In her Oct. 1 WorldNetDaily column, Ilana Mercer waxes nostalgic for the days when only white Europeans were allowed to immigrate to the United States:
What Americans ought to be discussing, and are not, is mass immigration (which subsumes illegal immigration) and, in particular, the radical transforming of America through state-engineered immigration policies.
Since the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act took effect – with no real debate or voter participation – immigration to the U.S. has been predicated on a multicultural, egalitarian quota system. The result of this system in practice has been an emphasis on mass importation of people from the Third World. Family reunification supersedes America’s economic or cultural interests.
At the time, Congress was more circumspect about the pitfalls of this plan than it is today. Members of the Senate openly conceded in their debates that America had a distinct and undeniable identity, which previous immigration – being mostly from the traditional northern and western European sources – had not altered. The representatives promised (falsely) that the radical new amendments would generally preserve the country’s historical and cultural complexion.So eager was one senator to pass the act – which was to herald the age of mass, indiscriminate immigration – that he vowed: “[O]ur cities will not be flooded with millions of immigrants annually … under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration [will remain] substantially the same,” and “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.” These pre-PC assurances came not from a “nativist” or a member of the Know-Nothing Party, but from no other than then-Immigration Subcommittee Chairman Edward Kennedy.
This was all before it became taboo to discuss openly, as the late senator did on that occasion, the reshaping of America by means of central planning. (Such discussion is now regularly squelched with accusations of racism or via totemic, robotic incantations of “We are a multicultural nation of immigrants.”)
In 1965, when Edward Kennedy was promoting his “vision” for America, he candidly acknowledged that (for better or for worse) the country had not always been a mess of multicultural pottage, and that an adventurous immigration policy had the potential to render the place unrecognizable.
The 1965 act has produced a torrential influx of immigrants. Every qualified immigrant holds an entry ticket for his extended family.
Mercer doesn’t acknowledge that the immigration policy before 1965 was largely driven by racism and eugenics.