LBJ Signs Historic Immigration Reform Law in Ceremony at the Statue of Liberty
President Lyndon B. Johnson on this day signed the historic 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the notorious “national origins” quota system of the 1924 Immigration Act (May 26, 1924).
The national origins quota in the earlier law discriminated against Eastern and Southern Europeans. In an important symbolic gesture, President Johnson signed the bill at a ceremony at the Statue of Liberty (see the video below).
Much of the credit for the new law belongs to President John F. Kennedy, who had urged reform of existing law while a senator on August 6, 1960; as president, he again called for a new immigration law, on June 11, 1963, and sent a reform bill to Congress on July 23, 1963. He also authored a report that was posthumously published as a book, A Nation of Immigrants. The tolerant attitude toward immigrants in the 1960s contrasted sharply with the anti-immigrant fervor among many Americans today.
The new law had broad public support. The tolerant egalitarian mood of the country and political leaders in the mid-1960s contrasted sharply with anti-immigrant hysteria that began to rise in the 1980s, and reached its peak with the election of President Donald Trump in 2016.
LBJ: [The law is] “one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration. For it does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.”
See LBJ sign the historic law: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQNP5XKMNls
Learn more: Margaret Sands Orchowski, Immigration and the American Dream: Battling the Political Hype and Hysteria (2008)
See a timeline on U.S. immigration history here
Read John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants (1964)