Closing the Floodgates: The Origins of U.S. Immigration Policy Towards Latin America in the 1965 Hart-Celler Act

In the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, the US Congress placed a cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere for the first time. Previously, the number of Latin American immigrants who entered per year was not restricted by a quota. Why did Congress enact this policy at this time?

Previous scholars have dismissed it as a hazy compromise behind closed doors that the Johnson Administration made in order to pass this landmark piece of legislation. Yet given that this policy is one of the founding blocks of our immigration policy toward Latin America today, it is important to study it further: what exactly drove members of Congress to curb immigration from Latin America? My thesis contributes a new statistical analysis on the breakdown of the Western Hemisphere vote in the House and in the Senate. I then apply my statistical findings to a historical analysis in order to provide a more comprehensive narrative on the inclusion of this provision.

In my regression analysis, I find that the economic ideology of congress members and the number of Mexican immigrants in their district were the most predictive variables. This is interesting given that most of the literature on the Hart-Celler Act ignores the economic debate and focuses on the issue of race. Therefore, in my historical analysis, I highlight the economic debate over immigration from Latin America with quotes from the House and Senate floor.

This paper contributes to the current literature on the Hart-Celler Act by creating a more robust picture of the Western Hemisphere amendment: the economic debate was more determinative than previously thought. Arriving to a more complete understanding of the roots of our immigration policies toward Latin America is especially important today, at a time when the debate over immigration from the region is front and center in our national politics.