In the political and governmental frenzy in the years following the 1963 assassination of John Kennedy, one of the most destructive laws ever passed by the U.S. Congress has ended up changing America forever. That law was the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act.
The late president’s brother and the act’s lead supporter, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), famously promised at the time that the law “will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.”
Only now are we finally understanding that never was a bigger lie ever told America.
Note our posting on January 26 to the effect that by 2053 all growth of the U.S. population will come from immigration, both legal and illegal. By that year, the Congressional Budget Office predicts our population will have reached 373 million, three million more than the CBO had forecast just last year.
Looking even further into the future, in 2015 Pew Research predicted that by 2065–a century after the law was passed–America’s population will approach a half billion at 441 million.
In 2015, fifty years after the Act, the population stood at 324 million. Pew Research estimated at that time that post-1965 immigration had accounted for 72 million additional U.S. residents. In other words, without Kennedy’s law, the 2015 population would have been a far more manageable 252 million. Yet it was what it was, and the additional foreign-born–who have come primarily from Mexico, China, India, Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, El Salvador, the former Soviet Union, and the Dominican Republic–have made all the difference.
Josiah Lippincott on the American Greatness website on January 28 quoted Thomas Jefferson on the dangers of such wholesale immigration:
They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.
As Lippincott observes, no such miracle ever happened. He writes:
Mass immigration radically transformed the American people and thereby radically changed the political possibilities available. Now, it has become clear that immigration hasn’t just changed the country’s political order, it has completely undermined it. The Democrats learned a useful lesson over the last 50 years—if you don’t like the way the vote turns out, just import more voters. Then hold the election again.
So, if you wonder how the madness that goes by the strange name of “Woke” ever occurred in your country, look no further than the Honorable Edward Moore Kennedy and his 1965 anti-American law.
For more, see American Greatness.