Imagine you're part of a highly exclusive club,
and the founders of this club set up these incredibly
rigid rules for who gets in. Right, like a carefully
curated, highly restricted guest list. Exactly.
They basically ensure that only people who look
talk and act exactly like them ever make it past
the velvet rope. But eventually, you know, the
pressure gets too high. Oh, totally. You can't
keep that up forever. Right. People are protesting
outside. The optics are just terrible on the
global stage. So the club leaders say, fine,
we'll change the rules. We'll make the admissions
process fair. But there's a catch, right? There's
a huge catch. They promise the existing members.
They literally swear to them that the actual
identity and demographic makeup of the club will
not change at all. Which, I mean, When you think
about the actual mechanics of human behavior
and global movement, that is an impossible promise
to keep. Completely impossible. Because the new
rules end up fundamentally rewiring the club's
entire DNA in ways the founders explicitly promised
wouldn't happen. Yeah. And that club we're talking
about is the United States. Yep. And those new
rules were the Immigration to Nationality Act
of 1965. You might also hear it called the Hartzeller
Act. Right. So today, our mission for this deep
dive is to explore how this one single piece
of legislation, which was actually signed by
President Lyndon B. Johnson at the foot of the
Statue of Liberty, changed absolutely everything.
It really did. We're going to look at how rewired
the demographic DNA of the country and how its
unintended consequences are still like the invisible
architecture dictating the headlines you read
today. OK, let's unpack this. Yeah, to really
grasp the magnitude of what happened in 1965,
we have to start by looking at the system they
were trying to dismantle. Because, you know,
you can't understand the cure without understanding
the disease. That makes sense. So before 1965,
US immigration was governed by something called
the National Origins Formula, which was established
back in the 1920s. Right. And its purpose was
incredibly blunt. I mean, it was designed specifically
to preserve American homogeneity by heavily favoring
immigrants from Northern and Western Europe.
It was essentially a demographic freezing mechanism.
And it's wild how they did it. The lawmakers
in the 1920s actually used an older census, the
1890 census, to calculate the quotas. Wait, 1890?
Why would they go back that far if it was the
1920s? They did that entirely on purpose because
in 1890, the massive waves of Italian, Eastern
European, and Jewish immigrants hadn't really
arrived yet. Oh, wow. Yeah. So by tying the quotas
to that older data, they legally locked the door
behind the Northern Europeans. That is, I mean,
it's just... calculated. And the numbers from
that time are striking. Prior to the 1965 act,
the United States was about 85 % white. Right.
Black people, most of whom were descendants of
enslaved people, made up about 11 % of the population.
And Latinos made up less than 4%. And it wasn't
just a subtle preference either. The 1920s laws
were so explicitly race based and focused on
keeping out those undesirable groups from southern
and eastern Europe, not to mention almost entirely
banning immigration from Asia and Africa, that
Adolf Hitler actually praised them. Wait, really?
Hitler praised US immigration policy. He did.
He wrote admiringly about America's exclusionary
laws in Mein Kampf. He literally cited them as
a model for racial purity. That is a chilling
detail. I mean, when the architect of the Holocaust
is taking notes from your immigration policy,
that is a profound indicator of how legally entrenched
this racial exclusion was. Absolutely. But, you
know, by the 1960s, that system was cracking
under pressure. Domestically, you had the Civil
Rights Movement. You just couldn't be passing
the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act
at home while maintaining a racially discriminatory
quota system at your borders. Exactly. But if
we connect this to the bigger picture, the domestic
pressure was only half the story. The international
pressure was just boiling over. And you have
to remember the context of the Cold War. Right.
The U .S. versus the Soviet Union. Yeah. The
United States was in this global battle for ideological
supremacy. They're trying to win the allegiance
of all these newly independent nations across
Africa and Asia, right? Exactly. Decolonization
is sweeping the globe. New nations are forming
and joining the UN. And the Soviet Union is actively
using American immigration policy as a massive
propaganda weapon. Because it's so obviously.
hypocritical. Right. They're pointing at the
U .S. and telling these new African and Asian
nations, look at them. They claim to be the beacon
of democracy, but their laws explicitly state,
your people are inherently inferior and not welcome.
Wow. U .S. foreign policy just couldn't effectively
operate under that hypocrisy. I have a nightmare
for them diplomatically. Which brings up something
I really want to dig into with you. If the global
pressure was that intense, and the domestic civil
rights pressure was that intense, why didn't
presidents like Truman or Eisenhower fix it earlier?
That's a great question. Like, why was it so
incredibly hard to pass this reform? Who was
actively guarding the door? Well, the guardians
of that door were a group of very powerful conservative
politicians who controlled the immigration subcommittees
in Congress. Men like Senator James Eastland
and Representative Michael Fan, they vehemently
opposed immigration reform because they genuinely
wanted to maintain that white European ethnic
profile of the country. They held the levers
of bureaucratic power, and they simply refused
to let any reform bills out of committee. Even
President John F. Kennedy, who started this whole
reform push, he actually wrote a pamphlet called
The Nation of Immigrants back in 1958. Even he
couldn't get it past them. Nope. He was completely
blocked. It wasn't until after Kennedy's assassination
that Lyndon B. Johnson used his massive political
capital. LBJ framed immigration reform as a continuation
of Kennedy's legacy and tied it to the broader
civil rights push, finally forcing the issue
onto the floor. Because the geopolitical and
domestic pressures made some kind of reform inevitable,
the resistance didn't just die, it mutated. And
that mutation took place in the gritty, unglamorous
committee rooms of Congress. That's where a political
compromise was struck that is arguably one of
the greatest historical ironies in United States
law. Here's where it gets really interesting.
To get this bill through Representative Fein's
subcommittee, they had to compromise on how the
new quote unquote fair visas would actually be
handed out. Yeah. And Fein insisted that family
unification had to take priority over employability
or skilled labor. And we really have to look
at the mechanics of his reasoning here. Feyen
pushed for family reunification because he looked
at the country, saw that it was 85 % white and
European, and calculated that prioritizing the
relatives of people already in the U .S. would
simply result in more white Europeans immigrating.
Oh, I see. Yeah, if you prioritize family and
the family already here is European, the new
arrivals will be European. He thought he was
building a mechanical workaround to maintain
the racial status quo without explicitly using
race in the text of the law. It's like he tried
to build a dam to stop a river, but accidentally
engineered a massive canal right into the country
because his plan backfired spectacularly. I mean,
he completely misread global economics, didn't
he? He absolutely did. By the mid -1960s, Europeans
largely weren't migrating in the numbers they
used to. The Marshall Plan had worked. European
economies were recovering post -World War II,
so the urgent economic drive to leave Europe
was fading. But immigrants from outside Europe,
who did manage to get in... maybe through a student
visa or a high skilled labor exemption, could
now use those family preference categories to
bring over their spouses, their children, and
their siblings. Exactly. And this is the birth
of what sociologists call chain migration. By
prioritizing family ties over everything else,
the law inadvertently created a compounding demographic
shift. How did that actually look in practice?
Let's look at how it physically worked. One highly
educated immigrant arrives from, say, South Korea.
They establish citizenship. They sponsor their
siblings. Those siblings arrive, get established,
and sponsor their own spouses. And then it just
keeps going. Right. Those spouses sponsor their
parents or their siblings. It's exponential growth.
It rapidly accelerated immigration from Asia,
Africa, and Latin America. And the lawmakers
at the time were just entirely blind to this
reality. When the bill is being debated and it
passed by wide margins by the way like 74 percent
of Democrats and 85 percent of Republicans voted
for it Politicians were literally standing on
the Senate floor making sweeping promises. They
couldn't possibly keep oh The quotes from that
time are amazing Yeah, Ted Kennedy publicly assured
the American public that and this is a direct
quote the ethnic mix of this country will not
be upset Which really goes to show that legislation
is essentially a massive experiment on society.
The lawmakers of 1965 abolished the old racist
national origins formula, which was undeniably
historic and necessary. Right, totally. But they
fundamentally misunderstood the mechanical reality
of the new system they just built. They thought
they were tweaking a dial, but they had actually
installed an entirely new engine. Well, let's
talk about the mechanics of that engine, because
knowing who they wanted to let in didn't solve
the problem of how to actually process them.
Congress had to build an entirely new bureaucratic
machine, and that resulted in a category preference
system. Right, because if you're abolishing quotas
based on race, you need a new metric. So they
prioritized relatives of U .S. citizens first.
Then they prioritized professionals and people
with specialized skills, and finally, refugees.
Okay. But to handle the skilled workers, they
introduced something called a labor certification
requirement. Okay, stop right there, because
this is a huge piece of the puzzle. How does
a company actually prove an American can't do
the job? I mean, they can't just send a letter
to the government saying, hey, we need a guy,
right? No, exactly. It created a massive new
layer of corporate immigration law. The Secretary
of Labor had to legally certify that there was
an actual shortage of American workers for that
specific job in that specific location before
a foreign worker could be brought in. That sounds
like a ton of paperwork. No, it was. The employer
had to prove they tried to hire locally, that
they were offering a prevailing wage, and that
hiring an immigrant wouldn't dep... the wages
of Americans. So if you're listening to this
and you work in tech, or maybe agriculture, and
you hear about visa categories today, like the
H -1B for software engineers or the H -2A for
seasonal farm workers, the DNA for those complex
wage rules and certifications was written right
here in the 1965 act. That's the structural legacy,
but while they were building this complex new
system to open up the Eastern Hemisphere, you
know, increasing visas for Asia and Africa, they
made a crucial profound shift regarding the Western
Hemisphere. What did they do? For the very first
time in U .S. history, the 1965 Act placed a
strict numerical cap on immigration from the
Americas. They capped it at 120 ,000 people annually.
Wait, I need to make sure I'm understanding this.
By making the global system more quote unquote
fair and ending the European quotas, they simultaneously
clamped down on their next door neighbors. That
is exactly what happened. It's like sharing a
driveway with your neighbor for decades and Suddenly,
in the name of making your house more open to
strangers, you build a toll booth in the middle
of that shared driveway. That's a great way to
visualize it. Historically, before this act,
there were no numerical limits on the Western
Hemisphere. And there was a very specific economic
reason for that, which was American agriculture.
Right. Farm labor. Yeah. Migrant agricultural
workers from Mexico and other parts of the Americas
could move relatively freely across the border.
They would come north to work the critical farming
seasons in the U .S., harvest the crops, and
then return home. So it was just a regular cycle?
Exactly. It was a circular, functional, general...
The border wasn't a hard wall for labor. It was
a commute. And I imagine the agricultural industry
was just terrified of this cap. Did they just
sit by and let Congress close the driveway? Not
at all. Agricultural lobbyists like the American
Farm Bureau were furious. They went to the congressional
hearings and practically screamed that placing
an arbitrary cap of $120 ,000 on the Western
Hemisphere was going to ruin their industry.
I bet. They argued that the U .S. economy relied
heavily on that seasonal labor and that a cap
wouldn't magically make Americans want to do
backbreaking agricultural work. But they were
ignored. And it's incredible how a policy designed
to fix an injustice in one hemisphere accidentally
criminalized a functional labor market in another.
Because putting a cap on visas didn't magically
put a cap on the economic demand for those workers,
did it? Precisely. By cutting off legal circular
migration from the Western Hemisphere, the law
didn't stop the flow of people. It just made
the existing natural flow illegal. The 1965 Act
inadvertently created the modern framework of
unauthorized border crossings. That is just,
it's a staggering reality. You abolish a racist
quota system, but in the exact same pen stroke,
you lay the foundation for a massive modern border
crisis in the Southwest. The same law that let
the light in also built a new wall. And because
the law simultaneously opened the doors wide
to Asia and Africa through family reunification
while artificially restricting the Americas,
the decades following 1965 saw a transformed
America grappling with entirely new social demographic
and legal realities. The demographic shift is
just mind blowing when you look at the numbers.
Pew Research estimates that without the 1965
act, the United States in 2015 would have been
75 percent white. and less than 1 % Asian. That's
a huge difference. Huge! Instead, it sparked
a wave that brought in millions. Let's look at
one specific example. In just the 20 years following
the act, 25 ,000 Filipino professional workers
entered the U .S., including thousands of nurses.
And there is a very mechanical reason for that.
Remember the labor certification we talked about?
Oh, right. The proof of shortage. Exactly. American
hospitals were facing massive nursing shortages,
so it was incredibly easy for a hospital to prove
to the Department of Labor that they needed to
hire Filipino nurses. The mechanism of the law
perfectly met the economic demand of the health
care sector, completely changing the fabric of
the American workforce. It's a beautiful example
of the law actually working the way it was supposed
to. But we also have to look at where the law
failed or, well rather, who it actively targeted.
Yeah, that's important. Because while the Act
removed national origin discrimination, it's
wild to realize that a law celebrated for ending
racial discrimination simultaneously codified
discrimination against other groups. Yes, the
concept of progress in legislation is rarely
absolute. It's almost always selective. Even
after 1965, the Immigration and Naturalization
Service continued to ban LGBTQ plus immigrants
from entering the country. How did they legally
justify that if the whole point of the new law
was equality? They bypassed the concept of equality
by classifying LGBTQ plus individuals under medical
and psychological exclusions. Wait, what? Yeah,
they banned them under the guise of being mentally
defective or having a constitutional psychopathic
inferiority. The medicalization of homosexuality
was used as a legal loophole to maintain a strict
barrier. That is awful. And that outright ban
wasn't formally rescinded until the Immigration
Act of 1990. 1990. That's so recent. It's a dark
reminder that bureaucratic definitions can be
weaponized just as effectively as quotas. And
returning to the Western hemisphere cap, those
dominoes kept falling, too. Just as the agricultural
lobbyists warned, the restriction led to a massive
rise in illegal immigration. Which in turn led
to the militarization of the southern border
in the 1970s and 80s, rising apprehensions, and
eventually forced Congress to pass the Immigration
Reform and Control Act of 1986. And to clean
up the mess. Basically, they had to deal with
the millions of unauthorized workers who had
settled permanently because the circular migration
pattern was broken. And those historical dominoes
are still crashing right into our current legal
battles. I mean, the non -discrimination clauses
of the 1965 act, the very rules designed to stop
things like the national origins formula, actually
became a central weapon. in recent Supreme Court
clashes. Yes, they did, because the act explicitly
made it illegal to discriminate based on national
origin or religion when issuing visas. Right.
So if we jump forward to 2017, President Donald
Trump issued an executive order temporarily halting
immigration from several majority Muslim nations,
which is often referred to as the travel ban.
And to be clear, we're just looking at the legal
mechanisms here, not taking sides on the policy
itself. But when that happened, lower federal
courts immediately stepped in and used the 1965
Act to block it. Exactly. They essentially argued,
look at the Hart -Celler Act. It specifically
forbids nationality -based discrimination. The
executive branch can't just ignore a statute
passed by Congress. But the legal friction goes
much deeper than that. When the battle went all
the way up to the U .S. Supreme Court in June
2018, the court ultimately upheld a version of
the travel ban. Right. They overturned the lower
courts. Yes. And their reasoning centered on
the immense power of the executive branch. They
ruled that the president has broad delegated
authority over national security and border control
and that this specific authority was not undermined
or erased by the 1965 acts non -discrimination
provisions. It perfectly illustrates how a text
from 1965 isn't just historical artifact gathering
dust, it is actively wrestling with the executive
powers of the 21st century. The tension between
congressional lawmaking and presidential authority
is literally playing out using the vocabulary
of 1965. It really is. And this raises an important
question, one that I think anyone studying policy,
history or law needs to sit with. What's that?
Can any single immigration policy, no matter
how well -intentioned or carefully drafted, ever
truly account for the complex realities of human
movement, global economics and the fundamental
desire of families to be together? Or are we
always just creating new, rigid rules for a fluid
world? Man. So what does this all mean for you?
listening to this today. It really makes you
wonder if the law is always just playing catch
-up with human nature. Let's tie this all together.
Sounds good. Whether you are prepping for a policy
debate, trying to understand the evening news,
or you just love uncovering the hidden gears
of history, knowing the mechanics of the 1965
Hart -Seller Act is your a skeleton key to understanding
modern American demographics. Absolutely. It
proves that the how of a law You know, the boring
mechanical compromises like prioritizing family
over labor or throwing a numerical cap on a specific
hemisphere is often so much more impactful than
the lofty why that politicians sell to the public.
The mechanics always outlast the rhetoric, always.
And speaking of old mechanics outlasting modern
rhetoric, I want to leave you with one final
fascinating detail to mull over. Oh, I love these.
What is it? Well, we've talked about how the
1965 Act overhauled everything. It abolished
the 1920s quotas. It created new hemispheric
caps. It instituted labor certifications. It
entirely rewrote the rules of the club. Right.
But. Amid all that massive bureaucratic overhaul,
it specifically left one incredibly old piece
of law untouched. Wait, so we completely rewire
the entire U .S. immigration system, place strict
caps on our neighbors, build a complex visa machine.
But there is one group that can bypass all of
this because of a treaty from, what, the 1700s?
Exactly. The provisions of the 1794 J Treaty.
1794. Yeah, it was signed with the United Kingdom
back when the U .S. was still in its infancy.
To this day, the provisions of that treaty still
apply, legally guaranteeing Native Americans
born in Canada the freedom of movement across
the United States border. That is wild. They
don't need the visas or the labor certifications
we just spent the last 15 minutes detailing.
Despite all the modern caps, quotas, and border
militarization, that profound ancient indigenous
right still quietly survives deep inside the
machinery of modern bureaucracy. It's an amazing
reminder to look closely at the rules of whatever
club you're in, because sometimes times, the
most profound forces shaping the future are the
political compromises no one paid attention to,
and the engine promises no one dared to erase.
Thanks for joining us on this Deep Dive.