By Mark Potok
Senior Fellow, Southern Poverty Law Center
When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality
Act of 1965 on Liberty Island, he had no doubt about the perniciousness
of the law that it was replacing. The 1924 Immigration Act, which
imposed a racist quota system favoring Northern European whites, was a
"cruel and enduring wrong," a "harsh injustice" and "un-American in the
highest sense," he said at the signing ceremony.
“We can now believe that [the 1924 law] will never again shadow the gate
to the American Nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and
privilege,” he said. He added that “the American Nation returns to the
finest of its traditions today.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican seeking confirmation as
President Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general, doesn’t see things
the same way.
In an October 2015 interview with Stephen Bannon, then the chief of
Breitbart News and now Trump’s chief strategic adviser, Sessions praised
the law and said that between 1924 and 1965 it had “created really the
solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was
good for America,” The Atlantic reported.
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Source: The Southern Poverty Law Center
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