Identity theft
The charge is that the nation built by the pre-1965 stock is being replaced, and that the replacement was arranged. The documents support a narrower claim, which is already large. In 1965 Congress abolished the national-origins quotas. The sponsors said the ethnic mix would not change. The census says it did. A set of nonprofit contractors, HIAS among them, then took federal money to place the people the new system admitted. That is the mechanism. It is public.
What the sponsors said
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the Hart-Celler Act, ended the quota system that had preferred northern and western Europe. In its place Congress put family reunification and skills, with a per-country ceiling. Edward Kennedy, floor manager in the Senate, said the bill would not inundate the country with immigrants and would not upset the ethnic mix. The architects treated family reunion as a way to continue the existing stream. They assumed the relatives would be European, because the recent immigrants were European.
That assumption was wrong within a dozen years. New permanent residents from Asia and Latin America overtook Europe. Family reunification did what a chain does. One arrival sponsors another. The first post-1965 cohorts were no longer British, German, and Italian. The chain followed the new cohorts.
What the census recorded
In 1970 the foreign-born were 4.7 percent of the population, near the modern low, after four decades of tight law and an aging immigrant stock. In 2023 they were 14.3 percent, 47.8 million people, the largest number on record and the highest share since 1910. Pew’s count is that about 72 million immigrants have come since 1965, about half from Latin America and about a quarter from Asia. In 1960 the foreign-born were about three-quarters European. That composition did not survive the act.
The New York Times’ chart of Pew’s figures puts the non-Hispanic white share at 84 percent in the mid-1960s and 62 percent in 2015, with the line still falling. The same projections showed a country with no single racial majority around the middle of this century. A later Pew estimate is that, without the post-1965 immigration, the non-Hispanic white share in 2015 would still have been about 75 percent. The gap between 75 and 62 is the part of the change the act and its chain produced, on top of birth rates.
That is the identity claim stated as a number. A people who were the large majority of the country their ancestors built became a shrinking majority, and are projected to become a plurality, inside one lifetime. Calling this identity theft is a political description of a measured result. The measurement itself is not in dispute.
The contractors
HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, was founded in the late nineteenth century to aid Jewish arrivals. It is open about the 1965 law. Its own history treats the act as a victory of advocacy by HIAS and allied groups. After 1965 it did not retire. It became one of the national voluntary agencies, the VOLAGs, that contract with the State Department to resettle refugees.
The list is not a secret society. It is a federal partnership. The usual names are HIAS, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (now Global Refuge), Church World Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries, World Relief, the International Rescue Committee, and the Ethiopian Community Development Council. Most of them are church agencies. HIAS is the Jewish one. They receive referrals through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, meet people at the airport, rent the apartment, and enroll the children. The Reception and Placement grant has been a per-capita payment — $2,075 per refugee in the 2017 schedule — for the first weeks, with further money through Health and Human Services for the longer case.
This is not volunteer charity in the old sense. It is a paid pipeline. The agency’s interest in a larger admission ceiling is the interest of a contractor in a larger contract. When admissions were cut, HIAS and Church World Service were among the plaintiffs suing to restore them. That is public litigation, not a rumor.
What “alongside HIAS” does and does not mean
The aftermath of Hart-Celler is not HIAS acting alone. The statute did the first part, by changing who could come and by letting family chain compound the change. The Refugee Act of 1980 did the second part, by building a standing resettlement system and handing the placement to the VOLAGs. Asylum rules, parole programs, and the decision not to enforce the border did the rest. HIAS is one name on the placement list, and one lobby among several. The Catholic and Lutheran agencies have moved more people.
This is how to “destroy the nation.” The sponsors said the mix would hold. It did not. The agencies that place the arrivals are paid to place them. The census is the result. A reader who calls that a destruction of the pre-1965 nation is describing the scale of the change, not inventing the change.
Invaders, and the legal line
“Invaders” is the word for people who come without admission. It is the wrong word for a refugee the government has stamped. Both are in the post-1965 total. Legal immigration under the family rules is the larger long-run engine. Illegal crossings and parole are the part that arrives without the quota. The identity result is the sum. A country that cannot say who enters cannot keep the people it was.
The pre-1965 stock was not a blank category. It was the Ethnic American population described in the earlier pieces: mixed European ancestry, American English, a political inheritance from the English colonies. The 1965 act did not repeal that population. It ended the legal preference for continuing it, and the contractors built a system for receiving whoever came next. That is the theft, if the word is going to be used: not a stolen passport, but a nation changed past the assurances under which the change was sold.
EAB Radio Network
EAB Radio Network