During a Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization hearing in February 1965, many politicians as well as delegates from outside committees and organizations both for and against the act testified before the Senate. Both proponents and opponents of the bill explained the interests they represented in presenting their testimony. Many of the arguments presented at the February hearing reflected larger concerns over the effects, both positive and negative, that the bill would have on immigration and the United States. In these excerpts, Myra C. Hacker and Senator Edward Kennedy offer varying viewpoints on the pros and cons of the Hart-Celler bill. Hacker was a representative of the New Jersey Coalition, an organization opposed to the bill, while Kennedy was a Democrat from Massachusetts and a noted supporter of the bill. Both testimonies reveal attempts to predict the outcomes and effects of the bill if it became an act. In many ways, Hacker’s and Kennedy’s testimonies reveal more about the way Americans viewed their country and their place in it than necessarily how they viewed immigrants or immigration policy.
Hacker: In light of our 5 percent unemployment rate, our worries over the so called population explosion, and our menacingly mounting welfare costs, are we prepared to embrace so great a horde of the world’s unfortunates? At the very least, the hidden mathematics of the bill should be made clear to the public so that they may tell their Congressmen how they feel about providing jobs, schools, homes, security against want, citizen education, and a brotherly welcome … for an indeterminately enormous number of aliens from underprivileged lands.
We should remember that people accustomed to such marginal existence in their own land will tend to live fully here, to hoard our bounteous minimum wages and our humanitarian welfare handouts … lower our wage and living standards, disrupt our cultural patterns….
Whatever may be our benevolent intent toward many people, [the bill] fails to give due consideration to the economic needs, the cultural traditions, and the public sentiment of the citizens of the United States.
Kennedy: 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 deprived nations of Africa and Asia…. In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.
Source: U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, DC, Feb. 10, 1965.
Evaluating the Evidence