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Africa—and the civil rights movement in the United States. It allocated 170,000 visas to
the Eastern Hemisphere, with a ceiling of 20,000 per country, and 120,000 to the
Western Hemisphere, with no per-country limit. However, a seven-category preferential
system for visa admissions gave priority not to nationality, but to relatives of U.S. citizens
and individuals with needed skills and abilities. McCarran-Walter had introduced similar
preferences for U.S. relations and job skills, but only within the strict national quotas.22
Supporters of the 1965 Act, which the Senate approved in a vote of 76 to 18, did not
anticipate drastic changes to the existing pattern of immigration. The bill was intended to
eliminate discrimination among immigrants, not to encourage all races to immigrate; few
Asians and Africans were expected to arrive because, according to one of the bill’s
sponsors, the family-ties and job-skills provisions would “hold the numbers down.”23
In a dramatic illustration of the law of unintended consequences, the 1965 Immigration
Act catalyzed an era of mass immigration and a fundamental demographic overhaul. The
prioritization of family reunification caused the number of nonquota immigrants to
skyrocket. Three times as many legal immigrants crossed U.S. borders between 1965 and
1995 as during the 30 years before, and unprecedented numbers came from Asia and
Latin America. Within five years of the bill’s passage, 27,859 immigrants entered the
country from India alone.24 An amendment passed in 1976 extended the 20,000 per-
country ceiling and the preference system to Western Hemisphere countries, and another
passed in 1978 merged the separate hemispheric ceilings into one worldwide limit of
290,000 visas.25
Meanwhile, a new debate over immigration policy was fueled by heightened job
competition amid stagflation and recession in the late 1970s; the Mariel boatlift crisis of
1980, in which some 124,000 undocumented Cuban migrants entered the United States
in 25 overcrowded vessels;26 and a continuing influx of Haitians. In 1981, the Select
Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy identified undocumented (illegal)
immigration as the country’s primary immigration problem.27
The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was primarily designed to reverse
the sharp increase in the number of immigrants entering the country illegally. It was the
product of deep congressional divisions, however, and it effectively expanded both legal
and illegal immigration.
On the one hand, the law established penalties for employers who “knowingly” hired,
recruited, or referred aliens who were not authorized to work in the United States. It also
strengthened U.S. border controls, through improved technology and a 50 percent
increase in Border Patrol staff. On the other hand, IRCA established a Visa Waiver Pilot
Program that enabled the admission of certain nonimmigrant foreigners without visas for
educational, business, and other purposes (a system now notorious for allowing the entry
of some of the 9/11 hijackers), and authorized a new classification for seasonal agricultural
workers (SAW). In a provision that continues to generate controversy, the law also
legalized all aliens who had resided in the United States unlawfully since before January 1,
1982.
Controlling America’s Borders: The Ongoing Debate
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