"We will preserve the makeup,
the racial mix of the countries
through family reunification."
These guys weren't demographers.
They were attorneys.
And they -- in the Wall Street
Journal I found it in the notes
of a lot of the members
that were working on it.
They thought it was one of the
ways to perpetuate the makeup.
They were more worried about
expanding employment base
and running the risk of
opening it up to the world.
So yes, you're absolutely
right, Diane.
>> But the big miscalculation
was underestimating the
family multipliers.
So here's the deal: they
thought we had restricted
with the Asian Exclusion Act that
was renewed and renewed and renewed
until finally the small
one, the Asian triangle,
the Asian Pacific triangle,
was left in place.
And they thought, "Well that's
just going to generate like 5,000
and then there will be no more."
They totally miscalculated something
that the employment categories.
They were expecting German
doctors and English engineers
or whatever, German engineers.
But they got Asian doctors
and engineers, et cetera.
And the problem is when you
bring somebody of high skill,
the probability of
naturalizing is much higher.
So the skill categories, the
Asian influx was slow at first.
It came through those two employment
categories that were lower
in the preference system.
But they had the fastest,
highest migration multiplier.
So it's the multiplier
through those two categories
that actually generated
that huge spurt
and then it could continue
to multiply.
Add to that other events
like Tiananmen Square
where we make exceptions and
we bring in a few extra here
and a few extra there, and
you have a huge potential.
And that's what's happened
with the Asian complex.
>> Ruth Wasem: Yeah,
except it's very interesting
that Congress didn't seem to be
looking at what was happening
in Europe when they
made these calculations.
I mean, western Europe
had established all sorts
of guest worker programs because
they didn't have enough workers.
Southern Europeans could easily
stay in Europe and do work
because they had all
of these openings.
And Eastern Europe was
behind the Iron Curtain.
They couldn't get out.
>> Yep. That's exactly right.
>> Ruth Wasem: And so going
through a thought process --
by 1965 it was really unlikely
after the displaced
persons had been admitted,
that there was literally
no one from Europe
that was going to need to migrate.
That it would only be
migration by choice.
But also adding to what Marta
said was that part of our policies
in the 1960's and to the '70's
were having Fullbright scholars,
foreign students coming
in from Asia.
>> Marta Tienda: Exactly.
>> Ruth Wasem: And so that
became the draw for --
not only were we bringing in high
skilled, but we were training them
to stay in the country on that and
creating a totally different --
also in '64 the Bracero
program ended.
So the legal migration from
Mexico, which had been accompanied
by very high levels of undocumented
migration for most of that period,
but that combination of things also
meant that there would be a new push
for the western hemispheric
migration to increase.
Because the permanent system
became the only route in.
And there was enough
family reunification
to get that started as well.
So I think it was a
lot of miscalculations,
some of which were not foreseeable.
Others of which were the result
of US policies and other areas.
>> Susan Martin: Exactly.
Cuba and et cetera.
>> Ruth Wasem: And
even though the act,
and I mention it was
only 12 pages long,
which by today's standards
is unheard of.
That a 200-plus page bill would be
reduced down to 12 pages is amazing.
>> Yep.
>> Ruth Wasem: But they left
out a lot of other things.
It was another 15 years before
they did the Refugee Act.
>> Right. We had signed.
>> Ruth Wasem: And it was another 25
years before they dealt with a lot
of the grounds for admissibility
and some of the other issues.
So it wasn't like they
did everything in '65.
But they did the key thing
that changed legal flows.
They also -- and again you talk
about not thinking about Europe.
The woman who was the head
of immigration statistics
at INS testified in
'63 I believe about --
she pointed out that the largest
number of skilled immigrants
that were coming to the
United States were coming
from the Western Hemisphere.
They were Canadians.
We weren't getting skilled
workers from Europe.
They were the non-preference people
that were qualifying for visas
that were coming from
northern Europe.
Our high skilled immigration was
already coming from this hemisphere
and in some adjustments
coming from Asia.
I think there are some
more questions.
Julie, hi.
>> Hi. Thank you so much.
Splendid talk.
And thank you for the
commentaries also.
I wondered what you thought about --
this kind of builds on what
you've just been getting
into with the ending
of the Bracero program.
May Nigh argues in her book
that part of the problem
with the 1965 act was that it
was trying so hard to be fair
in principle, but it failed to take
into account the historic
relationship
between the United States and
certain countries, say Mexico.
Which had had through the Bracero
program and through the need
for labor, millions of
workers crossing the border.
And by putting such an affair,
equal but a very low limit
on Mexican immigrants,
that in fact it lead
to this you know historic
rise in more
and more undocumented immigration.
And thus created real tensions
and problems in the relationship
between the two countries.
I wonder if in your work you're
dealing with issues like that.
>> Ruth Wasem: I've taken a
good long look at how the act
and then the subsequent capping
and putting the western hemisphere
under the preference
system has played out.
And I don't think it was as much
-- and I want my colleagues up here
to weigh in with alternative
perspectives.
But I think the end of the
Bracero might have created
unauthorized migration.
But the '65 act, and I
presented a slide that shows it,
it shifted Mexican migration away
from who an employer would sign off
to come in through western
hemisphere, into family-based.
But the numbers stayed
at the same level.
And when you look at the role
of family-based, how
it shifted the flow.
But the argument that it
limited them that much,
I think it's really
more Bracero, the loss.
And this is where the
unintended consequence
of two important policy changes
happening virtually simultaneously.
The Bracero program, for
those of you that don't know,
was a temporary worker
program that we had with Mexico
for agricultural workers to come in.
And it had been highly
controversial for a long time.
And efforts to reform it to not be
as exploitative of both the workers
who were brought in from Mexico
as well as the domestic supply
of migrant workers, there were
always efforts to reform it.
It was ultimately ended in '64.
But one of the key things
that was part of that,
if you look at a very young Henry
Gonzalez who was a new congressman
from Texas, or Ed Roybal who was
a new congressman from California,
who had both been very active
in the movement of Latinos
in the labor movement and kind
of the growing Latino
Civil Rights movement.
They wanted the shift away
from Bracero to a legal flow.
They did not want to
come in as temporary,
do the job and be sent back.
They wanted it to be a
permanent flow on a track
like every other LPR, to be a
citizen if they chose to be.
And that was why I notice -- one
of the reasons I noticed a shift.
Because the western
hemisphere exemption
in the 1920's was supported
by the south.
And the south supported Bracero.
By the time we got to '65, it wasn't
-- and even in the '50's, Phil Hart
and Emanuel Celler who I think
by anyone's standards would
be considered liberal,
they had put the western hemisphere
under the worldwide ceiling.
There was a flip, and I'm
still trying to understand it.
But part of it was, "Let's end
the temporary exploitative flows.
Let's create a permanent flow."
And also in terms of why
the south pulled away,
I think it was the mechanization
of cotton and sugar cane
that dramatically affected
the desire of the south
to have unlimited workers coming in.
So it was largely the --
>> Susan Martin: It was
much slower in Texas.
They had the citrus industry.
>> Ruth Wasem: Yes, yes.
>> Susan Martin: They
had cotton still.
I mean, I'm from Texas, y'all.
So it took a longer period of time
for that type of mechanization.
But remember the Bracero
program had two pieces.
The first part, Texas
was not allowed
to participate in the first half.
1945-48, that was World
War II, labor shortages.
And then they had a hiatus, but
they continued it informally.
And the demand, the taste for
having this cheap, pliable,
no-regulation labor force
got to be really good.
The appetite for that kind of
labor force became really high
in California and Texas.
So everybody was doing it like we do
today with unauthorized immigration.
We turn a blind eye.
And so that was going
on for a long time.
For the second, for the renewal,
the impetus for the public life
in '78 was for the Korean conflict.
In between those two
formal bills was the peak
of Braceros coming to the US.
It had temporarily ended.
Texas was allowed to
participate the second round
because they had the
Texas Proviso, right?
And that's where we wrote into our
legislation that it was a felony
to be in a country,
but it was not a --
it was a felony to
transport to harbor,
to do everything except
purposes of employment.
So we had la viva la contratoin
in our legislation written
that made it okay for employers
to hire unauthorized immigrants
alongside the Bracero program
which made the exploitation
of the Bracero program --
there were several incidents
in California that led to this.
They said, "We've had enough."
So we had these two, the formal
and informal guest worker program.
Which is kind of what we have today,
except that the fertility
in Mexico has declined.
The demand for the supply of
extra workers has been shrinking.
So this is a window of
opportunity starting to close.
And we haven't figured
out how we want
to handle low-skill
workers in our country.
Which is really the bottom line.
>> Ruth Wasem: And to follow up your
point, I did a role call analysis
of support for the Bracero program,
which was the same Congress --
the legislation you were referring
to that passed the '52
act, and it was identical.
The people that supported
Bracero also supported national
origin quotas.
It was temporary.
Yeah?
>> I think he has a question.
>> Ruth Wasem: One more question.
Right here.
>> Thank you, Ruth.
I found this to be a very,
very stimulating discussion.
My question has to do with what your
views are on using amnesty as a way
to bridge you know, some of the
shortcomings of the legislation.
And perhaps including
also adjustments
in the caps in the quotas.
>> Ruth Wasem: One of
the things that struck me
in my research was how frequently
in the past there were provisions.
Some called the registry provisions.
Others were just -- they
just adjusted people,
that today we would call
amnesty or legalization
and it would be big news.
But it happened all
through the '50's.
And even Congressman Walter
of McCarran-Walter sponsored.
You know, when I mentioned
some of the incremental bills,
one of them was an outright
legalization of certain populations.
And you could just
come in and register.
So those kinds of things weren't
as controversial back
then as they are today.
And I would love to
hear from my colleagues
because I don't think
illegal presence was
as stigmatized back then.
Nor was it an illegal
concept then to be
in the United States without status.
>> Marta Tienda: The
amnesty gets a lot of play
when it's seen as a
national activity.
We've been doing it.
Congress has been doing
amnesties ever since '86.
They do it on a rolling basis.
Nacara. They've done this
population, that, so they do this.
There are all these little ones that
are done by congressional decision,
but most people don't hear about it
because it's not an
amnesty like a big amnesty.
Therefore they're little
secrete amnesties.
Those little amnesties
have added up to hundreds
of thousands to date, since 1986.
But because each one
is not like yes or no,
the whole everybody who's here,
it's a series of small
incremental changes.
Of course the federal
government got sued
for not handling systematically
the temporary protected status
of individuals who were here
as temporary workers,
refugees, et cetera.
And they kept extending it.
So they were systematically
allowing the Nicaraguans,
but not allowing the Guatemalans
and the Central Americans to qualify
under the same conditions
until they were sued.
Then they did retroactive
amnesty for many of them.
But if we just go through,
there's a really nice paper
by the Migration Policy Institute
that documents how many
have been amnestied since.
I don't share the view of the author
that it's greater than
the '86 amnesty.
It's not, but that's the claim.
But there have been
additional rolling additions
to the initial amnesty where people
are grandfathered es post facto.
But we're doing amnesty
all the time.
We're just not drumrolling it.
And it's the drumrolling
it in today's media
and highly polarized environment
that Susan was talking about,
that makes it seem like it's
out of line and out of course
and like it's not what we're doing.
They're doing it all the time.
>> Ruth Wasem: Yeah.
And getting I think to the
fundamentals of what you're asking,
if you think about
fairness and equities
as being what should drive
immigration policy, then it's hard
to justify a situation where
11 million people are outside
of that frame work and have
no ability to gain access
to legal status and/or an underclass
in a society which is built
around bringing -- or should
be built around bringing people
into the society rather
than excluding them.
While often exploiting their labor.
And so I think the country
at some point has to realize
that it can't have its
cake and eat it too.
That in fact this dependence
and you know,
kind of love of your own
undocumented gardener or housekeeper
or you have a person working in the
Chinese restaurant that you go to
or order from is fine, as long as
they're out of sight, out of mind
and not legally here and
becoming part of our society.
And I think, I want
to say one more thing
and then I'll let him shut us down.
And that is building
on the fairness, yes,
there is the fairness question
of how we treat unauthorized
aliens who are currently here.
But we also have -- and I'm
looking at my colleague William --
we have 4 million approved
petitions of relatives
who are waiting to come in.
And they're waiting, and
how gets to go first?
Who gets the green card first?
What is fair?
The brother and sister?
Because we've put that
in the priorities.
And the parents, the people
that are waiting to come in,
what is the fairest way to do this?
And I think that these are
pretty tough questions.
>> Susan Martin: And they're aging
in place while they're waiting.
[ Laughter ]
>> Ruth Wasem: Yep.
>> Jason Steinhauer: This is a
conversation that we can keep going
for much longer than
we have this afternoon.
But please join me in first
thanking Dr. Marta Tienda,
Dr. Susan Martin for
joining us today.
[ Applause ]
>> Jason Steinhauer: And then if
you would, please join me again
in recognizing and thanking
Ruth for her work today,
her work over the past year and
for her successful completion
of a Kluge staff fellowship
for 2014-2015.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at LOC.gov.