Sixty years ago, on Oct. 3, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Hart- Celler Immigration Reform Act into law. LBJ’s signature ended 40 years of race-based National Origins policy that favored bringing white northern European immigrants to the U.S. and restricted immigrants from less-desirable parts of Europe, along with additional roadblocks for people from Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Six decades ago, change meant immigrants eager or desperate to come to the U.S. legally could apply without restrictions based on their country of origin. 

The legislative architect of this revolution in American demographics and culture was Emanuel Celler, a congressman who served Brooklyn, New York, two months shy of 50 years, from 1923 to 1973. I wrote a 2020 biography of Celler (1888–1981) because I was intrigued by his immigration crusade. He represented a district populated with Americans of Jewish, Italian and Irish descent plus African Americans who could trace their roots to the 1630s, when the land was Dutch-colonized New Amsterdam. 

By the 1920s, there was a nativist U.S. backlash to restrict immigrants pouring in from eastern and southern Europe, deemed the “wrong white people” to be accepted in the U.S. Celler and a handful of young congressmen representing immigrant-heavy urban districts waged a gallant but futile fight against the nativist assault. President Calvin Coolidge in 1924 signed National Origins into law. 

Celler, however, was tenacious. He sounded alarms in the late 1930s that Nazis were slaughtering Jews and argued America should open its doors to refugees. After World War II ended in 1945, the U.S. emerged as a freedom-loving, prosperous, capitalist superpower. With such power came responsibility. The U.S. needed to win the hearts and minds of people around the world who were not white but could fall under the influence of the communist Soviet Union. 

Celler was a key player with collaborator U.S. Rep. Clare Boothe Luce in convincing the U.S. to recognize the emerging democracy of India. 

Through the 1950s, Celler worked with presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower to engage in “mortgaging,” borrowing from the ample British, German and Scandinavian-favored immigration slots to bring in immigrants from restricted nations, like India, which had quotas of 100 people per year. 

Continued global Cold War politics in the 1960s compelled President John F. Kennedy to push for U.S. immigration reform. Celler was in the thick of the movement. Celler’s conservative adversary, fellow Rep. Michael Feighan, D-Ohio, believed he had a scheme to keep American immigration white. During congressional give-and-take, the immigration reform proposal favored family reunification with immigrant relatives abroad. 

Feighan’s plan, wrote Tom Gjelten in 2015, backfired. By the 1960s, Europeans were not as eager to flock to the U.S. as they had been in the early 1900s. Asians and other people of color, however, were eager to come to America. 

In 1960, 75% of foreign-born Americans came from Europe, reported Gjelten. By 1970, a few years into immigration reform, Europe-born Americans slipped to 62%. 

By 1980, the numbers flipped: 61% of foreign-born Americans came from somewhere other than Europe. That rose to 77% non-European in 1990, 84% in 2000 and 88% in 2010, according to Gjelten, “A Nation of Nations,” p. 139. 

Those numbers include a substantial number of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa who came to America not enslaved, as centuries ago, but voluntarily for opportunity and freedom. 

Indeed, demographically transformed 21st-century America faced a new nativist backlash stoked by fear and grievance. Donald Trump alleged that immigrants were taking Americans’ jobs and importing crime. Trump exaggerated and fear-mongered. American citizens generally did not want to do the physically taxing agriculture and factory jobs immigrants gladly did at low pay. 

The 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act signaled a significant positive turning point in American history, moving away from ethnically based immigration laws toward the ideal of America expressed by Emma Lazarus in her sonnet “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. 

Today, as we observe the 60th anniversary of immigration reform, the bottom-line question is whether it is time for celebration or a return to America’s core principles as a welcoming refuge for immigrants. Is this anniversary an urgent call to reinforce the law that has guided U.S. governance since 1965? 

President Ronald Reagan, a conservative GOP icon, said unequivocally in the late 1980s that immigration was good for America. Author Gjelten cited first president George Washington, who said, “The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions, whom we shall welcome to a participation in all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.” 

The writer is a professor of journalism and mass communications and the author of “Emanuel Celler: Immigration and Civil Rights Champion.”