60 Years of the Hart-Celler Act and Mass Immigration

Sixty years ago today, on October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Immigration Act into law. Little did the man who declared war on poverty know that he was restarting mass immigration, ending the Great Leveling, and ushering in a new era of economic inequality.

Ironically, Johnson Congress created new economic barriers to equality within a month of passing landmark civil rights legislation. George Fishman, who has served in both the Executive and Legislative Branches, likens their mistake to a Greek tragedy. But what once could be forgiven as a costly but honest miscalculation must now be acknowledged as a willful refusal to manage immigration in the national interest. Despite the temporary improvements at the border over the last few months, mass legal immigration continues at levels well beyond what federal commissions have recommended or Americans voted for. It’s easy for Congress to break its promises, and so very very hard to keep them.

Increasing immigration was never the goal

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” Johnson declared at the signing ceremony. “The days of unlimited immigration are past.” Not only was Johnson wrong, he was historically wrong. The 1965 Act started the largest wave of mass immigration by actual numbers, percentage of population, and length of time that America has ever seen. That wave continues to this this day.

Johnson was far from alone in his insistence that the bill would not increase immigration levels, which had averaged less than 300,000 per year for four decades prior to 1965, contributing to the greatest period of economic mobility in American history.

Rep. Emmanuel “Manny” Celler (D-N.Y.), one of the bill’s authors, also stressed that his bill “in no way significantly increases the basic numbers of
immigrants to be permitted entry. We are not talking about increased immigration.”

“This bill is not designed to increase or accelerate the numbers of newcomers permitted to come to America. Indeed, this measure provides for an increase of
only a small fraction in permissible immigration,” added Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.

“The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants,” echoed Sen. Edward (Ted) Kennedy.

The Hart-Celler bill was viewed by many as a way to honor Kennedy’s slain brother, President John F. Kennedy, who also believed – as he wrote in A Nation Of Immigrants – that immigration numbers should not be increased:

“We no longer need settlers for virgin lands, and our economy is expanding more slowly than in the 19th and early 20th centuries. … [My proposals] will have little effect on the number of immigrants admitted. … The clash of opinion arises not
over the number of immigrants to be admitted but over the test for admissions.”

Righting an old wrong; creating a new one

President Johnson and most of Congress were trying to address one specific aspect of the immigration system that had been the law of the land since 1924: national-origin quotas made it virtually impossible for anyone outside of Europe to immigrate to the United States. The 1924 Act drastically reduced immigration from Europe, but it effectively banned immigration from other parts of the world, regardless of an individual’s merit. If the fundamental questions of immigration policy are “how many” and “which ones,” the 1924 Act was right on the former, and wrong on the latter.

“Everywhere else in our national life, we have eliminated discrimination based on national origins,” Senator Ted Kennedy said, “Yet this system is still the foundation of our immi­gration law.”   

Kennedy and his fellow reformers vowed to leave the successful “how many” part of the 1924 Act in place. They promised a system that would admit 265,000 immigrants per year. Their aim was only to recalibrate the “which ones” part. The new system, they promised, would be less discriminatory.  A nuclear physicist, for instance, wouldn’t be denied just because he or she came from the “wrong” part of the world.  

In the end, the bill changed both the “which ones” and the “how many.” The discriminatory quotas were abolished, but immigration numbers almost immediately doubled. Decades of declining inequality, an expanding middle class, and shrinking racial wealth gaps were halted and reversed.

At what point does a mistake become intentional?

Just before the presidential election of 2024, David Leonhardt of the New York Times warned: “It simply is not sustainable in a Democracy, to have our elected representatives promise us one thing and then have it do the exact opposite of what they promised . . . We’re not going to get to a sustainable immigration system until Washington reckons with the past failure to produce what it promised the American people it was going to produce.”

That reckoning has been a long time coming.

In 1972, the “Commission on Population Growth and the American Future,” created by Congress and chaired by philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, recommended that immigration not be allowed to rise above 400,000 per year. Four years later, the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, chaired by Reverend Theodore Hesburg of Notre Dame University (and previous chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission), called for a ceiling of 350,000 for annual admissions. Congress ignored both of the recommendations.

By the 1980s, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act had demonstrably failed to deliver the promised tight labor markets for American workers. In addition to the increases in legal immigration, employers were hiring illegal workers instead of Americans as well. Congress and President Regan attempted a compromise solution in 1986 by issuing amnesty to 3 million illegal workers in return for promised workplace enforcement. The enforcement never materialized; another broken promise. 

Meanwhile, business lobbies had become reaccustomed to ample access to a global labor market, and were lobbying for more. A year after the 1986 amnesty, the Department of Labor warned of a looming worker shortage unless America embraced an “unprecedented opportunity” to “provide better job prospects for historically disadvantaged groups and to invest more heavily in their education and training.”

Congress found another solution. They passed the largest immigration increase in U.S. history. The Immigration Act of 1990 was signed into law just before a recession struck. Immigration soared to over one million per year.

The President’s Council on Sustainable Development was formed in 1993 during the Clinton Administration. They recommended reducing immigration to allow the U.S. population to stabilize. At the time, the U.S. population was roughly 260,000,000 and annual immigration was 900,000 per year and was increasingly driving U.S. population growth. Congress ignored their recommendation.

The Jordan Solution to Hart-Celler

Champions of American workers did get one concession from the 1990 bill: a mandate for a bipartisan commission to “review and evaluate the impact of this Act and the amendments made by this Act” and to issue findings and recommendations on (among other things) the “impact of immigration…on labor needs, employment, and other economic and domestic conditions in the United States.” That commission became known as the “Jordan Commission,” after its chairwoman, Barbara Jordan.

Jordan and her bipartisan commission recommended immigration levels to be reduced to 550,000 per year. They would do this primarily by ending the chain migration of extended family members, and by eliminating the visa lottery. Additionally, the commission called for the mandatory verification that employers were not hiring illegal workers (what we now call E-Verify). With Jordan as the unimpeachable leader, the immigration-reduction movement had won the support of leaders in Congress and the President of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Tragically, Jordan’s premature death in 1996 left a leadership vacuum, which supporters of mass immigration quickly filled. With Jordan missing from the field, Congress and the White House lost the political will to take on the special interests seeking wealth and power from an immigration policy that systematically privatized gains and socialized costs. Her vision to combine the low-immigration numbers of the 1924 immigration system with the non-discriminatory intention of the Hart-Celler Act remains the blueprint for sensible, sustainable immigration reform to this day.

NumbersUSA was formed the year Barbara Jordan died. Her commission’s recommendations now form the backbone of our Six Great Solutions to reform immigration.