"Could Be an Occasion for Celebration"

"Such assurances did not sway conservative critics of the reform, but a last-minute change in the legislative language did alleviate their fears of a massive African and Asian influx. The original version of the 1965 Act, cosponsored by Senator Philip Hart of Michigan and Representative Emmanuel Celler of New York, both liberal Democrats, favored those immigrants whose skills were 'especially advantageous' to the United States. Conservatives, led by Representative Michael Feighan, an Ohio Democrat, managed to change those priorities, giving visa preferences instead to foreigners who were seeking to join their families in the United States. Feighan, who chaired the House Immigration subcommittee, argued that a family-unification preference in immigration law would establish, in the words of a glowing profile in the American Legion magazine, 'a naturally operating national-origins system,' because it would favor immigration from the northern and western European countries that at the time dominated the U.S. population.
"Feighan and others were wrong."

Tom Gjelten in The Atlantic marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Immigration and Nationality Act.