America living under the ghost of Ted Kennedy.
Here’s what they won’t tell you about the 1965 immigration act, who was behind it, and why simply pausing immigration won’t fix the problem. https://t.co/5Nc95tRR5f pic.twitter.com/lhC07ufRvK
— Lauren Witzke (@LaurenWitzkeDE) November 28, 2025
So in 1965, they passed an Act that switched America's immigration from majority European to majority Hispanic from Mexico. Within just 50 years, America went from around 90% white of European descent to 60%. And even if we stop immigration completely, right now, by 2045, European Americans will still become the absolute minority in America. The Left realized that foreign-born Hispanics vote around 80% for the Left. So they started a campaign to call the immigration policy we had pre-1965 "racist" and "discriminatory."
There was a feeling in Congress that that same notion of ending discrimination should also be applied to US immigration policy up until 1965 US immigration policy was heavily biased in favor of Europeans.
Senator Ted Kennedy who played a major role in helping pass the 1965 Immigration Act promised in a speech that, "the passing of this bill won't change America or cause Americans to lose their jobs."
He said in the Floor speech, 1965,
Out of deference to the critics, I want to comment on what the bill will not do. First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed Bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same. Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset. Contrary to the charges in some quarters, the Bill will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area or the most populated and economically deprived nations. In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as some critics seem to think. Thirdly, the bill will not permit the entry of subversive persons, criminals, illiterates, or those with contagious disease or serious mental illness. As I noted moments ago, no immigrant visa will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public charge.
Every single thing that Ted Kennedy promised would not happen in the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act did, in fact, happen. We were, in fact, flooded with a million immigrants annually. The ethnic mix of this country was upset. America is, in fact, being inundated with immigrants every single year from one particular country, mostly that being Mexico. And we are, in fact, accepting immigrants from economically deprived nations, such as Africa, Asia, Mexico, El Salvador, Haiti. And when he promised along with others that the Bill would not permit the entry of subversive persons, criminals, illiterates, or those with contagious diseases, obviously, that was a lie as well . . . especially the subversive persons.
By the way, Ted Kennedy also had Reagan's back in 1986,
1986: “This amnesty will give citizenship to only 1.1 to 1.3 million illegal aliens. We will secure the borders henceforth. We will never again bring forward another amnesty bill like this.”
1963 is beginning to make a little more sense.
________________________________________________
Rush Limbaugh presents Ben Johnson's critique on "The 1965 Immigration Act: Anatomy of a Disaster," Ben Johnson, 2002.
America's current mass immigration mess is the result of a change in the laws in 1965. Prior to 1965, despite some changes in the 50's, America was a low-immigration country basically living under immigration laws written in 1924. Thanks to low immigration, the swamp of cheap labor was largely drained during this period, America became a fundamentally middle-class society, and our many European ethnic groups were brought together into a common national culture. In some ways, this achievement was so complete that we started to take for granted what we had achieved and forgot why it happened. So in a spasm of sentimentality on the Right and lies on the Left, we opened the borders.
Born of liberal ideology, the 1965 bill abolished the national origins quota system that had regulated the ethnic composition of immigration in fair proportion to each group's existing presence in the population. In a misguided application spirit of the civil rights era, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations saw these ethnic quotas as an archaic form of chauvinism. Moreover, as Cold Warriors facing charges of "racism" and "imperialism," they found the system rhetorically embarrassing. The record of debate over this seismic change in immigration policy reveals that left-wingers, in their visceral flight to attack "discrimination," did not reveal the consequences of their convictions. Instead, their spokesmen set out to assuage concerned traditionalists with a litany of lies and wishful thinking.
Chief among national concerns was total numeric immigration. Senate floor manager and Camelot knight-errant Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, assured jittery senators that “our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually.” Senator Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, further calmed that august body, insisting “the total number of potential immigrants would not be changed very much.” Time has proven otherwise. Average immigration levels before the 1965 amendments took effect hovered around 300,000 per annum. Yet 1,045,000 legal immigrants flooded our cities in 1996 alone.
