The following youtube is definitely politically incorrect but it was aimed at legal immigrants who had not yet fully assimilated into American society. In this case Germans who supported the Kaiser. Many Americans are the descendants of immigrants and it should give us all more to think about. The Immigration Act of 1965 (Thank you Ted Kennedy!)was a huge mistake and has dramatically changed our country.
The following snippet comes from the NPR article referred to in the above post:
ReplyDeleteAn Argument Based on Egalitarianism
"The law was just unbelievable in its clarity of racism," says Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University. "It declared that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race. The Nordics were superior to the Alpines, who in turn were superior to the Mediterraneans, and all of them were superior to the Jews and the Asians."
By the 1960s, Greeks, Poles, Portuguese and Italians were complaining that immigration quotas discriminated against them in favor of Western Europeans. The Democratic Party took up their cause, led by President John F. Kennedy. In a June 1963 speech to the American Committee on Italian Migration, Kennedy called the system of quotas in place back then " nearly intolerable."
The quotas in the previous immigration laws Kennedy called "nearly intolerable" were, with exception of the Asia Pacific Triangle, based on the existing population mix of the United States as determined by the official census. Racism it was not! The changes made in 1965 are still a disaster.