The Immigration Act of 1965, known as Hart-Celler, ended a quota system that had favoured Northern and Western Europeans since 1924. Lyndon B. Johnson signed it on October 3, 1965, at the base of the Statue of Liberty, a choice of venue meant to signal the change. Its framework of family ties and job skills still governs legal immigration, and most of today’s border arguments trace back to it in some way.
What it replaced
The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 set annual limits by nationality, using the 1890 census as a baseline. Northern and Western Europe took most of the visas. Southern and Eastern Europe, meaning Italy, Poland and Greece, were heavily restricted, and Asia was nearly shut out through the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” The Western Hemisphere had no numerical cap at all.
By the early 1960s the system was under pressure from two sides. The Civil Rights Movement made ethnic ranking hard to defend, and John F. Kennedy called the quotas “nearly intolerable” and proposed reform before his assassination in 1963. Johnson took it up as part of his Great Society agenda.
Three changes
First, birthplace stopped deciding who could immigrate. A Nigerian, a Filipino and a Pole were judged by the same rules as an Englishman. Second, the act created a seven-category preference system, with family ties to a U.S. citizen or permanent resident ranked highest. Third, it capped Western Hemisphere immigration for the first time, at 120,000 visas a year against 170,000 for the Eastern Hemisphere.
The third change had the least expected result. Mexican workers had long crossed back and forth for seasonal farm work, a pattern reinforced by the Bracero Program, which ran from 1942 to 1964. Congress added a 20,000-per-country limit in 1976, and legal visas fell far below demand. Many historians argue that gap fuelled unauthorized immigration from Mexico and Central America.
A shift nobody forecast
The sponsors expected little. Senator Ted Kennedy said the law “will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.” In 1965 roughly 84% of Americans were non-Hispanic white. By the 2020 Census the share was about 57.8%. Over 60% of immigrants came from Europe in 1960, and below 10% in 2019, with Asia, Mexico and Latin America now the main sources.
Family sponsorship compounded the effect. Once a skilled immigrant from India or the Philippines became a citizen, relatives could follow, and then sponsor their own. The employment categories also opened a path for educated workers. A 2018 National Academies report found that immigrants and their children account for a disproportionate share of U.S. patents, Nobel winners and major company founders.
Back in the argument
The RAISE Act, introduced by Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue, would cut family-based immigration by roughly 50% and replace the preference system with a points-based merit system. It has been debated since 2017 and had not passed as of 2026. Separately, President Trump’s January 20, 2025 Executive Order 14160 told agencies to stop issuing citizenship documents to children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents or parents on temporary visas. Every federal court that reviewed it blocked it, citing the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Trump v. CASA on April 1, 2026.
Both fights, in the end, ask what the 1965 act asked: who gets to be American.
