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Editor’s note: The following op-ed is adapted from author Jeremy Carl’s new book: “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart.” (Regnery, April 23, 2024)
Politics is complicated, and it is rare that we can trace an abrupt break in American society to a single act or single piece of legislation. But the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 fundamentally transformed America’s immigration policy and is arguably one such piece of transformative legislation. It took us from being an almost uniformly White and Black country at the time of its passage to a fully multi-ethnic, and increasingly ethnically fractious, country today.
What is clear is that the post-1965 immigration boom, rather than serving as a continuation of longstanding American policy, was a spectacular repudiation of that policy. Over the last six decades, America’s government has created a new American people. Democrats, who have not won the White vote since 1964, simply elected another people through immigration policy and attacked any White person who complained as a racist.
Given the enormous changes it would engender, it was inevitable that Democrat leaders would lie about the Hart-Celler immigration bill before putting it forward in 1965. “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” President Lyndon Johnson said. “It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives.”
Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy claimed, “The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.” None of this turned out to be true.
In an aerial view, immigrants pass through coils of razor wire while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border on March 13, 2024, in El Paso, Texas. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
A more accurate assessment was given by North Carolina Democratic Senator Sam Ervin, who argued it was not possible to design an immigration policy that did not discriminate, so why not discriminate on behalf of those who had made the country?
The American Legion said, “It is in the best interest of our country to maintain the present makeup of our cultural and social structure.” A Harris poll in May 1965 showed that by a 58%–24% margin, Americans opposed loosening immigration laws.
But who cares what the American people — in particular White Americans — thought?
To be fair, even many of the bill’s proponents professed to be surprised by how radical it proved in practice, how its “family reunification” provisions, intended to help White ethnics, led to chain migration, particularly from Mexico.
VideoAs immigration policy quickly took on a dramatically different character than had been promised, the left, unsurprisingly, shifted rhetorical tactics. In 1968, just a few years after the bill’s passage, the New York Times reported that “the extent of the change” in immigration because of the new law had surprised nearly everyone, but that it was unlikely to be modified because “congressmen don’t want to look like racists.” Even in the late 1960s, the left’s racial blackmail tactics were working.
Illegal immigration didn’t begin en masse until the 1970s, and its history is even more fraught. We are constantly told that illegal aliens do not commit more crimes than natives — another carefully chosen anti-White statement.
Many Whites are not concerned with whether illegal aliens commit more crimes than current legal residents; they’re concerned with whether they commit more crimes than their own communities of White Americans — which they most certainly do. The fact that there are non-White populations in the United States that commit even more crimes and thus raise the average should not convince Whites that immigration makes them safer.
By the 1990s, even moderate New Democrat rhetoric on immigration was changing. As former President Bill Clinton said in a 1998 address at Portland State, “Today, largely because of immigration, there is no majority race in Hawaii or Houston, or New York City. Within five years, there will be no majority race in our largest state, California. In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States. … [These immigrants] are energizing our culture and broadening our vision of the world. They are renewing our most basic values and reminding us all of what it truly means to be American.”
Jeremy Carl’s new book, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart,” talks about the continued impact of sweeping immigration changes.
Sounds kind of like … a great replacement. Did the supermajority of White Americans ask for this? Nobody cared.
The political history and consequences of immigration
Immigration has had many political consequences for America. The Democrats have used their polarization of African-American voters, in concert with mass immigration, to do something remarkable: they have achieved electoral pre-eminence while consistently losing the votes of the supermajority ethnicity. (This supermajority has ranged from an 89% White electorate in former President Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976 to a 67% White electorate in the 2020 victory of Joe Biden.)
Over this time, the Democrats have won six presidential elections and the popular vote in two additional elections without once winning the vote of White voters. There is no other modern multiracial democracy of which I am aware where a party has achieved electoral success while perennially losing the votes of the supermajority ethnicity. This fact, perhaps any more than any other, explains the power of Hart-Celler in creating an anti-White America.
The mass growth of illegal immigration has created another problem: the representation of illegal immigrants in our census — they are counted just like everyone else — has led to the creation of so-called “rotten boroughs” (a term originally used to describe very small constituencies in England that elected members to Parliament and that were eliminated in the Reform Act of 1832).
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VideoThese unequal districts amount to a modern three-fifths compromise in which the citizens of states and districts with large numbers of illegal aliens and other non-citizens are given disproportionate political power relative to those in districts with more citizens.
While the Supreme Court theoretically established a “one person, one vote” rule in Baker v. Carr, which set the stage for forcing states to create congressional districts with equal populations in the name of fairness, somehow the court (and the media) has not considered the unequal representation from illegal aliens to be a problem.
Overall, we have more than 45 million immigrants in America (88 million if you also count the children of immigrants), up from just 8 million or so in 1960. Of note, the number of immigrants from Europe and Canada has declined by almost 25% during that same period — almost all the rest come from areas where immigration had previously been minimal or nonexistent.
Indeed, since 1990, the Diversity Visa program welcomes 55,000 immigrants each year from countries that are chosen precisely for their lack of connection with historical immigration patterns to the United States. Some entrants on this visa have committed terrorist activities.
Yet the Democrats have staunchly opposed eliminating the program, even when this number of visas was offset by an equal increase of visas in other categories. Filling America with people with little or no ties to the historic American nation is an article of liberal ideology.
The result: among America’s children, less than half are non-Hispanic White. Within approximately two decades, America as a whole is projected to become majority-minority. The Great Replacement isn’t a conspiracy theory; it is, as 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy observed, “just the basic immigration policy of the Democrats.”
Jeremy Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and a former senior official in the Trump administration. He has a new book: “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart.” He can be contacted on X at @realJeremyCarl
