Answer:The year 1965 is often cited as a turning point in the history of US immigration, but what happened in the ensuing years is not well understood. Amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act passed in that year repealed the national origins quotas, which had been enacted during the 1920s in a deliberate attempt to limit the entry of Southern and Eastern European immigrants—or more specifically Jews from the Russian Pale and Catholics from Poland and Italy, groups at the time deemed “unassimilable.” The quotas supplemented prohibitions already in place that effectively banned the entry of Asians and Africans. The 1965 amendments were intended to purge immigration law of its racist legacy by replacing the old quotas with a new system that allocated residence visas according to a neutral preference system based on family reunification and labor force needs. The new system is widely credited with having sparked a shift in the composition of immigration away from Europe toward Asia and Latin America, along with a substantial increase in the number of immigrants.
Indeed, after 1965 the number of immigrants entering the country did increase, and the flows did come to be dominated by Asians and Latin Americans. Although the amendments may have opened the door to greater immigration from Asia, however, the surge in immigration from Latin America occurred in spite of rather than because of the new system. Countries in the Western Hemisphere had never been included in the national origins quotas, nor was the entry of their residents prohibited as that of Africans and Asians had been. Indeed, before 1965 there were no numerical limits at all on immigration from Latin America or the Caribbean, only qualitative restrictions. The 1965 amendments changed all that, imposing an annual cap of 120,000 on entries from the Western Hemisphere. Subsequent amendments further limited immigration from the region by limiting the number of residence visas for any single country to just 20,000 per year (in 1976), folding the separate hemispheric caps into a worldwide ceiling of 290,000 visas (in 1978), and then reducing the ceiling to 270,000 visas (in 1980). These restrictions did not apply to spouses, parents, and children of US citizens, however.
Thus the 1965 legislation in no way can be invoked to account for the rise in immigration from Latin America. Nonetheless, Latin American migration did grow. Legal immigration from the region grew from a total of around 459,000 during the decade of the 1950s to peak at 4.2 million during the 1990s, by which time it made up 44 percent of the entire flow, compared with 29 percent for Asia, 14 percent for Europe, 6 percent for Africa, and 7 percent for the rest of the world (US Department of Homeland Security 2012). The population of unauthorized immigrants from Latin America also rose from near zero in 1965 to peak at around 9.6 million in 2008, accounting for around 80 percent of the total present without authorization (Hoefer, Rytina, and Baker 2011; Wasem 2011). How this happened is a complicated tale of unintended consequences, political opportunism, bureaucratic entrepreneurship, media guile, and most likely a healthy dose of racial and ethnic prejudice. In this article, we lay out the sequence of events that culminated in record levels of immigration from Latin America during the 1990s. We focus particularly on the case of Mexico, which accounted for two-thirds of legal immigration during the decade and for three-quarters of all illegal migration from the region.
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