Immigration Act of 1965

In an excellent article written shortly after the November 4 election by the Boston Globe's Peter Canellos, Simon was quoted:

Simon Rosenberg, president of the liberal think tank NDN, formerly the New Democrat Network, calls the Immigration Act of 1965 "the most important piece of legislation that no one's ever heard of," and said it "set America on a very different demographic course than the previous 300 years."

By adding so many Asians, Latinos, and African immigrants, Rosenberg says, the act changed the racial narrative in America from one of oppression - the white-black divide dating to slavery - to one of diversity. That change was strongly echoed in the Obama campaign, which emphasized the candidate's mixed-race background as making him representative of a new generation of Americans.

Some of the ideas touched on in Canellos' report, "Obama victory took root in Kennedy-inspired Immigration Act," surface again in an equally compelling piece by editor Jon Meacham in this week's special Inaugural edition of Newsweek:

The message seemed mixed. It was 3 o'clock on the afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 3, 1965, and President Lyndon B. Johnson had come to the foot of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor to sign the unsexily named Immigration and Nationality Act. It was a grand and sentimental stage for Johnson, who loved the grand and the sentimental. There he was, less than a year into a term he'd won in the greatest of landslides over Barry Goldwater, at the mythic gateway to America, Robert and Ted Kennedy in the audience, the eyes of the press fixed on him in the shadows of the nation's most fabled icon of freedom. "Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers," Johnson said, reaching for political poetry. "From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide."

But the president was openly ambivalent, too. "The bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill," he said, defensively, almost as though to reassure white Americans that they had nothing to fear. "It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power."

To borrow an old line about Winston Churchill, when Lyndon Johnson was right, he was right, but when he was wrong, well, my God. (See, for example, War, Vietnam.) On reflection, the bill LBJ signed on that October day was one of the most significant of his momentous presidency, and the virtually forgotten legislation played a key role in creating the America that made this week's inauguration of Barack Obama possible.

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Why exhume the long-dead Johnson on the occasion of one of the most engaging inaugurals since George Washington took the oath at Federal Hall in New York City in 1789? Because who we are now—a country in which traditional barriers of race and age and gender are crumbling—flows in many ways from what LBJ did then. His conflicting language on that October day, meanwhile, underscores the nation's occasionally wary view of the changes wrought by immigration. We like to say we love the new, but the familiar, come to think of it, is awfully comfortable, too. So which will it be in the coming years: the America of the melting pot, or the America of resentments? The America of Lincoln's better angels, or the America of Nixon's Silent Majority?

The answer is almost certainly that we will be one or another of these Americas at different times depending on different circumstances. One reason to think that we might find ourselves with Lincoln more often than with Nixon, though, is that the "we" is getting ever trickier to define quickly and easily in terms of race, ethnicity and religion. We the People of 2009 are not the We the People of 1959 or 1969 or even 1979. And that is because of Lyndon Johnson.

There is something quintessentially American about a lumbering white man from Texas—a complex, gifted and ultimately tragic politician—transforming, however inadvertently, a largely Anglo-Saxon nation into a country which, in roughly the same amount of time that separates us from John F. Kennedy's inauguration, will have more people of color than whites. (The shorthand for this milestone, projected to take place in about 2050, is the arrival of a "majority-minority" country, but if the minorities are actually the majorities, we should probably find a cleaner linguistic way to talk about the coming reality.)

NDN has made compelling arguments about how the idea of what race is in America is dramatically changing. Whether it was the Immigration Act of 1965 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Lyndon Johnson changed politics forever with legislation he signed into law. In the case of the Civil Rights Act, we are only now witnessing the end of the southern strategy that resulted.

Also in his Newsweek report, Meacham cites another group who made Obama's election possible: the Millennial Generation. NDN Fellows Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, & the Future of American Politics, have written extensively on Millennials and are recognized as two of the nation's foremost experts on this massive -- in size and impact -- generation.

Writes Meacham:

By and large, the younger you are, the more assimilated you are in this new tapestry of daily life. The key cohort is the 75 million-strong generation known as the millennials (those born roughly between 1980 and 2000). To state the obvious, the experiences of the younger generation—now voting and beginning their adult lives—are not the experiences of their parents or of their grandparents. Vietnam seems as distant as Saratoga; Roe v. Wade as far off as Dred Scott. That much is self-evident, and perennial. (Every generation is shaped by unique forces; that is part of what makes them a generation, aside from the accident of a birth date.) What was less than clear until the election of 2008 was whether the experience of younger Americans would produce a shift in political attitudes, and would such a shift be felt beyond Facebook and Starbucks? Could Obama count on them to show up?

The answer, according to Winograd and Hais? A resounding, "yes:"

The 2008 election not only marked the election of America's first African-American president, it also saw the strong and clear political emergence of a new, large and dynamic generation and the realignment of American politics for the next 40 years.

The first large wave of the Millennial Generation about one third of the young Americans born from 1982-2003, entered the electorate to decisively support President-elect Barack Obama. Young voters preferred Obama over John McCain by a greater than 2:1 margin (66% vs. 32%). This is well above the margin given by young voters to any presidential candidate for at least three decades, if not at any time in U.S. history. In 2004, young voters preferred John Kerry to George W. Bush by a far more narrow 10 percentage points (55% to 45%). Moreover, the support of young people for Obama crossed all ethnic lines: he won the votes of a majority of African-American (95%), Latino (76%), and white (54%) young people.

To read their full essay on this subject, click here.

I doubt that President Obama will mention LBJ during his Inaugural speech tomorrow. But the history is there: the 36th president started down a legislative road that led directly to the election of the 44th.