This one is for Gowan.

Since 2002, as a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, I have offered every fall a lower-division course on immigration to the United States after 1965. I had focused on immigrants from Asia to the United States, as this was more in line with my early research interests, but then I revised the course to encompass a much broader cross-section of immigrants, if only to measure how Asian migrants were different from, say, Mexican and Central American migrants. The class is still evolving: over the last 15 years, many outstanding scholars have published work about immigration law and policy, as well as the impact of public law on immigrants and immigrant communities. It’s been my pleasure to share that research with my first-year students, to introduce them to some of the best and most accessible works in the social sciences and the humanities, and to introduce familiar topics from a scholarly point of view.

In my class, I’ve tried to make a number of underlying arguments about the Immigration Act of 1965, the most important being that this law represented one of the most significant changes in American history ever. We still feel its overall demographic impact. There is a before and after to the rule: before 1965, persons of Asian ancestry comprised less than 1% of the population of the United States, and persons from Mexico, Central America, and South America comprised about 4%. In 1965, about 85% of Americans defined themselves as “White” in the national census. By 2010, however, there were about 18 million people of Asian ancestry in the United States, and 57 million people of Hispanic ancestry were, representing 6% and 18% of the American population, respectively. The proportion of “Whites” had fallen to about 60% by 2010. For persons of African descent, the Immigration Act of 1965 had surprising impacts, too: by 2010, more persons of African ancestry living in the United States were immigrants from the Caribbean and from Africa, and about 10–12% of all persons of African ancestry were immigrants. In so many ways, the immigrants who came after 1965 have had a profound and lasting impact on American society, and, if present trends continue, they and their children will reshape the United States even further.

* * * * *

This volume reflects upon the central themes in immigration law and policy in the United States after 1965, but by presenting, in some detail, the American experience, I’ve sought to explain to my own students why American legal institutions shaped immigration laws in specific ways, how those rules governed immigrants and immigrant communities, and then how all modern states have wrestled with similar problems and consequences. Immigration is quite the hot topic around the world. In the United States, President Lyndon Johnson promised that the Immigration Act of 1965 would not be a “revolutionary bill,” but he was clearly wrong, and in ways that he and many other politicians and scholars could not have foreseen. Some members of Congress supported the Immigration Act of 1965 because they thought that this would be a race-neutral way of continuing to yield the same number and quality of European immigrants as before. Most Americans were of European ancestry in 1965, and a clear majority of leading colleges and universities were in Europe. Thus, some legislators thought that, by selecting immigrants with skills and family connections, the rule would yield mostly Europeans. Some 50 years later, though, persons of European ancestry were a far smaller proportion of the American population than since … well, ever. Combined with other developments around the world, the law resulted in a much more multiracial America than anyone could have predicted in 1965. Similarly, within Europe, few policy-makers thought that a European Union would produce such profound immigration consequences, and yet those consequences have caused many to reconsider the entire project.

Given the unpredictability of immigration rules, the field overall is suited to the “law and society” movement within the social sciences, as one of the main tenets among law and society scholars has been that the law often doesn’t do what the legislators intended. Moreover, using methods in the humanities and social sciences, scholars in law and society didn’t treat law and legal institutions as separate from political or social norms, and – perhaps most obvious of all – they did not take the law at face value. A law and society scholar might drive down a freeway and see a speed limit, 65 miles per hour, but she would never infer from that sign that people actually drove at or under that speed. Instead of just trusting the sign, the law at face value, this scholar might collect empirical data about speeds on the freeway, taking hundreds or thousands of measurements to see how the law shaped real-life driving speeds. A historian with a similar sensibility might study how the rule came to be, if just to understand why so many people tended to break it.

For scholars of the immigration law, a law-and-society approach has obvious intuitive appeal: for many years, American immigration rules have told some people not to come, encouraged others to live and work here, and threatened to remove a larger number of people who had come without inspection or who had misbehaved. Again, this book presents evidence from my colleagues that shows how these rules have never worked as intended; nor have they had consequences that the legislators themselves had foreseen or approved. The rules may provide some starting point for how things actually unfolded, but no one would conclude from the simple existence of rules prohibiting illegal immigration that there were, in fact, no illegal immigrants in the United States.

* * * * *

The first third of this volume lays out the historical context for the Immigration Act of 1965, drawing from several leading histories about the period before, during, and after. The first chapter outlines a theory for understanding everything else in the book: because of basic changes to our communication and transportation technologies, the world was a much, much smaller place than ever before, and so learning about distant places and then getting from one place to another was easier than ever. Federal immigration rules originated during a time when governments envisioned control of boundaries and territory and people. Governments passed these rules to regulate entry and exit, and yet with so much movement everywhere nowadays, all the time, it’s no wonder that so many governments pass rules that so often don’t work. Without question, many supporters of the Immigration Act of 1965 thought that persons of European descent would still dominate American immigration trends after the rule, just as they had before the rule. Instead, the rule resulted in millions of people immigrating from Asia and Latin America, and it’s only in hindsight that we can understand how and why that came to pass. It turns out that many of the Asians and Latin Americans came from countries where lots of Americans had gone first, which might suggest that spilling yourself into the affairs of other countries may result in a lot of migration from there to here.

The middle third of this volume deals with some of the most difficult challenges arising from the new immigration law. The United States became far more multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural within a very short period of time, and yet, as most professional historians know, the United States had never dealt well with this kind of diversity. In many instances, Americans continued to cope poorly with racial and ethnic diversity, and we focus here in this section on the persistence of hate crimes, hate speech, and then more disturbing instances of mass violence and social chaos. In the early 1990s, many Americans were watching entire cities fall apart through a combination of newer immigrant cacophonies layered over older, almost primordial, American racial tensions. In the aftermath of such recurring violence, many politicians and commentators proposed new and harsher immigration rules, ones designed to encourage “good,” “productive” immigrants, and others to discourage and to expel anyone who might rely on public benefits, or who had committed a crime. Moreover, as the number of people migrating unlawfully rose from 1965 through 1986, and then into our current decade, more Americans demanded that the United States regain control over its borders.

The last portion of this book deals again with the unintended and unforeseeable consequences of these latest reforms. Nationally, after 1996, immigration policy was coming into a near-permanent deadlock – indeed, we have not seen a major, comprehensive revision to the immigration law since the Clinton Administration. Two presidents, each with two terms, both failed. In the wake of these efforts, local governments, state governments, and the federal government have all pursued a mind-boggling range of policies, many of them completely contradictory. At the federal level, executive actions took the place of comprehensive legislation. States and local governments passed new rules that suggested profound disagreement about immigrants: were they public nuisances and threats to law-abiding communities, or were they integral members of communities and families? These conceptual disagreements were most obvious in the laws governing undocumented immigrants. In some states, young people who were out of status could attend public college and universities and get financial aid, while in others all the doors and supports were closed. In some jurisdictions, local police officers checked the status of anyone suspected of being “illegal,” and yet, not 20 minutes away, in another city, political leaders told officers not to ask or to care.

At the national level, where immigration law was supposed to be supreme and over-riding of all state and local rules, both Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama did not get what they had wanted. Members of his own party refused to offer “amnesty” to undocumented immigrants when President George W. Bush proposed and pushed hard for that result. To appease members of his party, Bush said that undocumented persons would have to admit the error of their ways, pay a fine, and wait longer to vote or to be secure in the United States. This was not enough. Other leaders recommended instead that all levels of government should make life so miserable for undocumented persons that they themselves might “self-deport.”

As these debates dragged on, there would be no “grand bargain,” no immigration reform at the end of the Bush Administration in 2008. The next President, Barack Obama, began on such a hopeful note – hope and change everywhere – but he too did not get what he had wanted. There would be no comprehensive reform over the next eight years. Instead, as the grinding wheels of existing immigration rules continued to turn and turn and turn, Barack Obama’s Administration ended up removing and deporting more people than any other Administration in American history. I am almost positive that he did not intend this to be a part of his legacy. There might be no mention of this in his Presidential Library back in Chicago.

In early 2017, the new President of the United States was blunt about what he had wanted in immigration law and policy. Even if he does get everything that he wanted, though, the readers of this book might, in the end, have a better sense of why he won’t be as successful or as loved as he himself desired to be.

* * * * *

Throughout this work, and throughout my class, I’ve posed problems in immigration law and policy as though they remain “open” – open to debate, to moral and ethical considerations, to thoughts of how our present connects to our past. Of course, none of these problems is going away, and, at the end of my class, I’ve told my students that many of these issues are likely to dominate a huge portion of their lives, no matter what their professional or personal goals after college. Governments and states fell apart before 1965, and many are falling apart now, and we have in the world more refugees and displaced persons than ever before. In addition, if the climate continues to change, if sea levels rise, if more violent weather events and droughts occur more often, the number of displaced people will increase ever higher, to figures that will dwarf our current crises. We thus leave the class having had a long and extended conversation about a vexing area of public law, and I do hope that my students might continue to cultivate a civic and scholarly engagement with the ideas presented over the term. We will all need that level of engagement as we approach even more formidable problems in human migration.

I am so deeply grateful to the hundreds of students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for having taken my class. My students have come from all over the world in recent years, in all kinds of circumstances, and they’ve inspired me to design a class that speaks to as many of their experiences as possible. Rudy Guevarra, Malaphone Phommassa, Dusty Hoesly, and Philip Deslippe were among the excellent graduate students who have served as teaching assistants for this class, and they too helped me to think through improvements. Many of the class participants have said that they’d shared the class with their parents or roommates or friends, and so, with that in mind, I’ve tried for a prose that is free from academic jargon and as accessible as possible, so as to promote this kind of sharing. I hope that this volume can be useful for professional scholars, too, as an overview of the entire field, and for insights about how best to connect past and present migration problems. I hope that everyone will continue to read and to consider the scholarly authors I’ve relied upon for this work – I’ve been so grateful to have learned from the fine scholars working in immigration law and policy, in law and society, and in American ethnic studies, and my debts to them will be obvious to any reader. I am grateful to Jonathan Skerrett of Polity Press, because he reached out to me a few years ago to see whether I could recommend someone who could write about the Immigration Act of 1965 in a single volume. He managed to make me do it, and I’ve been thankful ever since. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for Polity, for their thorough read of my manuscript and for their helpful suggestions. My copy-editor, Leigh Mueller, caught many embarrassing errors, and she helped to produce a much-improved version of the final manuscript.

Finally, I’ve dedicated this book to my wife, Gowan Lee, because she’s just the best. I’m inspired every day by her travels and by her constant and loving devotion to her family.