President Kennedy Calls for Immigration Law Reform
President John F. Kennedy on this day promised to send a proposal to Congress for “improving and modernizing” immigration laws.
Kennedy had supported immigration reform as a Senator (see his speech as candidate for president on August 6, 1960), and had written a short report on the subject that was posthumously published as a book, A Nation of Immigrants in 1964.
Reform was directed at the notorious 1924 Immigration Act, enacted on May 26, 1924, with its “national origins” quota system that discriminated against people seeking to come to the U.S from southern and Eastern Europe. Kennedy gave his speech on this day to the American Committee on Italian immigration.
When Lyndon Johnson became president after Kennedy was assassinated, he steered through Congress the 1965 immigration reform bill and signed it into law in a ceremony at the symbolically Statue of Liberty on October 3, 1965.
A BUSY DAY FOR CIVIL LIBERTIES: This day was filled with civil rights and civil liberties drama. Early in the day, President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and authorized the Secretary of Defense to use the unit in the event of further obstruction to the integration of the University of Alabama (see the separate event on June 11, 1963). In the evening, Kennedy delivered a nationwide television speech calling for a federal civil rights bill (see the separate event on June 11, 1963). One year later, an amended version of the bill he introduced became the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act (July 2, 1964).
Read Kennedy’s Immigration Statement: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/print.php?pid=9269
Read: John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants (1964)
Learn more: Margaret Sands Orchowski, Immigration and the American Dream: Battling the Political Hype and Hysteria (2008)