The 1965 Immigration Act and America’s racial transformation: was it done accidentally, deceitfully, or honestly?

John Dempsey writes:

I just ran across an article written by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin in the North Carolina Law Review, vol. 75, regarding the Congressional intent of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and was wondering if you had read it, as you have been named in it by the author on page 6 of the article (to load the document go down to the bottom of the page and click one of the links for the pdf) It’s an interesting read.

LA replies:

Yes, Chin sent it to me when it was published. In an unpublished manuscript, I have a revised version of the first chapter of The Path to National Suicide where I respond to Chin’s arguments. Here is that section of the manuscript:

Since the above account of the 1965 Act was first published in my booklet The Path to National Suicide, my description of it as the “accidental” revolution has been challenged. In a book-length law review article, law professor Gabriel Chin argues that the 1965 legislators fully expected and desired a large increase in nonwhite immigration and the resulting transformation in America’s racial make-up. He concludes that since the immigration law was not passed under false or mistaken pretences, it is wrong to suggest that the law is illegitimate.

To back up his thesis, Chin contacted several former congressmen and asked them about their intentions back in 1965. Their responses, made in telephone interviews and letters, are most revealing—but not in the way Chin would have us believe. Former President Gerald Ford, who had been the House minority leader in 1965, told Chin: “As I recall, it was anticipated that the 1965 Amendments would substantially increase the number of Asian immigrants…. I favored that result.” Former Judiciary Committee member Robert Kastenmeier expected that “many more Asians would be coming to the United States.” Immigration Subcommittee member Don Edwards recalled that he knew “there would be more” Asian immigrants.

Far from discrediting the view that the revolutionary increase of Asians and other non-European immigrants was unintended, the quotes Chin has collected from the 1965 legislators support it. Their expection of “substantially” more Asian immigrants or “many” more Asian immigrants (especially given the fact that they were speaking of “substantially more” than the then current number of Asian immigrants which was almost zero), can hardly be taken to mean, as Chin would have us believe, that the legislators consciously intended to admit hundreds of thousands of Asians per year and a million nonwhites overall, thus placing America on the path to becoming a white-minority country in less than a century. Chin himself admits as much when he writes that “Jack Brooks, Charles Mathias, and Arch Moore, all members of the Immigration Subcommittee, also anticipated increased Asian immigration, although not at the level that actually occurred.” [Italics added]. In other words, the legislators expected a certain increase in Asian immigration, not the racial reconstruction of America.

An additional flaw in Chin’s argument is suggested by the circumstance that the former Congressmen made these comments to him in the mid-1990s, thirty years after the passage of the Act. If the former legislators’ remarks in 1996 about an expected “substantial” increase in Asian and other nonwhite immigration accurately reflect what they were thinking in 1965, then why were these expectations and intentions not publicly stated at the time? If the supporters of the Act were, as Chin argues, not deceived, then they were deceivers. Either way the Act was passed under false pretences. Adam Walinsky, an influential liberal aide to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy who worked on the original draft of the bill, inadvertently admitted as much when he told Chin in 1995: “{Y]ou’d have to be a real dope not to know that the number [of Asians] would go up.” Well, in that case, Robert Kennedy was either a dope or a liar when he denied that there would be any substantial increase.

In his strongest bid against my “accidental revolution” theory, Chin claims to have found a few participants of the 1965 hearings who predicted that there would be, not just some undefined “substantial” increase in Asian immigration, but a revolutionary increase that would result, said one of these witnesses, in a Chinese-American population of 114 million (!) within forty years of the Act’s passage. What Chin fails to tell his readers is that these prophets of racial transformation to whom he is referring, far from being the Administration officials and Congressmen who supported the Act, were the outspoken opponents of the Act, including Myra Hacker, whose dire warnings were dismissed by the Congress and ignored by mainstream public opinion.

Chin’s flimsy efforts to make it appear that the supporters of the Act were open about their intentions only strengthen the view that the 1965 Act was passed through a combination of thoughtlessness and deceit. Given the then-prevailing consensus that America was and should remain a European-stock nation with a European culture, it could have have happened in no other way. Yet, even as reassuring predictions of ethnic stability were used to secure the bill’s passage, its “race blind”—but really anti-European—provisions pointed toward a new, multiracial America in which the old assumptions and allegiances of nationhood would be massively discredited, and in which former Congressmen would conveniently recall—30 years after the fact—that “of course” they had expected and desired a vast increase in America’s non-white population. An intention that had to be concealed in 1965 had become, by 1995, the national orthodoxy.

John D. replies:

Thank you for sending this.

I’ve always been a believer that those that crafted this legislation had to know fairly well what the (now proven) results would be. I agree with Chin that some in this particular Congress were most extreme in advancing their race blind ideology, the same Congress which also passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, all three proposed or drafted in part by Emanuel Celler, a career-long advocate for removing national origin quotas in our immigration policy.

But I also agree with you that there must have been an element of deceit involved in order to move this into law, i.e., the “glossing over” of the non-quota numbers, which could make a case for the law’s illegitimacy. However, I think it was the intent of most in this Congress that this law should not change America’s racial make-up. But it is the intent in a man’s heart that is always the most difficult to discern. Concerning most politicians, doubly difficult. As we are painfully aware, history has its way of either being forced into the abyss or undergoing ideological embellishment and gross revision. As you insightfully observed, 30 years coupled with ideologies and societal trends has a way of obstructing one’s earlier view of these matters, even for those that participated in them. And in the end for the politician, it’s ultimately about being able to pat himself on the back and feel good about himself and his perceived accomplishments.

I would tend to agree with your line of reasoning here and you have also shown in PNS that much discussion took place to attest to the fact that it was an overall consensus by Congress that America would not be racially altered. Some cynics understandably might not agree.

This is a very difficult issue.

LA replies:

It is a difficult issue. Legislative intent normally means that we understand the meaning of a law according to the legislators’ explicit statements of what they wanted the bill to do. But it’s not that simple. Suppose, as in this case, the legislators say that they have no intention that the bill will transform America’s ethnic make-up, yet in fact the bill itself must, by its very provisions, have that result. In 1965 the Congress was passing a bill that by its fundamental provisions—equal admission to America of immigrants from every country—wiped out the very concept that there is anything historically, civilizationally, or ethnically particular to America that is valuable and has a right to be preserved, a bill which said that ultimately America must become a mirror of the whole world. Yet at the same time the legislators said that the bill would not change America’s ethnic balance in any significant way!

The only way to describe such a situation is that the legislators were uncomprehending or deceitful. I think a critic must say of such legislators, that regardless of their statements made to accommodate public opinion to this bill, its real effect had to be—and has been—radically to transform America. Therefore the legislators were naive or dishonest in their assurances, and this bill was passed under false pretences.

But we must remember that this is the general modus operandi of liberalism Liberals and leftists always misrepresent what they are doing, whether the misrepresentation is deliberate, to deceive others, or naive, to deceive themselves, because liberal legislation does things to a society that its people would not accept if it were presented to them plainly. But once the new law has been passed, by deceit, suddenly its principle and its practical results, which previously had to be hidden, are declared openly. What formerly had to conceal itself, overnight becomes the new orthodoxy that no one can challenge. That’s what happened with the 1965 Immigration Act and with many other laws and judicial decisions in modern times.

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Mark Jaws writes:

Perhaps the drafters of the 1965 Act assumed white birthrates would have remained high, and hence there’d have been no demographic collapse. If Boomer women had had 3.5 kids, there’d be an additional 25M white children today.

LA replies:

They really weren’t assuming anything. There was NO THOUGHT about the substantial effect of this bill on America. As Sam Ervin, one of the few senators who DID think, said in the Senate debate, the bill made Afghanistan equal to Britain as far as immigration to the U.S. was concerned. Without putting it in so many words, the bill said that America should become the mirror of the world.

True, most of the legislators didn’t think about the long-term effect of this logic on America. But that’s the way liberalism works. You put in place a liberal principle, while still imagining that a familiar, traditional, non-liberal social order will somehow keep existing. In effect, by putting that liberal principle in place, you’ve turned the existing society into an unprincipled exception to liberalism. And so, when the liberal principle inevitably begins to have practical effects and to topple that social order, the only legitimate principle remaining is the liberal principle, not the legitimacy of the familiar society. And at that point liberalism with its destruction of the historic and the traditional takes over completely.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 20, 2008 04:56 PM | Send