An Act of Hatred

The Boston Globe today posts an amazing story openly attributing Barack Obama's recent election as President of the United States to the 1965 Immigration Act, shepherded through Congress by Senator Ted Kennedy.

There is no question that Obama owes a debt to the Kennedys - but it may be far greater than he or they realize. Yes, Senator Edward M. Kennedy offered a crucial early endorsement, comparing the Obama of 2008 to the Jack Kennedy of 1960. And certainly Caroline and others in the Kennedy family worked hard on the campaign trail. But the greatest Kennedy legacy to Obama isn't Ted or Caroline or Bobby Jr., but rather the Immigration Act of 1965, which created the diverse country that is already being called Obama's America.

That act is rarely mentioned when recounting the high points of 1960s liberalism, but its impact arguably rivals the Voting Rights Act, the creation of Medicare, or other legislative landmarks of the era. It transformed a nation 85 percent white in 1965 into one that's one-third minority today, and on track for a nonwhite majority by 2042.

Before the act, immigration visas were apportioned based on the demographic breakdown that existed at the time of the 1920 Census - meaning that there were few if any limits on immigrants from Western and Northern Europe, but strict quotas on those from elsewhere.

The belief that the United States should remain a nation of European lineage was openly discussed when immigration laws were revisited in 1952. The resulting bill, the McCarran-Walter Act, was notorious for giving the State Department the right to exclude visitors for ideological reasons, meaning that a raft of left-wing artists and writers - including Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, British novelist Graham Greene - and scores of others were denied visas. But it also had the effect of maintaining the 1920s-era notion of the United States as a white nation. (Congress imposed the bill over President Truman's veto.)

A decade later, attitudes were changing, and President Kennedy proposed a new immigration structure that would no longer be based on national origins. After Kennedy's assassination, his brother Ted took up the fight, pushing the Johnson administration to go even further than it wanted in evening the playing field. Though Lyndon Johnson, in signing the bill, tried to reassure opponents that it wouldn't do much to change the balance of immigration, its impact was dramatic.

Naturally, Johnson and Kennedy lied when the claimed the 1965 Act wouldn't shift America's racial balance. The Act and succeeding legislation that it made possible have drastically moved the sources of American immigration away from Europe and toward the Third World. All of this, incidentally, was done very quietly without anyone bothering to inform the American people of what was being done, or requesting their consent. Anyone who tried to open discussion on the topic was branded as a "racist" and silenced. Similar movements happened in almost every Western country.

At the National Review, immigration commentator Mark Krikorian, notes the hypocrisy implicit in the Globe article's analysis:

et me get this straight — the 1920s national-origins quotas were bad because they were pro-white social engineering, but the 1965 act was good because it was anti-white social engineering? How about we just skip the social engineering altogether by limiting immigration of all kinds, and just let today's American moms and dads decide who tomorrow's Americans will be?

Of course, the redesign of America's racial balance was exactly what those behind the bill were explicitly hoping for, as the Globe notes:

Simon Rosenberg, president of the liberal think tank NDN, formerly the New Democrat Network, calls the Immigration Act of 1965 "the most important piece of legislation that no one's ever heard of," and said it "set America on a very different demographic course than the previous 300 years."

By adding so many Asians, Latinos, and African immigrants, Rosenberg says, the act changed the racial narrative in America from one of oppression - the white-black divide dating to slavery - to one of diversity. That change was strongly echoed in the Obama campaign, which emphasized the candidate's mixed-race background as making him representative of a new generation of Americans.

That generation has its roots in the Immigration Act of 1965, and the act had its roots in the Kennedys. Obamalot may be the modern reflection of JFK's New Frontier, after all.

Can there be any doubt of the anti-white, anti-Western bias that now stands at the root of contemporary mainstream intellectual circles?

Incidentally, while immigration critics (and conservatives, in general) are quick to heap scorn on Ted Kennedy for his role in passing the 1965 Immigration Act, it should be noted that he was merely its advocate, not its author. Indeed, Kennedy, a man more given to sating his personal appetites than deep intellectual considerations, may well have not understood its ultimate ramifications (aside from possibly leading to more Catholic immigration). The bill was actually proposed by Emanuel Celler, a member of the House of Representatives from New York, who had long argued against America's "racist" (i.e., not convenient to his own ethnic group) immigration policy. Wikipedia notes:

Celler made his first important speech on the House floor during consideration of the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924. Three years earlier, Congress had imposed a quota that limited immigration for persons of any nationality to 3 percent of that nationality present in the United States in 1910, with an annual admission limit of 356,000 immigrants. This national origin system was structured to preserve the ethnic and religious status quo of the United States by reducing immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, thereby excluding many Jews and Catholics. Celler was vehemently opposed to the Johnson act, which passed the isolationist Congress and was signed into law. Celler had found his cause and for the next four decades he vigorously spoke out in favor of eliminating the national origin quotas as a basis for immigration restriction.

In 1965, Celler, using Kennedy's support, succeeded in thrusting a knife straight into the heart of the WASP majority he hated so deeply. America's current demographic decline is a direct result of his - and many others' - hatred for America's Anglo-Saxon, Protestant origins and racial makeup. Celler succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.