jan 1, 1986 - congress passes the Imigration Reform And Control Act

Description:

imigration and nationality act of 1965: A 1965 law that eliminated the discriminatory 1924 nationality quotas, established a higher total limit on immigration, and gave immigration preferences to those with skills in high demand or immediate family members in the United States.
multiculturalism:Diversity in gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual preference. This political and social policy became increasingly popular in the United States during the 1980s post–civil rights era.
Proposition 209:A proposition approved by California voters in 1996 that outlawed affirmative action in state employment and public education.

By most demographic predictions, the United States will become a “majority-minority” nation by 2050. No single ethnic or racial group will be in the numerical majority. This was already the case in four states by 2010 — California, Texas, Hawaii, and New Mexico — where African Americans, Latinos, and Asians together constituted a majority of the state’s residents. This long-range trend first became evident in the 1990s, sparking debates about identity and related public policies such as affirmative action.

EXAM TIP
Compare the “culture war” of the 1990s to the cultural conflicts in the 1920s and 1950s.

New Immigrants
According to the Census Bureau, the population of the United States grew from 203 million in 1970 to 280 million in 2000 (see “Firsthand Accounts”). Of that 77-million-person increase, immigrants accounted for 28 million, with documented entrants numbering 21 million and undocumented entrants adding another 7 million (Figure 30.2). As a result, by 2010, 27 percent of California’s population was foreign-born, as was 22 percent of New York’s, 21 percent of New Jersey’s, and 19 percent of Florida’s — though 2020 census figures were not available when this textbook went to press, the number of foreign-born residents of the United States is expected to be the highest since 1910. Relatively few of the newest Americans came from Europe, which had dominated immigration to the United States between 1880 and 1924. The overwhelming majority of immigrants — some 25 million, or 9 out of every 10 — from 1970 to 2000 came from one of two places: Latin America (16 million) and East Asia (9 million) (Map 30.2).

EXAM TIP
Recognize the impact of changes in immigration policy on American culture and the economy.

A stacked horizontal column graph shows exports from 1960 to 2009 for various regions of birth.
FIGURE 30.2 Regions of Birth for Immigrants in the United States, 1960–2017

This shows the foreign-born population of the United States by their region of origin between 1960 and 2017. In those decades, immigration from Europe slowed; thus the European-born population of the United States began to decline (as the children of immigrants were born in the United States). In contrast, immigration from the Caribbean and Latin America, Asia, and Africa accelerated, leading to expanding foreign-born populations from those regions. This shift in immigration patterns was made possible by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. As a result, the United States continued to be a diverse nation of immigrants, with Latin America and Asia increasingly leading the way. By 2017, Asian American and Latinx people together made up 25 percent of the U.S. population.

The vertical axis plots number of years ranging from 1960 to 2010, in increments of 10 years. The horizontal axis plots share of total immigrant population, in percent, ranging from 0 percent to 100 percent, in increments of 10 percent. The approximate data from the graph are as follows.

1960: Europe: 72 percent; Asia, 8 percent; Latin America and the Caribbean, 19 percent; Not reported, 1 percent.

1970: Europe: 60 percent; Asia, 10 percent; Latin America and the Caribbean, 25 percent; Africa, 1 percent; Not reported, 4 percent.

1980: Europe: 35 percent; Asia, 20 percent; Latin America and the Caribbean, 35 percent; Africa, 3 percent; Not reported, 7 percent.

1990: Europe: 25 percent; Asia, 20 percent; Latin America and the Caribbean, 47 percent; Africa, 3 percent; Not reported, 5 percent.

2000: Europe: 15 percent; Asia, 30 percent; Latin America and the Caribbean, 50 percent; Africa, 5 percent.

2010: Europe: 12 percent; Asia, 30 percent; Latin America and the Caribbean, 52 percent; Africa, 6 percent.

2017: Europe: 11 percent; Asia, 32 percent; Latin America and the Caribbean, 50 percent; Africa, 7 percent.

Two color-coded maps of United States show Latino and Asian Populations in 2000.
MAPPING THE PAST

MAP 30.2 Latino and Asian Populations, 2000

In 2000, people of Latin American descent made up more than 11 percent of the American population, and they now outnumber African Americans as the largest minority group. Asian Americans accounted for an additional 4 percent of the population. Demographers predict that by the year 2050 only about half of the U.S. population will be composed of non-Latino whites. Note the high percentage of Latinos and Asians in California and certain other states.

ANALYZING THE MAP: In what states and regions are immigrants from Latin America concentrated? Where are immigrants from Asia concentrated? Which specific states attract the most immigrants overall?

MAKING CONNECTIONS: How do the changes illustrated on this map relate to regional and national identity in the United States? How does the impact of immigrants on American identity illustrate both continuity and change over time?

The first map gives the following data with major Latino population.

41 percent of state population: New Mexico.

30 to 36 percent of state population: California and Texas.

18 to 23 percent of state population: Arizona.

12 to 17 percent of state population: Nevada, Colorado, New York, and Florida.

6 to 11 percent of state population: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Illinois, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

0 to 5 percent of state population: Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Maine, Washington D. C., Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Alaska.

The Cities with Major Latino Population are as follows.

3,000,000 to 5,000,000: Los Angeles

2,000,000 to 3,000,000: New York

500,000 to 2,000,000: San Francisco, San Diego, San Antonio, Houston, Miami.

100,000 to 500,000: Fresno, Visalia, Brownsville, Corpus Christi, McAllen, Laredo.

The second map gives the following data with major Asian population.

64 percent of state population: California

12 percent of state population: Alaska

4 to 6 percent of state population: Washington, Nevada, New York, Virginia.

2 to 3 percent of state population: Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Texas, Minnesota, Illinois, Georgia, Rhode Island, Connecticut.

Less than 2 percent of state population: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maine, Vermont.

The Cities with Major Asian Population are as follows.

Over 2,000,000: California

Over 500,000: Hawaii, New York

Over 200,000: Washington, Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland.

Over 100,000: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida.

A photo shows a man and a woman fruit seller with the man holding a banknote.
New Immigrants

In the early years of the 2000s, more immigrants lived in the United States than at any time since the first decades of the twentieth century. Most came from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Many, like those pictured here, started small businesses that helped revive the economies of urban and suburban neighborhoods across the country.

This extraordinary inflow was an unintended result of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a relatively unheralded but highly influential element of Great Society legislation (see “Great Society Initiatives” in Chapter 27). Also known as the Hart-Celler Act, the legislation eliminated the 1924 quota system, which gave preference to immigrants from Western and Northern Europe. In its place, the 1965 law created a more equal playing field among nations of origin and a slightly higher total limit on immigration. The legislation also eased the entry of immigrants who possessed skills in high demand in the United States. Finally, a provision with far-reaching implications was included in the new law: immediate family members of those already legally residing in the United States were admitted outside of the total numerical limit.

American residents hailing from Latin America and the Caribbean were best positioned to take advantage of the family provision. Mexican, Dominican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan families reunited by the millions, and Latinos surpassed African Americans as a percentage of the overall population. This surge in immigration also altered the emerging global economy. The new Americans often sent substantial portions of their earnings, called remittances, back to family members in their home countries. In 2015 alone, workers in the United States sent $25 billion to Mexico, a massive remittance flow that constituted Mexico’s third largest source of foreign exchange.

Asian immigration came largely from China, the Philippines, South Korea, India, and Pakistan, as well as 700,000 refugees from Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), who arrived during and after the Vietnam War. This inflow from Asian nations signaled more than just a population increase. As immigration from Asia increased, as Japan and China grew more influential economically, and as transoceanic trade accelerated, commentators on both sides of the ocean acknowledged an emerging “Pacific Rim” region, which included the United States, Southeast and East Asia, Canada, and Australia.

Most new immigrants arrived under the terms of the 1965 law. But those who entered without legal documentation stirred political controversy. Two decades after the new law, there were between three and five million such immigrants. To remedy this situation, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, which combined legalization for unauthorized immigrants with preventative measures to limit future immigration. The law granted citizenship to many of those who had arrived outside the law’s numerical limits, but also provided incentives for employers not to hire undocumented immigrants and increased surveillance along the border with Mexico. A subsequent, more liberal law passed by Congress in 1990 increased the number of immigrants with certain in-demand job skills permitted to enter the country — in effect, expanding the category of “legal” immigrant.

These reforms did not satisfy increasingly loud immigration critics. In 1992, as he campaigned for president, Patrick Buchanan warned Americans that their country was “undergoing the greatest invasion in its history, a migration of millions of illegal aliens a year from Mexico.” When Buchanan’s movement sputtered at the federal level, many anti-immigrant activists began turning to the states. They garnered a quick victory in 1994, when Californians approved Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that barred undocumented immigrants from public schools, nonemergency care at public health clinics, and all other state social services. After three years in federal court, however, the controversial measure was ruled unconstitutional. State-level efforts reemerged a decade later, in 2010 and 2011, when the Arizona and Alabama legislatures passed modified versions of Proposition 187. The federal courts, including the Supreme Court, ruled some elements of the laws unconstitutional but allowed others, such as mandatory citizenship checks during law enforcement stops, to remain. In 2016, immigration hard-liners massed behind Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who pledged to “build a wall” along the border with Mexico and to deport the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants by then residing in the United States.

Debates over post-1965 immigration resembled the argument over new arrivals in the early decades of the century. Then, many native-born white Protestants worried that predominantly Jewish and Catholic immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, along with African American migrants from the South, threatened the “purity” of the nation. In this view, the nation was white and Protestant. The conflicts looked the same, but the cultural paradigm had shifted. In the earlier era, the melting pot — a term borrowed from the title of a 1908 play — became the metaphor for how American society would accommodate, and assimilate, its newfound diversity. Some native-born Americans found solace in the melting-pot concept because it implied that a single “American” culture would ultimately prevail. In the 1990s, however, the idea of multiculturalism emerged, laying out a new definition of social diversity. Americans, this concept suggested, were not a single people that absorbed minorities. Rather, Americans as a whole comprised a diverse set of ethnic and racial groups — as well as religious and sexual — each with unique perspectives and experiences, living and working together.

Critics charged that multiculturalism sowed division and conferred preferential treatment on nonwhite groups. Many government policies, as well as a large number of private employers, continued to support affirmative action programs designed to bring African Americans and Latinos into public-roup private-sector jobs and universities in larger numbers. Conservatives argued that such governmental programs were deeply flawed because they promoted “reverse discrimination” against white men and women and awarded jobs and opportunities to less qualified applicants. As with immigration, California stood at the center of the debate. In 1995, the regents of the University of California scrapped their entire affirmative action admissions policy, and a year later California voters approved Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in state employment and public education. In 1995, at the height of the controversy, President Bill Clinton delivered a major speech reminding Americans that Richard Nixon, a Republican president, had endorsed affirmative action, and Clinton concluded by saying the nation should “mend it,” not “end it.”


As in the Bakke decision of the 1970s (see “Civil Rights in a New Era” in Chapter 28), the U.S. Supreme Court spoke loudest and last. In two parallel 2003 cases, the Court invalidated an affirmative action plan at the University of Michigan but allowed racial preference policies that promoted a “diverse” student body. Affirmative action had been narrowed, but its constitutional footing was preserved. States and public institutions could take race into account, as one factor among many, so long as the goal was a diversity beneficial to all.

Additional anxieties about a multicultural nation centered on language. In 1998, Silicon Valley software entrepreneur Ron Unz sponsored a California initiative calling for an end to bilingual education in public schools. Unz argued that bilingual education did not adequately prepare Spanish-speaking students to succeed in an English-speaking society. Unlike many anti-immigrant hard-liners, Unz cast his proposal, known as Proposition 227, as benefitting immigrants themselves, or at least their children. But when he unfavorably compared Latino immigrants to his own Jewish grandparents “who came to California in the 1920s and 1930s as poor European immigrants [to work]… not to sit back and be a burden on those who were already here,” many of his opponents accused him, and his measure, of anti-Latino bias. The state’s white, Anglo residents largely approved of the measure; most Mexican American, Asian American, and civil rights organizations opposed it. The passage of 227 — with a 61 percent majority in the nation’s most diverse state — seemed to confirm the limits of multiculturalism.

Added to timeline:

Date: