Myron Davis, “The Search for ‘Manpower and Brainpower’ Sources: The Origins of Immigration Policy and Kennedy and Johnson Administrations,” White House Studies 12, no. 4 (2012): 253–89. Historian Myron Davis’s article examines an alternative view of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965: Rather than a product of liberalism and civil rights changes, Kennedy and Johnson sought immigration reform to recruit a more professionalized group of immigrants and strengthen the U.S. white-collar and technically skilled labor force. In the midst of the Cold War, heightened tensions with the Soviet Union, and a demand for science, technology, engineering, and mathematic professionals to work in research and development and security, the act of 1965 proved to be a boon for America’s search for an edge in security and defense.

Jorge Durrand, Douglas S. Massey, and Emilio A. Parrado, “The New Era of Mexican Migration to the United States,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1999): 518–36. In this article, three historians analyze the impact of the Immigration Act of 1965 on Mexican migration to (and from) the United States during the last decades of the twentieth century. The demand for an agricultural labor from American farmers largely dictated U.S. immigration policies toward Mexico for most of the twentieth century. This article argues that the continued demand for cheap labor played a role in the passage of the 1965 act and shaped Mexican migration long after. Also, because the 1965 act placed Mexico, Central American, and South America under a quota system for the first time in U.S. immigration policy, the number of illegal immigrants entering the United States also increased, complicating what Durrand, Massey, and Parrado describe as a new era in Mexican immigration.

David Reimers, “An Unintended Reform: The 1965 Immigration Act and Third World Immigration to the United States,” Journal of American Ethnic History 3, no. 1(1983): 9–28. In this classic article, historian David Reimers analyzes the unexpected impact of the Immigration Act of 1965 on migration from third world nations. From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, the number of “nontraditional” immigrants from Asia, Africa, and South America increased dramatically when race- and nation-based quotas that previously restricted immigrants from these regions were lifted. Although Reimers wrote this article in 1983 in the midst of changing immigration patterns, his argument that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (contrary to what Johnson and other politicians believed) radically increased the number of immigrants coming to the United States and changed the ethnic and racial composition of America continues to be true.