Around 50 years ago, the face of immigration in the U.S. began to change. Whereas previous waves of immigration brought migrants to the U.S. from Europe, many more began to arrive from Asia and Latin America. That’s because of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which shifted who was allowed in, along with who was criminalized.
In our podcast Status Pending, we’ve been looking at critical moments in the country’s immigration history. Today, WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez looks back to 50 years ago.
Below is the transcript of our latest episode, “US at 50: Unintended consequences” which has been edited for length and clarity.
Jimmy Gutierrez: Something I can freely admit is that I didn’t always love history. But something that’s always brought it to life for me, besides audio, is photography. I get obsessed with historical photos. It’s all in the details. The style. Facial expressions. The context. Something Corky Lee was a master of.
Corky Lee (from “Dear Corky”): Yeah, maybe I was somewhat invisible, but I didn’t want the larger community, Asian Pacific Americans, to be invisible.
JG: This is Corky from his 2024 PBS special, “Dear Corky.” Corky photographed New York City and the changes in the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community over generations. In 2021, he died from complications after contracting Covid.
CL: I may be six feet under, pushing up daisies, when people realize I’ve had this amazing visual record of what took place in the '70s, '80s and '90s. It’s almost the history of Chinese in America.
Mae Ngai: Anybody who went to college and took any Asian American studies classes in the last 20 or 30 years knows his work.
JG: This is Dr. Mae Ngai, history professor at Columbia University. She ran in the same circles with Corky in the '70s. She also edited his book, "Corky Lee’s Asian America: 50 years of Photographic Justice." She sent me over some of his work from 50 years ago….back when there were huge migration shifts happening with Asians and Asian Americans.
MN: So, this is taken in the early 1970s. Corky called it "Crossing Canal Street," and he meant to show us the changes going on in the community in New York, Chinatown.
JG: In this picture, people are crossing Canal Street. And maybe that’s all you see. The background is a pretty quintessential, narrow Chinatown street. Banners, large and small, line the street in Chinese writing. But front and center in the picture, there’s a woman.
MN: A middle-aged woman carrying groceries, probably on her way home from work. She probably was a seamstress in a garment factory.
JG: Yeah, it looks like she's got maybe, like, at least three bags in one arm. She's got multiple, like, probably work bags in the other.
MN: So, women and children and families were a new demographic in Chinatown, actually, starting after World War II, but really starting after 1965, when the immigration reforms went into effect.
JG: In the photo, there are also teen girls, in very classic '70s fashion, walking casually. And there are older men. Their faces weigh heavy. So do the bags they’re carrying. Corky was documenting a radical demographic shift with this photo, one where there were women and kids in Chinatown. Because that wasn’t always the case. The next photo Mae wants to talk about shows a group of older men. They’re grouped together, but they’re not together. All of them are by themselves — expressionless.
MN: In Chinese, we call them the “lǎo huáqiáo” — the old overseers, or the old sojourners. And they're just kind of randomly on the sidewalk in front of the…
JG: The butcher shop. It's got some hanging meat.
MN: They’re smoking a cigarette. There's an old car there that evokes the period, and they're the tail-end of that generation of men who came as laborers to work in the United States without their families. They had lonely, lonely years in America.
JG: Because of the country’s exclusion and immigration laws, some of these men went 25, 30, or even 50 years without ever seeing their families. Corky’s work told this story brilliantly. And it centered Asian Americans, making them visible in the U.S. immigration story in ways they never were before.
But this history that he archived was made possible 10 years earlier when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
Lyndon Johnson (from archival tape): This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.
JG: Here are just a few things the bill did. It ended a discriminatory quota system. Mae says before this, Chinese immigration was restricted to just over 100 visas per year. It set a hard cap of 20,000 people per country annually, and set another hard cap against people migrating from the Americas. And contrary to what LBJ said in that speech, this bill would affect millions of lives, right up until today.
This is Status Pending. I’m Jimmy Gutierrez. Today we’re closing our series looking at the history of U.S. immigration at critical points in time. And we’re traveling back 50 years with this one. At the time, these changes in immigration law were considered non-revolutionary. But that couldn’t have been more wrong. We’re going to find out why this bill is called "the bill of unintended consequences"…and how it led to some of the most restrictive immigration policies of the past hundred years.
This legislation was passed in 1965, so we're talking in the heart of the civil rights movement. What was the connection of this act to the movement? Like, what were people pushing for at the time when it came to immigration?
MN: Right. 1965 is the same year as the Voting Rights Act. It's one year later from the 1964 Civil Rights Act. So it's very much a piece of civil rights era legislation that are all aimed to correct the long-standing racial discrimination in the country's laws. And the immigration reform had been a project, a demand by mostly European immigrants — Italians, Jews, Greeks, Slavs — who all came in the early 20th century and were the prime targets of the national origin quota system, which discriminated against them terribly. Those quotas also completely excluded Asians.
Archival Audio: They filed quietly, somewhat hesitantly from the belly of a chartered airline at a San Fransisco airport one morning. It started in 1965, when Congress abolished the policy excluding oriental immigration.
MN: So this law passed in 1965, in part because there was a long history of mobilization and agitation and lobbying and support in Congress to reform the immigration laws, and to reckon with the racism that had been levied against Jews, Italians, Poles, etc. And so, in many ways they envisioned it as a symbolic reform, but they didn't necessarily see that there would be, you know, a big increase in immigration. In fact, part of their argument in Congress was that "we're not going to have a lot of new people." This is mostly a symbolism to correct a racial slur that had been imposed on people of eastern and southern European origin.
JG: And I think what we should call this section that we're moving into now are the myths and unintended consequences of this bill — but one of those unintended consequences is that these quotas were supposed to be applied to every country evenly, right? Like 20,000, maybe to every country. But what we see here as an unintended consequence is we have a huge rise in immigration from Asian and Latin American countries.
MN: You know, the way we can think about the '65 act is that it was based on a principle of formal equality, in the sense that we are going to treat every country the same. Every country is going to have the same number, the same quota, and that is going to be fair. And that is really just taken from the Civil Rights Act, where every individual is equal. But nations are not the same as individuals. And what they didn't realize was that the push for immigration from Europe was actually very low. But there was demand from Asia and Latin America.
JG: Mae says these populations came in two different ways. The U.S. has always been dependent on Mexican labor, so that didn’t stop. But what changed now is the people coming over were criminalized, considered "undocumented" or "illegal." For East Asians, and later South Asians, the U.S. used something called "occupational preference" to fill their quotas — high-skilled workers in fields of demand. At the time in the U.S., that means telecommunications, healthcare and hospitals.
MN: The Philippines' quota of 20,000 was used up almost exclusively by nurses who came to work in the growing hospital systems in the United States in the late 1960s and '70s. Others were engineers, scientists, chemists who worked in pharmaceutical companies. And then once they were here, they could become a citizen. And then they began to petition for their family members to come over under the family preferences. So you have this kind of exponential increase, based on entirely legal and legitimate means.
JG: Mae says this is also a huge reason for the "model minority" myth. It’s less about the people, but it’s the pattern produced directly by immigration laws. It favored professionals. And those professionals brought over family or friends from the same social class. And the family pathway, that also comes from the 1965 act. Immediate relatives of US citizens were now allowed, even favored, in this new immigration system.
You touched on this, but another unintended consequence was that you had this hard cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, which fueled this undocumented immigration kind of push, or this creation of illegality, and also manufactured it — because this was, ever since the creation of that border, the southern border, a country that had been dependent on Mexican labor. Can you tell me about the unintended consequence of this hard cap, on the Western Hemisphere?
MN: That's a really good question, because before 1965, it's hard for us to believe that there was no numerical quota on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. There were other kinds of restrictions. You had to have a visa, and you had to pass through border inspection. But there was no numerical cap.
So in '65, they made a formal restriction and included the Western Hemisphere. And it's really in 1965 that you have established a global restrictive system. And so in some ways, it was more restrictive, numerically speaking, than the previous laws had been. So today, for example, or actually, since the 1980s, if you want to apply to come from, say, a country with a low-sending volume — say New Zealand — it's really, you know, there aren't that many people applied to get in. So there's no way high-sending countries like Mexico, India, China and the Philippines had a way to come legally under any of the preference systems, that could be 10, 15, or 20 years, depending on the category you're talking about. So that's why you had this increase of undocumented migration, because who's going to wait 20 years?
NPR Audio: Right now, there's nearly 12 million applications awaiting a decision. And that's for citizenship, work permits or other permissions to live and work in the United States.
JG: Within the series, we looked at these big moments within U.S. history as we celebrate the 250th birthday, what immigration looks like 250 years ago, where we were 100 years ago with that Immigration Act of '24, and then we're here in 2026. And we're seeing a ton of exclusion from a lot of countries, maybe you'd call them the Global South. Where are we? What do you see as a trend in immigration of where we are currently? And maybe it's how far we've come since '65, since 250 years ago. I mean, it's a big question. I'm kind of throwing it at you, but what is the immigration history over the past 50 years when we look back?
MN: 1965's immigration reform was a famous law of unintended consequences. This opened up America to people from many other parts of the world who had not previously come. And so, by the late 20th century, we have a really different America, one that's really, multiracial, multicultural. Immigrants contributed vastly to the economy. So it really became a part of American society.
JG: According to the Migration Policy Institute, immigrants went from 5% of the US population to 14%. The racial makeup of the country changed dramatically.
MN: And what we've seen under the Trump administration is a gigantic backlash. He rode to power on the slogan "build the wall," and he's been nothing but a steady drumbeat of nativist rhetoric and restrictive and exclusionary laws. You know, the only refugees who can come to America now are white South Africans. For all intents and purposes, they have ended the right to asylum. So this is a terrible time for immigrants and for all Americans who care about the rule of law and fairness and justice and diversity in our country.
You know, you're in Wisconsin, which is next in Minnesota, right? That's where we had a terrifying reign of terror that was imposed on the people of St. Paul and Minneapolis and throughout the state by ICE. But then you saw this amazing response by ordinary people to protect the immigrants, regardless of where they came from. And it was an act of, I think, neighborly love.
LBJ (From Archival Audio): This system violated the basic principle of American democracy — the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country. Today, with my signature, this system is abolished.
JG: That was Columbia history professor, Dr. Mae Nai. Today’s episode was produced by me, Jimmy Gutierrez and edited by Emily Files.
