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The Unlovely Residue of Outworn Prejudices: The Hart-Celler Act and the Politics of Immigration Reform, 1945–1965
- The University of North Carolina Press
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mae m. ngai H H H H H H H The Unlovely Residue of Outworn Prejudices The Hart-Celler Act and the Politics of Immigration Reform, 1945–1965 It is to the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that we generally attribute the vast changes in the demographics of the United States of the last quarter century. Hart-Celler opened up new chains of migration from the third world: Latinos became the fastest growing ethnoracial minority group in the United States, by the year 2000 representing 12 percent of the total United States population; no less phenomenally , the number of Asian Americans increased almost tenfold between 1965 and 2000. Since 1980, 90 percent of new immigrants to the United States have come from areas of the world other than Europe.∞ Congress did not anticipate these changes in migration patterns, so scholars commonly refer to Hart-Celler as an example of the law of unintended consequences. In this essay I locate an explanation for this unintentionality in the pluralistic brand of Americanism that liberals advocated during the Cold War era. Because the intent of social actors is not always transparent, I approach this problem by way of examining the intellectual underpinnings of the political and legislative discourse on immigration reform during the two decades following World War II. I am especially interested in the influence of postwar liberal commitments to pluralism and equal rights and the engagement of these ideas with nationalism as they were applied to immigration policy. The problem of unintentionality might be productively approached by examining the set of paradoxes to which the idea of unintended consequences gestures without actually explaining them. In the case of HartCeller , the first paradox concerns the principle of equal quotas for all nations, which is commonly understood as the principal feature of the act. Equal quotas did not, in fact, lead to an equal number of immigrants from each country. Rather, Hart-Celler produced vastly asymmetrical patterns of migration. The second paradox has to do with the qualitative and quantitative The Politics of Immigration Reform { 109 aspects of immigration policy. After World War II, many liberals believed that the national origins quotas were an illiberal and racist anachronism: as the Harvard historian Oscar Handlin described the quotas in 1953, they were ‘‘the unlovely residue of outworn prejudices.’’≤ Yet most critics of the quota system treated numerical restriction as a normative feature of immigration policy. In fact, both were initiated in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 as part of a single thrust aimed at limiting migration from southern and eastern Europe. So, we might ask, why did reformers attack one part of that proposition but naturalize the other? And, in a related vein, we might ask, why have historians and other scholars of immigration continued, to this day, to focus their attention on Hart-Celler’s repeal of the national origins quotas, to the near exclusion of its other features—most important, the overall ceiling on admissions and the unprecedented imposition of numerical quotas on countries of the Western Hemisphere? I argue that these paradoxes may be understood by considering HartCeller as a product of liberal nationalism, a central feature of postwar Americanism. Here I use ‘‘liberal nationalism’’ to describe a historically specific ideology, which conjoined liberal pluralism with economic and geopolitical nationalism (as distinguished from the concept’s recent use in multicultural citizenship debates). I highlight the marriage between liberalism and nationalism because scholars have recognized Hart-Celler as an expression of the former but not the latter—reflecting, I think, the enduring influence of American exceptionalism in our historical consciousness generally and the normative nature of nationalism in modern immigration policy more specifically. That is to say, the idea that citizens have a ‘‘national interest’’ that exists above and against the interests of noncitizens, is an unquestioned assumption in our thinking, not a matter that we subject to critical analysis. Postwar liberal nationalism comprised a number of interrelated strands in immigration policy: first, a liberal pluralism that emphasized the equal rights of all citizens, regardless of race, ethnicity, or ancestry; second, an economic nationalism that sought to maintain and enhance the privileged position of the United States in the postwar global economic order; and, third, the nationalism of geopolitics, specifically the imperatives of Cold War foreign policy. In this essay I will focus mainly on liberal pluralism, after first briefly discussing the influence of Cold War politics and economic...