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How the Kennedy Family Caused Today's Immigration Crisis
[Front Page] When LBJ signed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act into law, JFK had been dead for two years, but it, more than the Cuban missile crisis or the race to the moon, was his real legacy which still impacts us today when there are no more Americans on the moon or nukes in Cuba.At the signing, LBJ paid tribute to "the vision of the late beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy". Little did the 36th president know that the 44th president, born to a radical Kenyan student, was already growing up in this country due to JFK’s personal intervention during his 1960 presidential campaign. "This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill," President Johnson argued. "It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives... Yet it is still one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration." Only the last was true. It affected not only millions, but tens of millions, and it reshaped our lives and our country. At the signing ceremony, LBJ was flanked by the newly minted Senator Ted Kennedy and a grinning RFK to cement the bill which ended national quotas for immigrants as the Kennedy legacy. The bill would be described as Senator Ted Kennedy’s "first legislative victory" which "helped change the face of the country" and "fashioned the modern day immigration system." "The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs," Senator Ted Kennedy had promised in the Senate. All of these promises proved to be false. The 1965 bill was a sequel to a battle that Rep. John F. Kennedy had narrowly lost to Senator Richard Nixon over the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. President Truman had vetoed the 1952 bill because it imposed national restrictions on immigration, favoring Western European immigrants and drastically limiting immigration from the rest of the world. Kennedy had upheld Truman’s veto in the House but Nixon cast a tie-breaking vote and the 1952 bill became law. Posted by: Besoeker 2024-03-19 |
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