The Johnson Administration and A Renewed Push for Immigration Reform

The restrictive immigration system of the early 1960s originated in the 1924 Immigration Act, or the Johnson-Reed Act, which created a system of numerical annual quotas to restrict immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, barred immigration from Asia, and reiterated the exclusion of such applicants as contract laborers; common criminals; persons not meeting certain moral standards, with various disabilities and diseases, or “liable to become a public charge”; anarchists; and illiterates. The act, however, exempted immigrants from the Western Hemisphere from any quotas because of the need for agricultural labor in the Southwest and American foreign policy interests in the region.

Despite repeated efforts by reformers to overturn the law, prevailing xenophobia and staunch restrictionists in Congress blocked any serious effort to revise immigration policy until Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, or the McCarran-Walter Act. The law included several liberalizing elements, such as the introduction of small quotas for previously excluded Asian countries, the abolition of racial and marital qualifications for citizenship, and the continued exemption of the Western Hemisphere from the quota system. At the same time, the law retained the national origins quota system, expanded categories of exclusion, and created a system of preferences that categorized immigrants in accordance with American needs.

Although John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 reignited immigration reform advocates’ hopes for an overhaul of U.S. immigration policy, the Kennedy administration did not focus on immigration until 1963. In a message to Congress on July 23, 1963, President Kennedy presented his proposal, which recommended the immediate elimination of restrictions on immigration from the Asia-Pacific Triangle, the discontinuation of the quota system over a five-year period, and the allocation of visas based on skills and family relations. Despite Kennedy’s call for reform, Congress failed to act, focusing instead on civil rights legislation, tax reform, and the war on poverty. Kennedy’s assassination in November halted reform efforts.^{Footnote 8}

When Lyndon B. Johnson became president following Kennedy’s assassination, many of Kennedy’s advisers reportedly found Johnson’s voting record on immigration discouraging. As Bernstein points out, Johnson had voted to override Truman’s veto of the McCarran-Walter Act, had played no role in the passage of any major immigration legislation since entering Congress, and was a Southern Democrat, leading many to believe that he might share his colleagues’ support for immigration restriction.^{Footnote 9} According to Tichenor, Kennedy’s aides’ concerns were legitimate, as Johnson was initially reluctant to embrace immigration reform, both because of his earlier support for the McCarran-Walter Act and because he feared that the controversial nature of the issue could sabotage the rest of his reform agenda.^{Footnote 10}

Only when Meyer Feldman, Abba Schwartz, and other staffers from the Kennedy Administration persuaded Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers, Johnson’s closest advisers, to intercede did Johnson capitulate. As Tichenor observes, these advisers drew a clear connection between immigration reform and the administration’s foreign policy and civil rights agenda. They told Johnson that immigration reform had been among Kennedy’s highest priorities at the time of his death, that Johnson’s endorsement would appeal to voters in the Northeast, that the immigration quotas damaged the United States’ reputation abroad just as much as Jim Crow laws did, and that national origins quotas contradicted Johnson’s pledge to eradicate ethnic and racial discrimination in the country.^{Footnote 11} Because Johnson left little in writing about his decision-making process, the reasons for his ultimate endorsement of immigration reform remain somewhat unclear. Nonetheless, the existing evidence suggests that Johnson’s initial reluctance to champion a more liberal immigration policy never completely vanished and would later influence his approach during the final negotiations on the immigration bill.^{Footnote 12}

Given the influence of Kennedy’s advisers, the Johnson Administration’s immigration proposal closely resembled the 1963 Kennedy administration bill. The bill, the product of a tense collaboration of a team in the Department of Justice headed by Assistant Attorney General Norbert Schlei, a team in the Department of State led by Schwartz, and White House staffer Feldman, had three overarching objectives. It proposed to eliminate discriminatory provisions of the existing immigration policy, craft a more comprehensive refugee policy (which up to this time had been handled by ad hoc legislation and executive parole power), and create a more flexible immigration system that took into account changing domestic labor needs, refugee crises, and evolving migration patterns. To tackle the first goal, the bill provided for the immediate elimination of Asia-Pacific Triangle restrictions and the abolition of the national origins system over a five-year period. The bill proposed to reserve up to 20 percent of all visas for refugees from tyranny, military activities, and natural calamities and to retain the underlying principle of the Fair Share Refugee Law, which established that the number of refugees admitted into the United States would not exceed 25 percent of the total number of refugees that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees resettled around the world.^{Footnote 13}

To create a more flexible immigration system, the bill sought to avoid the problem of oversubscribed quotas and uneven allocation of visas of the old system. It continued to exclude migrants from the Western Hemisphere, together with their spouses and children, from the world quota ceiling. It established a new preference system for the Eastern Hemisphere that equally favored individuals with needed skills or with family members already in the country. It also proposed the creation of an Immigration Board “to study . . . all facets of immigration policy; to recommend to the President whether to reserve quota numbers in the national interest . . . ; and to recommend to the Attorney General criteria for admission under the occupational preferences.”^{Footnote 14}

Despite Johnson’s initial hesitation, once converted to the immigration reform cause, he devoted considerable energy to its passage, working closely with Kennedy’s former advisers. On January 8, 1964, during his first state of the union address, Johnson criticized the existing immigration law and urged its reform.^{Footnote 15} Two days later, Schwartz wrote, the White House contacted him to organize a meeting with immigration reformers on January 13, 1964, the same day on which the Senate immigration subcommittee had scheduled hearings for Kennedy’s original proposal. The sixty attendees included members of the House and Senate immigration subcommittees, representatives of religious and lay organizations involved in immigration and refugee matters, union leaders, and the media.^{Footnote 16}

White House staffers painstakingly choreographed the meeting to create momentum for reform. Surrounded by television cameras, Johnson urged the immediate passage of the bill with bipartisan support and reminded the audience that every president since Truman had criticized the quota system because it hurt the country’s Cold War mission. Senator Philip Hart (D-Mich.), one of the key supporters of immigration reform, praised Johnson for “stepping up and swinging on an issue that really isn’t politically good. It is right, but it takes some guts to swing.”^{Footnote 17} He then urged the groups attending the meeting to rally support behind the president’s immigration proposal.

While most of the audience rejoiced at the president’s endorsement, the two key players in Congress on immigration matters, Representative Michael Feighan (D-Ohio), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, and Senator James Eastland (D-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization, expressed little enthusiasm.^{Footnote 18} Veterans of the immigration subcommittees since the 1950s and important actors in the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, Feighan and Eastland knew well how to use congressional procedure to their advantage. When urged to take a stance, Feighan proposed the revival of the long dormant Joint Committee on Immigration and Naturalization to evaluate the existing immigration policy. Although many, including Johnson, exulted at his statement, Feighan knew that the joint committee would give him much more authority to shape the final bill because it would allow him to circumvent immigration reformers in Congress and put him and Eastland, a renowned restrictionist, in charge of immigration legislation.^{Footnote 19} Similarly, Eastland vaguely responded that he was prepared to look into the matter “very carefully and very expeditiously.”^{Footnote 20}

It soon became clear to the administration that Feighan would be the major stumbling block in passing the bill. While he had voted 75 percent of the time with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he was, according to the New York Times, “an intellectual bedfellow with the conservative and patriotic groups who have most stoutly defended the status quo” in immigration matters.^{Footnote 21} Although many of his constituents descended from Southern and Eastern Europeans, Feighan had strongly supported the McCarran-Walter Act and, according to Schlei, considered “the traditional supporters of the national origins system” his only real constituents.^{Footnote 22} Moreover, he opposed the exemption of Western Hemisphere immigrants from numerical limits and objected to including newly independent countries in the West Indies in the exempted category because he feared those immigrants of color would change the fabric of American society. Feighan also resented that, when crafting its immigration proposal, the Kennedy Administration had consulted with Representative Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee and his longtime political nemesis, rather than with him, thus ignoring his longtime involvement in immigration legislation.^{Footnote 23}

The White House soon realized that the January 13 meeting had failed to spur serious action on immigration reform in Congress. Although Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), acting chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization, began hearings on the immigration proposal on the same day as Johnson’s meeting at the White House, the hearings, Schwartz remembered with disappointment, “were not extensive and no record was published.”^{Footnote 24} In the meantime, the push for immigration reform in the House quickly came to a stall. On February 10, 1964, when Johnson called Celler to ask him to start working on an immigration bill immediately, Celler, an immigration reform advocate since his election to the House of Representatives in 1922, admitted that he was having trouble pushing the House to move forward on the legislation.^{Footnote 25}

Despite his effort to advance the administration’s immigration reform agenda, Celler was himself responsible for some of the delay as he continued to battle for weeks with Feighan over whose committee had the authority to initiate immigration policy changes. As chair of the Judiciary Committee, Celler sought to limit Feighan’s hold on the Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization by refusing to grant him full power to choose other subcommittee members and issue subpoenas for witnesses for the hearings. Their feud came to a head when Feighan asked the House Appropriations Committee for $160,460 to conduct a study of the existing immigration policy. Celler convinced the committee to allocate only $20,000, and Feighan retaliated by bringing his case to the entire House on April 10, 1964. During the House debate, Feighan accused Celler of blocking “a full and open inquiry into immigration policy.” Although Feighan’s appeal failed to win more funding, his accusations further delayed action on reform and sent a clear message to the White House that he was ready for a fight on immigration.^{Footnote 26} Once the hearings finally began in June 1964, Feighan protracted them until September 1964, despite the White House’s efforts to deploy key administration members to testify and to persuade him to collaborate.

Among those advocates, Secretary of State Dean Rusk offered the most scathing critique of the existing immigration policy.^{Footnote 27} Rusk testified before the committee that the national origins system seriously endangered the United States’ relationship with many of its European allies and that the restrictions against immigrants from the Asia-Pacific Triangle were “indefensible from a foreign policy point of view.”^{Footnote 28} In his opinion, the repeated passage of ad hoc laws to intervene in refugee crises, family reunion cases, and backlog cases demonstrated that both Congress and the country were ready for a less discriminatory immigration policy. On immigration from the Western Hemisphere, Rusk reminded Feighan that it had always been Congress’s policy “to recognize the common bond uniting the Americas by exempting from any quota restrictions those immigrants who were born in independent countries of the Western Hemisphere.”^{Footnote 29} Despite Rusk’s passionate plea for reform, Feighan seemed unmoved.

Given Feighan’s power to impede his reform agenda, Johnson shifted strategies and put his closest aide, Jack Valenti, in charge of negotiations with Feighan. Valenti, however, was hardly more successful than the other members of the Johnson administration who had preceded him.^{Footnote 30} During a plane ride from Cleveland on June 17, 1964, Valenti reported, he sought to convince Feighan to shepherd through an immigration bill by the end of the session. Feighan, after reiterating that he would prefer to hold joint committee hearings and criticizing Celler for refusing to testify a second time at his committee hearings, vaguely promised that the immigration bill would become law by the end of the ongoing session.^{Footnote 31} Valenti’s enthusiasm in reporting this news to the president was short lived. On July 1, Valenti reported in a memo to the president that Feighan was insisting that his support for immigration reform depended on approval for the joint committee hearings, a problem because Celler, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Representative Peter Rodino (D-N.J.) opposed such hearings because the committee had no legislative power and would be chaired by Feighan and Eastland.^{Footnote 32} Concerns about the alliance between Feighan and Eastland were well founded, as Eastland had favored immigration restriction since his election to the Senate in 1943. Eastland, once called “the Voice of the White South,” had replaced Pat McCarran (D-Nev.) as the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration in 1953 and had used his position to oppose any significant change to American immigration policy ever since.^{Footnote 33}

After talking to Celler and Hart, Feldman proposed a strategy to circumvent Eastland’s influence, suggesting in a memo to Valenti at the beginning of August 1964 that they encourage Feighan to propose a bill and then allow Celler and Hart to try to incorporate provisions of the administration bill once the bill reached the House and Senate floors.^{Footnote 34} As the presidential election began to take center stage, however, all action on immigration reform came to a halt.

The 1964 Election and the Limits of Congressional Majorities

Despite a two-to-one Democratic majority in both houses of Congress after the 1964 elections, Johnson and his allies understood that the window of opportunity for reform would not last forever. As a liberal lobbyist admitted to Tichenor, “A recognition spread like wildfire among liberal and labor organizations—that the back of the old conservative-Dixiecrat coalition had been broken, but that it might mend again as soon as the next election.” As a result, many liberal reformers believed they had to “get everything through in the next 2 years that we need in the next 10.”^{Footnote 35} Johnson shared this sense of urgency as he pushed for the passage of eighty of his own legislative proposals in 1965 alone.^{Footnote 36}

Realizing that a lack of popular support made the window for success on immigration reform even smaller, the Johnson administration worked to neutralize opposition in the House. Soon after the election, a Harris poll in the Washington Post confirmed what the White House already knew—that most Americans opposed allowing greater numbers of immigrants into the country.^{Footnote 37} To increase their prospects for success in the House, the Johnson administration pushed the newly elected representatives to enact rules to make it more difficult for the conservative House Rules Committee to block liberal legislation.^{Footnote 38} According to Schwartz, to guarantee a Democratic majority on the House Subcommittee on Immigration, which increased from five to nine members, the administration asked Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to arrange for the appointment of representatives who would support the administration bill and outvote Feighan if necessary.^{Footnote 39} Celler also succeeded in again persuading the House Appropriations Committee not to allocate funds to comply with Feighan’s request to revive the Joint Committee on Immigration and Naturalization.^{Footnote 40} The administration hoped that these developments would at least allow its immigration bill to reach the House floor.

Determined to pass his immigration bill quickly, Johnson signaled to Congress his willingness to do whatever was necessary to break the impasse in the negotiations. In his inaugural address on January 4, 1965, and a special message to Congress on January 13, Johnson called for the immediate reform of American immigration policy and reassured critics that the new law would only repair an injustice and not lead to an immigrant invasion or threaten American workers’ jobs.^{Footnote 41} More important, Johnson also used these speeches to make clear that his administration would endorse any bill that repealed the quota system.^{Footnote 42} Responding to Johnson’s call for action, Celler and Hart introduced the administration bill in the House and the Senate, respectively.

Forced to act, Feighan announced that his committee would hold hearings on the administration bill at the beginning of February. He used a speech before the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies on February 4, 1965, to outline his views on immigration reform and adopt a new negotiating strategy. For the first time, he endorsed the abolition of the national origins quota system, but he called also for a worldwide ceiling on immigration to eliminate all discrimination from American immigration policy, arguing that the administration’s proposal was discriminatory because it preserved the non-quota status for immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. ^{Footnote 43} His speech therefore not only set the stage for a new round of negotiations with the White House but offered a new agenda for anti-immigration organizations like the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies and the American Legion, which immediately endorsed Feighan’s proposal.^{Footnote 44} If immigration reform was imminent, Feighan had apparently decided, he could at least frame the debate on his own terms and fight to win restrictive concessions.

To counteract Feighan’s end run, Johnson again dispatched administration officials to testify in Congress that its proposed bill would hardly change the landscape of American immigration and that its main goal was simply to abolish the national origins system and the restriction on immigration from the Asia-Pacific Triangle. Far from affecting the overall number of immigrants entering the country, they claimed, the new law would maintain the status quo and favor immigrants with desirable skills or with family ties in the United States.^{Footnote 45} Feighan scoffed at their arguments and repeatedly called the administration witnesses’ attention to the rise in population in the Western Hemisphere to justify his calls for a ceiling. In a heated exchange with Attorney General Katzenbach over the changes in immigration from the Western Hemisphere if the final bill failed to include a ceiling, Feighan exclaimed: “Well, I am sure you are not suggesting—or are you—that Congress wait until nonquota immigration from Latin America reaches floodgate proportions before acting?”^{Footnote 46} More troubling for the administration, other members of the subcommittee shared Feighan’s position. Representative Frank Chelf (D-Ky.) similarly objected to the Attorney General’s statements and expressed concern over the impact of Caribbean immigration on American society. During his own exchange with Katzenbach, Chelf wondered: “If we are going to recognize more and more of Jamaica and those areas, if we have got to have more colored folks in the United States, that is all right. That is, if we need them. However, I really and truly think that we have got all the troubles that we can say grace over with our own American native-born colored people.”^{Footnote 47}

As the hearings continued, members of the Johnson administration, especially Valenti and Schlei, continued to seek Feighan’s cooperation in advancing any bill that included its two main goals. Johnson himself even met with Feighan to negotiate a bill acceptable to all, but the representative remained relentless in his demands, even after the administration accepted Feighan’s proposal to change the preference system to favor family reunification over skills.^{Footnote 48} To avoid an open struggle with Feighan and his allies, according to Edward Kennedy, “It was felt in many quarters, of both the private and public sectors, that the Administration perhaps paid a needlessly heavy price in getting this cooperation. But, given its attitude in this matter, little could be done to salvage many reasonable provisions in the original bill.”^{Footnote 49}

Despite having gained these initial concessions from the Johnson Administration, Feighan again stalled the negotiations when he refused to endorse Celler’s House bill unless it included a worldwide ceiling on immigration. When pressed to expand the ceiling to apply also to the Western Hemisphere, Johnson publically deferred to Secretary of State Rusk, saying he would accept a global cap only if Rusk agreed. The Secretary resolutely rejected the idea, adducing that such a measure risked offending Latin American nations already alienated by Johnson’s decision to send Marines into the Dominican Republic in April 1965. If the United States imposed numerical limits on the Western Hemisphere, Rusk told Valenti, “We will vex and dumbfound our Latin American friends, who will now be sure we are in final retreat from Pan Americanism.”^{Footnote 50} Echoing Rusk’s objections, Schlei noted that Feighan’s proposal would hardly serve any purpose since existing qualitative restrictions on non-quota immigrants already regulated immigration from the Western Hemisphere.^{Footnote 51}

This impasse in the negotiations caused the White House to consider postponing immigration legislation altogether. To counteract Feighan’s insistence upon a Western Hemisphere ceiling, Secretary of State Rusk instead suggested a one-line amendment to the bill stating that if total immigration ever went beyond 350,000, the president would make recommendations to Congress to intervene. “What this will do,” Valenti wrote to Johnson, “is keep non-quota status for Latin America, but allow Feighan to tell his right-wing friends that the Congress and the President will act if immigration looks like it is getting out of hand.”^{Footnote 52} Schlei supported Rusk’s proposal because it capped Western Hemisphere immigration “in the least offensive way possible” and did not require devising a legal formula to establish numerical limits for particular countries in the Western Hemisphere. Telling Feighan that developing an immigration system for the Western Hemisphere similar to the one the bill proposed for the Eastern Hemisphere would require time, data, and careful examination, especially with regard to the impact that such a system would have on Mexico and Canada, Schlei promised that the administration would work on creating such a system once the pending bill passed.^{Footnote 53} Expecting Feighan to refuse the administration’s compromise, Valenti recommended delaying passage of the bill, suggesting that they “wait until Santo Domingo is behind us and look again at the Feighan proposal.”^{Footnote 54} Although not openly, the administration was clearly ready to relent on the ceiling but remained sensitive to the country’s foreign policy interests in the Western Hemisphere.

To wrest control of the negotiations back from the Johnson administration, on June 1, 1965, Feighan surprised everybody by introducing his own competing bill without informing the supporters of the administration’s proposal in Congress. His bill proposed to abolish the national origins system and eliminate any form of discrimination based on place of birth, race, or nationality immediately rather than over the proposed five-year span. Although it retained non-quota status for the Western Hemisphere to appease the administration, the bill set a yearly worldwide ceiling of 325,000 immigrants that included Western Hemisphere immigrants.^{Footnote 55} His bill also drastically reduced the admissible number of refugees from the administration’s proposal and reversed its original admission priorities, giving precedence to family reunification over immigrants with needed skills.^{Footnote 56} According to Carl Bon Tempo, Feighan believed that setting a global cap on immigration and giving priority to family reunification would preserve the existing ethnic and cultural makeup of the United States by guaranteeing that most new immigrants would continue to come from Western Europe rather than from other parts of the world.^{Footnote 57}

Feighan’s bill, as Schwartz observed, replaced “the Administration’s proposal as the pending bill on immigration reform.”^{Footnote 58} The bill the House Immigration Subcommittee ultimately sent to the House floor reversed admission priorities to favor family reunion over skills, eliminated the proposed Immigration Board, included a global ceiling on immigration, and diminished provisions for refugees—all changes that ultimately led to a less flexible immigration system. Going on record as favoring a ceiling, Feighan, nonetheless, accepted that the final version of the bill would replace his ceiling on the Western Hemisphere with Secretary of State Rusk’s provision that the president present recommendations for action to Congress whenever immigration from the Western Hemisphere exceeded the previous five-year average by 10 percent.^{Footnote 59}

Yet the battle over a ceiling on immigration from the Western Hemisphere in the House bill continued to affect negotiations as the debate in Congress and its coverage in the press attracted unexpected acolytes in favor of such a ceiling. Not only traditional restrictionists in Congress but also such important advocates of immigration reform as the AFL-CIO, the Christian-Science Monitor, and the New York Times came to favor the Western Hemisphere ceiling on the grounds that its adoption might prevent the enactment of more stringent legislation later on.^{Footnote 60} More troubling for the White House was the endorsement of longtime immigration reform advocate and member of the House Subcommittee on Immigration Peter Rodino (D-N.J.), which signaled a fracture in the liberal reformers’ coalition in Congress. According to White House aide Perry Barber, Rodino had come to believe that the administration bill would favor the relatives of Western Hemisphere immigrants over those of Italian Americans. Rodino’s reversal helped Republican members on the committee and in the House argue for the worldwide ceiling.^{Footnote 61}

These developments moved the dispute over the ceiling on the Western Hemisphere to the center of the negotiations over immigration reform, a debate that further escalated on August 24, 1965, when, during the House debate of the bill, Representative Clark MacGregor (R-Minn.) proposed placing an annual ceiling of 115,000 on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, excluding spouses, parents, and minor children of United States citizens, effective July 1, 1968. He had already proposed his amendment during the subcommittee’s executive sessions, but the committee had rejected it after intense pressure from the administration. On the House floor, confident in the support of fellow restrictionists, MacGregor again proposed the imposition of a ceiling, arguing that a truly nondiscriminatory immigration policy required a ceiling on immigration from the Western Hemisphere as from elsewhere. Appealing to long existing sentiments of xenophobia toward immigrants of color, he urged his colleagues to include the ceiling because the population explosion throughout the Western Hemisphere could soon lead to a sharp increase in immigration and because the hemisphere would now include immigrants from newly independent countries like Trinidad-Tobago and Jamaica, who threatened to alter the makeup of American society.^{Footnote 62} On the second day of the debate, MacGregor argued in defense of his amendment that it still favored the Western Hemisphere over the Eastern Hemisphere because the rigid preference system would not apply to immigrants from the Western Hemisphere.^{Footnote 63} Expressing the official position of the administration, representatives who objected to the ceiling countered that the special relationship between the United States and its neighbors that had always been acknowledged in American immigration laws should continue and that there was no evidence that it had led other countries in the world to consider themselves the object of discrimination.^{Footnote 64}

The State Department and the White House exerted great pressure to ensure the rejection of the MacGregor amendment. Secretary Rusk sent letters to numerous congressmen, including Representative Celler, urging their help in defeating the amendment.^{Footnote 65} All the while, Valenti continued his efforts to regain the support of Representative Rodino.^{Footnote 66} On August 25, 1965, the House initially voted in favor of the MacGregor amendment by a 156–154 teller-vote, after which Celler demanded a record vote, which rejected it 189–218. Shortly after, the House passed the full bill by a 318–95 vote and sent it to the Senate for consideration.^{Footnote 67}

The Fight Moves to the Senate

The White House realized that its narrow victory against the ceiling in the House would be more difficult to repeat in the Senate. The Senate had held hearings from February 10 to August 3, 1965, but had decided to delay action until the House voted on its immigration bill. As in 1964, Senator Edward Kennedy acted as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration.^{Footnote 68} On August 16, 1965, White House assistant Mike Manatos reported that Eastland had decided to give in on the immigration bill and “be guided by Ted Kennedy’s wishes in the matter.”^{Footnote 69} The administration realized that the real obstacles to immigration reform in the Senate would now be Senator Samuel Ervin (D-N.C.) and Senate Minority Leader Senator Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.), both members of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and staunch restrictionists. Ervin, like many of his Southern colleagues, would have preferred to retain the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act in its entirety but decided to intervene in the negotiations over the new bill when he realized that immigration reformers in Congress had enough votes to succeed.^{Footnote 70} As Manatos explained to presidential aide Larry O’Brien, Ervin, like Feighan, agreed “strongly about placing the Western Hemisphere on a quota footing as is the rest of the world,” but, unlike Feighan, could count on a majority on the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration to vote with him in favor of the ceiling.^{Footnote 71} As Ervin repeatedly reiterated on the Senate floor, he believed that immigration from the Western Hemisphere would “become unmanageable unless we place realistic limitations.” Like his colleagues in the House, Ervin worried that the recent increase in immigration from Latin America was not just a trend but rather “a threatened avalanche.”^{Footnote 72}

The Senate hearings left the White House and supporters of the bill in no doubt about Ervin’s ability to muster the opposition. Throughout the hearings, he encouraged critics of the administration bill to express their views openly and made clear that he could endorse the new law only if it set a numerical cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. Many of the restrictionist groups who testified criticized immigrants’ ingratitude in sending their money back home rather than spending it in the United States and contended that American immigration policy was not as outrageous as the Berlin Wall, the genocide in Tibet, or prisons in Castro’s Cuba. Others argued that using the census to calculate the national quotas guaranteed objectivity and warned that, without the quota system, “hordes of Red Chinese, Indians, Congolese cannibals” would destroy the nation’s identity. Another group lamented that the administration bill robbed white citizens of their rights. Echoing the xenophobic restrictionist views of the turn of the nineteenth century, yet another vocal minority contended that the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon majority in the United States justified immigration restriction.^{Footnote 73}

As it had done with Feighan during the House hearings, the White House deployed key administration representatives to the Senate hearings to dissuade Ervin from his agenda. Secretary of State Dean Rusk once again testified that the existing policy harmed American foreign relations, explaining that the many foreign ministers who criticized the national origins quota system “were not complaining about numbers but about the principle which they considered discriminatory.”^{Footnote 74} Assistant Attorney General Schlei, echoing another of the administration’s key arguments, testified that the new legislation did not represent a radical change but simply rectified a discriminatory facet of the country’s immigration policy. Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz, focusing on family reunion, reassured those worried about American jobs that most of the immigrants entering the country between 1959 and 1962 were women, children, and other relatives who were reuniting with their families and would not join the workforce. Finally, New York Senator Robert Kennedy criticized the absurdity of an immigration system that allowed some American citizens to bring over an unskilled worker from Northern Europe fairly quickly but forced skilled immigrants from other parts of the world and relatives of American citizens to wait years to immigrate to the United States.^{Footnote 75}

These testimonies did little to deter Ervin, who, with his allies, could still block immigration reform in the subcommittee. On August 20, 1965, as the House debate on the bill reached its final stages, Ervin introduced his own immigration bill in the Senate. Ervin’s bill proposed a ceiling of 120,000 on immigrants from the Americas to go into effect on July 1, 1968; eliminated completely the non-quota preference category for family members; favored the reunion of families on a first-preference quota basis; provided for special quotas for skilled individuals; placed a yearly world ceiling at 300,000; and prohibited the admission of unskilled labor unless certified by the Secretary of Labor.^{Footnote 76}

The administration again found itself at a crossroads, facing an intransigent negotiating partner and the real possibility that it would fail to achieve immigration reform of any type. In Edward Kennedy’s opinion, the administration, although remaining opposed to a ceiling on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, “was unwilling to wage a battle for this cause” and “believed that, given the general parliamentary situation and the strong support voiced by Senator Dirksen for a curb in Western Hemisphere immigration,” the inclusion of some of the provisions of the Ervin bill would be necessary to get the bill out of committee.^{Footnote 77} And in fact, as private correspondence from the president’s aides reveals, Johnson and the Department of State were ready to capitulate so as to accomplish some form of immigration reform. In a memorandum Barber suggests that Johnson privately admitted that a quota on the Western Hemisphere made sense to him, which, coupled with his desire to enact immigration reform and move on to the rest of his legislative agenda, made a compromise all the more likely.^{Footnote 78} More important, the Department of State, the sole remaining objector in the administration to a ceiling on the Western Hemisphere immigration, accepted the president’s decision.^{Footnote 79}

Once both the president and the Department of State relented, Attorney General Katzenbach took over the final stages of the negotiations to mediate a reasonable compromise for both sides. During a meeting on August 25, 1965, the same day the House defeated the MacGregor amendment and passed the House bill without a ceiling, Dirksen, Ervin, and Katzenbach agreed that the administration would accept Ervin’s 120,000 annual ceiling on the Western Hemisphere on the condition that a commission on immigration from the Western Hemisphere be appointed to examine the issue and report to Congress by January 1968.^{Footnote 80} At the end of its study, the three men agreed, if the commission proposed a number higher than 120,000, Congress would have to consider a new proposal; if it deemed that limit acceptable, then the 120,000 ceiling would go into effect on July 1, 1968.^{Footnote 81} Perhaps reflecting the administration’s uneasiness about how its allies would perceive this concession, the only other condition imposed by the Johnson administration, as Valenti reported in a memo, was that the ceiling proposal “be played as a Committee sponsored thing, not as something the Administration has consented to.”^{Footnote 82} The day after the meeting, the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration included Ervin’s amendment to its bill and, with a vote of 5–3, passed it on to the Judiciary Committee.^{Footnote 83}

The president and the State Department’s acceptance of the ceiling on the Western Hemisphere left liberal immigration reform advocates with very few options to counteract the influence of immigration restrictionists. When debate on the revised immigration bill reached the Senate floor on September 15, 1965, “amid indications,” according to the New York Times, “that the administration had virtually dropped its opposition to place Western Hemisphere countries under an annual ceiling of 120,000,” the only serious objection came from Republican Senator Jacob K. Javits from New York.^{Footnote 84} On September 20, Javits, after losing the vote over the ceiling two days earlier, made a final plea to his colleagues to strike it from the bill because “it would impair our special relationship with our sister republics in the Americas.”^{Footnote 85} His colleagues paid no heed to his appeal.

In fact, evidence suggests that immigration reformers accepted the compromise bill because the White House presented it as just the first step in an incremental reform process. “There was a general agreement on the part of all concerned,” remembered Edward Kennedy, “that matters corollary to the basic issue of eliminating the national-origins quota system should be left for deliberation at a future time.”^{Footnote 86} Attorney General Katzenbach published an open letter to Kennedy in the Congressional Record that reassured reformers in the Senate that the administration recognized the need for further changes in immigration policy and promised to send an omnibus bill to both immigration subcommittees the following year.^{Footnote 87}

That the negotiations over the most ambitious immigration reform effort since 1952 eventually hinged on the debate over the ceiling on the Western Hemisphere, a provision that had been absent from both the Kennedy and Johnson bills, demonstrates the influence that Southern Democrats and their allies held in the Senate even after the 1964 elections. The full Senate voted in favor of the bill imposing a limit on immigration from the Western Hemisphere on September 22, 1965. The vote was 76 to 18, with opposition largely confined to those Southern Democrats who still considered the bill too generous.^{Footnote 88} As the New York Times pointed out, the passage of the bill in the Senate was “a somewhat qualified victory for President Johnson.” After having defeated the Western Hemisphere ceiling provision in the House, the administration failed to do the same in the Senate when Dirksen and Ervin’s ultimatum left him “with the alternative of accepting the restriction or facing a determined fight in the Judiciary Committee against the bill as a whole.”^{Footnote 89}

Since the House and Senate bills differed, the two bodies next began a new round of negotiations to reconcile the two bills. The composition of the joint committee gave restrictionists another opportunity to leave their mark on the bill and ensured that no bill would pass without the inclusion of a ceiling on Western Hemisphere immigration. As the final report of the joint committee reveals, during the joint committee’s meetings, those who had supported the MacGregor amendment in the House joined forces with senators in favor of the ceiling, outnumbering those who opposed it.^{Footnote 90} Emboldened by their success in the Senate, the restrictionist group also worked to undermine other aspects of the bill that could have lessened the impact of the ceiling. Among other concessions, they successfully reduced the number of presidential appointees to the Select Commission on Western Hemisphere Immigration, eroding the president’s power to shape the debate on the ceiling in the immediate future and obliterating the last effort to shift the center of immigration policymaking away from Congress and to the Executive Branch.^{Footnote 91}

Before the final passage of the bill in both houses, two final attempts to challenge the Western Hemisphere ceiling demonstrated the liberal immigration reformers’ frustration with the compromise that had been struck. The first took place in the Senate on September 20, 1965, when the Kennedy brothers carried out a final attack on the ceiling during the Senate debate on the immigration bill, and Senator Ervin once again made it clear that the bill would not pass without the Western Hemisphere provision.^{Footnote 92} Concerned that infighting among Democrats would derail the passage of the bill, O’Brien intervened with the Kennedy brothers on behalf of the administration to make sure that they would not make any other “move to eliminate the western hemisphere quota.”^{Footnote 93} A second attempt to oppose the ceiling occurred on September 30, 1965, the day of the House vote, when Representative Henry B. Gonzalez of Texas proposed a motion to reopen deliberations on the bill with instructions to reject the Senate provision on the Western Hemisphere immigration. Despite these attempts, the House adopted the bill on a roll-call vote of 320–69, and the Senate adopted it by a voice vote shortly afterward.^{Footnote 94}