Sixty years ago, the president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, championed the value of immigration to the United States. When the president signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 into law on Oct. 3 of that year, he dismantled the national quota system that had been put into place during the 1920s.
Today, President Donald Trump continues to move in the opposite direction. Building on a road map devised by advisor Stephen Miller, his administration is in the process of imposing one of the most restricted immigration programs that the nation has experienced since World War II. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, authorized roughly $170 billion for border and immigration enforcement over the next five years, including $75 billion for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—on top of its existing annual budget of about $10.4 billion. The funding will help to transform U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the biggest domestic policing force that the country has ever had.
As Michael Tomasky noted in the New Republic, the administration is likely to expand detention camps such as “Alligator Alcatraz” into forced labor programs. “And this is where we are,” Tomasky lamented, “in the United States of America, in the year 2025: We’re looking at the very real possibility of a string of labor camps across the country.”
For the first time in seven decades, U.S. immigration could dip below net zero in 2025. In New York City, Lady Liberty is lonely and scared.
Trump has gone after immigration, both undocumented and legal, in ruthless fashion. The administration has sealed off the borders and undertaken a massive deportation program, sending those detained to prison facilities in other countries. The president has been revoking temporary legal status and canceling programs that allowed certain categories of immigrants to enter the country and work. He has imposed a new travel ban as well as limits on refugee programs that have been on the books for decades.
Following a recent Supreme Court ruling that limited the ability of lower courts to temporarily block his policies, he will use executive orders to end birthright citizenship in as many states as possible, despite the action being clearly unconstitutional. This will strip citizenship from kids born in the U.S. in certain states where district judges don’t challenge the law. Given that the president seems to feel that he has the wind to his back, there is little doubt that he will continue to expand his efforts.
Democrats are not doing much to fight back. Indeed, many leading figures—shell-shocked from the 2024 election and the first few months of Trump 2.0—have focused on the need for their party to get tougher on immigration crackdowns. Still holding on to arguments about the economic and cultural benefits of immigration to the nation, they are spending more energy repositioning themselves toward a new center. Whereas Democrats in the lead-up to the 2004 election tried their best to be tougher on national defense, now they are vying to be the better alternative for the tough-on-immigration crowd.
There are many compelling arguments about why Democrats need to make these moves, both in terms of policy and politics, but they would do well to remember the legacy of Johnson’s immigration reform. Even though championing immigration might be harder to do in our current age, the arguments have deep roots and tap into one of the most important forces that has shaped the greatest elements of the national character: the constant influx of new people, communities, and culture onto the United States’ shores.
Nativism has a long history too, of course. When Johnson entered the White House, public policy had coalesced around measures that limited and restricted the ability of individuals to enter into the United States. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur, which created prohibitions on Chinese workers entering the country. In 1921 and 1924, Congress passed legislation that imposed quotas on how many persons could arrive from Southern and Eastern Europe, which had been the origin point for a massive entry of immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. In 1952, during the early Cold War, the McCarran-Walter Act entrenched most of the limitations. President Harry Truman attempted to veto the bill, but the Republican-controlled Congress overrode him.
After World War II, opposition gradually built against the restrictionist regime. The genocidal massacre of Jews—and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration famously denying access to a boat filled with refugees fleeing the Nazis, as well as the internment of Japanese Americans—served as living lessons as to the dangers of ideology that had guided policymakers in the 1920s.
The pressures from the Cold War against the Soviet Union and China meant that the United States’ elected officials were more eager to be welcoming to refugees from Eastern Europe who were trying to flee communist regimes. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Refugee Relief Act, which authorized visas for over 200,000 refugees, most of whom were coming from Europe.
“This action,” Eisenhower announced, “demonstrates again America’s traditional concern for the homeless, the persecuted and the less fortunate of other lands. It is a dramatic contrast to the tragic events taking place in East Germany and in other captive nations.”
Yet anti-immigration sentiment endured. Indeed, a year after signing the refugee bill, Eisenhower put “Operation Wetback” into effect, its derogatory name explaining what the policy was doing. The Immigration Bureau conducted a major, military-style deportation program that rounded up more than 1 million Mexican immigrants, most of whom had been brought into the country through the bracero program, which recruited them for work.
The Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century finally broke support for maintaining this infrastructure. As a result of activists and leaders who fought to protect the human rights of Black Americans within the United States, a growing number of elected officials started to connect those arguments with the plight of immigrants. On Capitol Hill, New York Rep. Emanuel Celler, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, teamed up with Michigan Sen. Philip Hart to promote legislation that would end the quota system.
They found support from President John F. Kennedy, who—in a pamphlet published while he was a senator—had called on Congress to end the quota system, and then his successor, Johnson, who folded immigration reform into his Great Society plan.
Nonetheless, success was not a slam dunk. There were many divisions over reform; many conservatives demanded a numerical limit on immigrants, whereas liberals wanted a more flexible system. In June 1965, Gallup reported on public sentiment on the issue: Of those surveyed, 39 percent of the public wanted to keep immigration levels the same, while 33 percent wanted to lower them. Only 7 percent supported any kind of expansion.
The 1964 election created the conditions necessary for success. Johnson’s landslide victory over Sen. Barry Goldwater discredited right-wing extremism, and Democrats were left with 295 seats in the House and 68 in the Senate. Southern Democrats were on the defense, Republicans were in disarray, and liberal northerners ruled the roost. Their agenda included immigration reform.
One of the main proponents of reform—the deceased President Kennedy’s youngest brother, Ted Kennedy, a senator from Massachusetts—proclaimed that “our streets may not be paved with gold, but they are paved with the promise that men and women who live here—even strangers and newcomers—can rise as fast, as far as their skills will allow, no matter what their color is, no matter what the place of their birth.”
The legislation passed with strong bipartisan support. In the House, 320 members voted in favor and 70 against. The Senate approved with a voice vote. The Hart-Celler Act—formally known as the Immigration and Nationality Act—dismantled the national origins quotas from the 1920s. Congress put into place a different policy structure that was based on preference. The government would allocate visas to certain categories of people, such as the spouses and children of individuals who were in the United States as permanent citizens as well as certain kinds of workers. The legislation focused on the themes of family unification and skilled labor.
“It’s really amazing,” Sen. Kennedy said after absorbing the magnitude of the victory, “A year ago I doubt the bill would have a chance. This time it was easy.”
When Johnson signed the bill into law on Oct. 3 on Liberty Island, the first president to visit the statue since Franklin Roosevelt had celebrated the 50th anniversary of its dedication in 1936, he called it “one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration.”
Johnson argued that the legislation “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.” As a result of the reform, he said, “Those who can contribute most to this country—to its growth, to its strength, to its spirit—will be the first that are admitted to this land.” Invoking the spirit of civil rights, Johnson reminded the country that “[o]ur beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. … The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources—because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.” Never again, he hoped, would a quota system “shadow the gate to the American Nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.”
Proponents of immigration reform acknowledged that the final bill had shortcomings. Columbia University historian Mae Ngai, in her pathbreaking book, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, noted that the legislation imposed a quantitative cap on immigrants from countries such as Mexico—the first time that an act had placed restrictions on Latin Americans.
The legislation would also have many unintended consequences. Although the crafters of the reform had been focused on Eastern Europeans, the law ended up producing a huge influx of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Africa through the family unification provisions.
Despite these issues, many supporters of immigration saw the legislation as transformative. There was a huge increase in immigration. According to the Center for American Progress, the number of foreign-born persons living in the U.S. rose from less than 10 million in 1965 (4.8 percent of the population) to 45 million in 2015 (13.9 percent of the population). More important than the numbers, argued historian Geraldo Cadava, the legislation was a “law that made possible the continuation of a kind of pluralism that has defined America from the beginning.”
Indeed, Johnson’s bill marked a high point of the United States’ affirmative commitment to a nation created by immigrants, expanded by immigrants, and perpetually strengthened by the contributions of immigrants.
In 2025, the United States is living under a very different political ethic. The proposed balance between a path to citizenship and tighter border control that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama fought for, unsuccessfully, has turned into a national rhetoric about illegality, criminality, deportation, and ruthless crackdowns.
Without reviving the ideas that drove Johnson in 1965, the United States will forever be impoverished. The nation is now at risk of gutting and vanquishing one of the most fundamental principles of the American dream. Democrats need to avoid a race to the bottom where political imperatives propel them into accepting Trump’s terms of the debate.
And any Republican who still has the courage to remain independent should remember the words of President Ronald Reagan, who said in 1981: “Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands.”
Without appreciating Lyndon B. Johnson’s vision, we risk wiping away one of the greatest components of U.S. history: a nation made stronger, freer, and more powerful because it opened its arms to the world.