The Golden Door: How a Texas Democrat and a California Republican made the case for immigration

https://proffish.substack.com/p/the-golden-door

LBJ at the Harbor

In October 1965, Lyndon Johnson stood at the foot of the Statue of Liberty and signed a bill that did something the United States had refused to do for four decades.

It reopened the country.

The Immigration Act of 1924 had slammed the door on most of the world. For forty years, three countries were allowed to supply seventy percent of all immigrants to the United States. Italians, Greeks, Poles, Jews, Asians, Africans, turned away because they had been born in the wrong place. By the 1960s, the foreign-born share of the American population had been ground down to five percent.

Then Johnson, the master of the Senate, the man from a Stonewall, Texas farmhouse without electricity, took out a pen.

Here is what he said as he signed:

The fact is that for over four decades the immigration policy of the United States has been twisted and has been distorted by the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system… Families were kept apart because a husband or a wife or a child had been born in the wrong place. Men of needed skill and talent were denied entrance because they came from southern or eastern Europe or from one of the developing continents.

This system violated the basic principle of American democracy—the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense.

Un-American.

That’s the word Johnson used. Not unkind. Not unfair. Not suboptimal from a policy standpoint. Un-American.

*snip*