In 1965 America‘s immigration policy changed significantly due to a law pushed through by the late Senator Ted Kennedy. In September 2009, Numbers USA posted an article about what those changes were and the impact they have had. Breitbart posted an article about the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act on October 3, 2015, fifty years after the act was passed.

Breitbart reports:

The Kennedy immigration law abolished the national origins quota system, which had favored immigrants from nations with a similar heritage to our own, and opened up American immigration visas to the entire world.

While about nine in ten of the immigrants who came to the United States during the 19^th and 20^th century hailed from Europe, the 1965 law inverted that figure. Today about 9 out of every 10 new immigrants brought into the country on green cards come from Latin America, Africa, Asia or the Middle East.

The size of the numbers also grew exponentially as well. According to Pew Research Center, 59 million immigrants entered the United States following the Act’s passage. Including their children, that added 72 million new residents to the U.S. population.

In 1965, according to Pew, the country was 84 percent white, 11 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic and less than 1 percent Asian.

In 2015, as a result of Kennedy’s immigration law, the country is now 62 percent white, 12 percent black, 18 percent Hispanic and 6 percent Asian.

Numbers USA notes the range and scope of the reforms in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act passed:

• The 1965 revamp of the entire immigration system.  It ended 40 years of low immigration, got rid of solid numerical caps and opened up chain migration into every overpopulated country in the world, exploding annual immigration numbers. 
• Massive expansion of the refugee programs in the late 1970s, opening up massive loopholes and encouraging a domestic resettlement industry that became a major lobby for more and more overall immigration.
• The 1986 blanket amnesty. Kennedy’s skills may have been best seen here where he got legislators on our side to agree to the amnesty in exchange for enforcement rules that he made sure were written in a way that would not work.  Within a decade, he would be using the inability to enforce the 1986 rules as an excuse for why we needed more green cards and more amnesties. An example of Kennedy’s great skill was that he persuaded Ronald Reagan to enthusiastically support this bill.
• The 1990 immigration act, which increased overall immigration by another 35%.  The first Pres. Bush was Kennedy’s co-partner, just as the second Pres. Bush was Kennedy’s eager co-partner in trying to force through another blanket amnesty 2001-2008.
• The 1990 act also established the lottery whereby we randomly give away 50,000 green cards a year to people in countries picked because they have the least ties and cultural association with the United States, and which disproportionately are terrorist-sponsoring countries. This was something of a compromise for Kennedy who was able to ensure that during the first few years, much of the lottery winners would be illegal aliens from Ireland — his own ethnic group.
• The H-1B visas which have enabled corporations to keep hundreds of thousands of American kids from getting a foothold in the high tech industry.
• The total defeat of liberal civil rights champion Barbara Jordan’s blue-ribbon commission recommendations to reduce overall immigration and eliminate chain migration and the lottery in 1996.
• Six mini-amnesties that passed in the 1990s, primarily aimed at specific nationalities.

In February of this year, Senator Tom Cotton and Senator David Perdue unveiled the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act, which would undo some of the damage done by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

Yesterday Paul Mirengoff at Power Line posted an article about RAISE.

The article at Power Line reports:

Today, President Trump, with the two sponsoring Senators by his side, publicly backed the RAISE Act. Subsequently, at a press briefing, CNN’s Jim Acosta invoked the words on the Statue of Liberty, as he tried to debate White House policy adviser Stephen Miller on the merits of the legislation. Putting it nicely, Scott observed that Acosta was in over his head (Steve was more graphic).

This is the video of Jim Acosta debating White House policy advisor Stephen Miller (when did it become the job of the press to debate the White House policy advisor instead of simply reporting the news?);

The problem with our current immigration system is that it lowers the wages of of workers in jobs that don’t require a lot of training or education.

The Power Line article explains:

As Sen. Cotton has pointed out, wages for Americans with only a high school diploma have declined by two percent since the late 1970s. Wages for those who didn’t finish high school have declined by nearly 20 percent. Wage pressure due to immigration doesn’t explain all of this decrease, but unless the law of supply and demand has been repealed, such wage pressure explains a good deal of it.

The American Dream is at least as fundamental to our national identity as the “nation of immigrants” theme. The collapse of wages described above threatens to create a near permanent underclass for whom the American Dream is always out of reach.

The RAISE Act seeks to vindicate the American Dream while permitting historical levels of immigration. It does so by placing the priority on high-skilled immigrant — immigrants who won’t squeeze the wages of our low-skilled workers, but who instead will spur innovation, create jobs, and make America more competitive.

The article at Power Line concludes:

We can expect Senate Democrats to block the RAISE Act. But before they do so, Democrats should ask themselves how they expect to return to the good graces of the working class if they put the interests of foreigners ahead of the interest of working Americans at the lower end of the economic spectrum. How is this “A Better Deal”?

I was living in Massachusetts when Ted Kennedy died. A friend of mine who is a lawyer commented on how much damage Senator Kennedy had done to America. Because my friend is a conservative, I at first assumed he was referring to what was done to Judge Bork and some of the other ridiculous charges the Senator levied at various Republicans. It wasn’t until later that I began to look at the damage done to America by the 1965 immigration law that Senator Kennedy had pushed through. It is time to begin to undo that damage. Hopefully it is not too late.

One final comment from the article at Numbers USA:

He (a friend of the author of the article) also said that he believes that, despite all the liberal veneer, Kennedy was deeply beholden to the country’s banking titans and other globalist business entities who have so much interest in the free flow of international labor and in keeping the wages of Americans stagnant. (This was given credibility later when Kennedy was lauded for the great work he did to help the high-tech industry of Massachusetts to hire foreign computer programmers.)

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act illustrates the damage the ‘Washington swamp’ can do to average Americans.