The visa arrangement in place when the 1965 law was passed was a legacy from half a century earlier. At that earlier time, a giant wave of immigration that began in the late 1800s had raised the nation’s population of foreign-born residents to a then-record high of 13.9 million in 1920, making up a near-record 13% of the U.S. population (Gibson and Jung, 2006; Passel and Cohn, 2008).5 The first arrivals in this wave were mainly Northern Europeans, but by the early 1900s most new arrivals came from Italy,
