It’s Long Past Time To Scrap Hart-Celler And Insist That Immigrants Assimilate

One of the stubborn realities hanging over all our immigration debates — whether about ICE arrests and deportations, asylum reform, border security, even H-1B visas — is that America today has a sclerotic immigration regime whose basic structure and premises were set down 61 years ago in the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. It’s not too much to say that Hart-Celler is one of the most destructive laws ever passed in this country, and we will never solve our immigration problems until we get rid of it.

Hart-Celler replaced a system based on national origins that favored immigration from Northern and Western Europe, the so-called National Origins Formula devised in the 1920s, with one based on family reunification and employment needs in certain industries. The practical effect of this change was to shift immigration away from Europe to Asia and Latin America, reshaping the demographics of the country in a single generation — despite the insistence of Hart-Celler’s authors that it would do no such thing.

But at the heart of the legislation was an assumption that immigrants from Northern and Western Europe were no more desirable than immigrants from the Philippines or Guatemala or anywhere else. In essence, the new law codified an assertion of multiculturalism, the liberal belief that assimilation to American society had no real cultural component, and that the entire concept of assimilation was racist and backwards. There was no reason, under this view, that immigrants from Europe would be preferable to immigrants from Africa. Understood in this light, remaking the demographics of the country by increasing Third World immigration was the entire point of Hart-Celler.

And that regime is still what we live under. The 1990 Immigration Act modified Hart-Celler slightly by creating the H-1B visa program and adding a diversity lottery to increase immigration from “underrepresented” countries. But other than that, the immigration system established in 1965 remains largely intact.

For a long time it was considered bigoted and racist to criticize this regime, or even to suggest that America had a problem with immigration. After all, were we not a “nation of immigrants”? No national politician or major candidate, Republican or Democrat, would dare to criticize Hart-Celler or suggest that it had not worked out well for the native population of this country. Debate over immigration was restricted to arguing about the right balance to strike between border security and mass amnesty for illegal immigrants. As recently as 2013, large numbers of congressional Republicans wanted to sign an amnesty deal that would grant citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants in exchange for hazy promises of “securing the border.” No one was willing to admit what seemed obvious: that Hart-Celler had been a disaster for the United States.

It was in that context that Donald Trump burst onto the scene in 2015. His slogans of “Make America Great Again” and “Build the Wall!” captured the mood of the country on immigration and expressed what no major candidate had ever been willing to say. It didn’t even matter that Trump’s focus was on illegal immigration rather than the larger legal immigration system. He broke the taboo on our immigration discourse by calling into question the multiculturalist assumption that mass immigration from the Third World was good for Americans. The unspoken assumption at the heart of Trump’s immigration rhetoric was that bringing in people who are unsuited to or uninterested in assimilation is actually bad for our country, and makes us all worse off.

Ten years on, the immigration debate has been transformed — helped immensely by the massive wave of uncontrolled illegal immigration Democrats unleashed under the Biden administration. Today, talk of assimilation, which would have been unthinkable in the pre-Trump GOP, is more or less mainstream on the right. Even the concept of remigration (that recent immigrant arrivals, legal and illegal, must go back to their own countries) is gaining traction — even in the Trump White House.

No surprise then, that this week two Republican congressmen, Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee and Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, introduced a bill called the Assimilation Act. Ogles said in an X post Thursday that the idea is to “GUT the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, as well as scrap provisions of the Immigration Act of the 1990s. The goal of this bill is simple: end replacement migration and ensure American cultural cohesion.”

As first reported in March, when Ogles proposed the legislation, the bill would indeed dismantle the Hart-Celler regime. It would end chain migration (which allows immigrants to sponsor relatives in foreign countries for visas), end the H-1B visa program, end the diversity lottery, impose mandatory E-Verify to prevent employers from hiring illegals, strengthen public charge rules to make it harder for immigrants to get on welfare, and impose tougher standards for asylum.

The bill would also introduce a “national interest standard” for immigration. As Tuberville said in a speech introducing the bill Tuesday on the Senate floor, the bill “says America has a right to set immigration policy in the national interest,” and that “legal immigration should place higher value on skilled merit, economic contribution, and the ability to succeed without becoming a dependent on the American taxpayers.”

All of this is common sense — and should have been the mainstream position on the right for decades. For fear of being labeled racist, Republicans shied away from talking about assimilation, or acknowledging that some cultures and societies are going to produce people who are more inclined and able to assimilate to American society than others.

It shouldn’t have taken this long to get here, or have been this hard to state the plain truth. But it’s a testament to how much what’s politically feasible can change when people are willing to stand up to false accusations of racism and xenophobia and simply say the thing everyone already knows: that immigration without assimilation is national suicide, and it’s long past time we had an immigration system that recognized that.

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John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.