♪ ♪ (theme music plays) RUBENSTEIN: Hello.

I'm David Rubinstein.

I'm going to be in conversation with Jia Lynn Yang, who is the Deputy National Editor of the "New York Times", previously a Deputy National Security Editor of the "Washington Post".

She's a graduate of Yale, native of Alexandria, Virginia.

And she's written a very interesting book on immigration in the United States called, "One Mighty and Irresistible Tide".

So Jia, thank you very much for being with us today.

YANG: It's wonderful to be here.

RUBENSTEIN: So you're a journalist, uh, you were at Yale at the "Yale Daily News", an editor there, and you are at the "Washington Post" now the "New York Times".

What prompted you to be interested in immigration?

YANG: You know, I think I kind of stumbled into this subject to be honest.

Um, I was at the LBJ Library at, um, in Austin, Texas a couple of years ago for a friend's wedding and I was walking through a room that really summarizes all of LBJs accomplishments from the "Great Society".

And I stumbled on something that I had not heard of or read about after reading, you know, in my mind, a couple of books then by the end about LBJ, it was about this law called the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

And in that room, there's a very short description of the law.

And it says, and this law was a huge overhaul of America's immigration system.

And it helps explain why there are so many immigrants from outside Europe, in the United States now in particular from Asia.

And when I saw that, I thought, I wonder if my family is connected to this because my parents came here after 1965, um, they came for graduate school in the late '60s, and early seventies.

And I had just sort of taken for granted that they were allowed here because you know, we've all heard about this country is a nation of immigrants.

We've, we welcome immigrants.

I grew up seeing, you know, the children of immigrants all around me.

So, I kind of took for granted that we would all be here.

But once I began to explore this law, I felt like I was unearthing kind of a piece of family history for me, that was very personal that I had not known before and learning about why it is that my family was allowed here rather than assuming that that was always going to be the case.

RUBENSTEIN: So, we'd like to say are, we are a nation of immigrants, but as you point out in the book, we're a nation of immigrants for a long time if they came from certain places.

If they came from China or Japan or Southern Europe or Latin America, they weren't as welcome, uh, for a long part, time of our history.

Is that right?

YANG: Yes.

For the most part.

So, you know, we had very open borders, pretty much open borders period, um, until about 100 years ago.

And at that point, you know, we began to restrict by ethnicity and, you know, I think all of us can kind of trace our families to different points, right?

At the beginning, you have many people from England.

Um, you have Irish immigrants, Germans, and then later you have people from other parts of the world.

And, um, as those waves of new immigrants come in, there's inevitably something of a backlash to these different kinds of people who are here.

RUBENSTEIN: So let's talk about the beginning of the country, settlers come to the country, we have 13 colonies.

Uh, the settlers are all in those 13 colonies, more or less from, uh, from England, is that right?

YANG: That's right.

RUBENSTEIN: Did they need a passport or visa to come here?

YANG: No you didn't, no, no documentation.

RUBENSTEIN: Or they just showed up?

YANG: This entire modern infrastructure we have is, is very, very recent.

Passports didn't become codified the way we think of them now until after World War I, when the League of Nations sort of created a, a worldwide standard out of Europe.

So, you know, again, all this paperwork that we're used to didn't really exist then.

I mean, the only thing to really think about from those early days, that was a really important law that, um, we're, we're still very much living in the legacy of is that in 1790, the founders created naturalization requirements.

And those naturalization requirements said only free white men of quote unquote, "good moral character" could become citizens, could naturalize.

And so, for a long time, um, only those people could become citizens after immigrating here.

RUBENSTEIN: In the early days, to become a citizen did you have to take a test or what was the standard, you have to be here a certain number of years in the early days of our country?

YANG: You know, it changed over time.

You used to be, I don't know if this was the very beginning, but at some point there was kind of a sense that if you came here, we really wanted to encourage you to become a citizen.

And so you would basically file a petition for citizenship so that you were in kind of this interim period of trying out being a citizen.

And it's only now that I think we have a very different view of that, which we can talk about more, but you know, it used to be something that we wanted people to become and we sort of cultivated them as citizens more, I think, than we do today.

RUBENSTEIN: And, I should point out that there was one provision in the constitution that dealt with people coming to the country involuntarily, uh, slave trade was supposed to be eliminated by 1808.

I think it was.

But in terms of people coming voluntarily, it wasn't really dealt with at all in the constitution.

Is that right?

YANG: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: So when did Congress finally pass a law that said, well, if you're from a certain country, you cannot come to this country.

Was that in the 1800s?

YANG: Yes.

So the first instance of this, a singling out a group of people based on their ethnicity is the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which is a really important historic point because once you see that law passed in our history, there's a succession of attempts, uh, peaking in the 1920s.

But that is sort of the beginning of a long era of, of adding restrictions based on people's race and ethnicity.

So this law is really a backlash to the wave of Chinese migrant laborers, who were showing up in the West, um, you know, searching for gold.

As we all know, helping to build railroads, they were a competition for a lot of white workers on the West Coast.

And so out of that backlash, this law's passed and it's really Chinese laborers in particular who are a banned.

Um, and in their wake, I mean this changes immigration forever, there are more Korean and Japanese immigrants who come after, but this is, this is such an important law for people, even those who aren't Asian-American to know, because it's sort of the bedrock law that says, huh, we're going to start restricting immigration.

And the way we're going to do it is singling you out by your ethnicity.

RUBENSTEIN: So, um, most of the people who are coming to the United States were not from China.

Uh, they weren't from Mexico or Latin America.

Most of the people coming in the 1800s to the United States were from Western Europe where the settlers had originally come from, the original colony people.

So they were coming from England or they might've been coming from Ireland or Germany or Scandinavia.

But in the early part of the 20th century, you pointed out in your book that all of a sudden people are coming from Southern Europe, uh, Italians, uh, people from Greece.

And a lot of people are coming who are Jewish.

And this began to make people a little un- uncomfortable in the United States.

Uh, people were thinking that the wrong type of people are coming.

So during the early part of this, the 20th century, the first 20 years, was there a big debate and what ultimately happened in 1924?

YANG: This is such an important period, um, of American history because basically there'd never been this many immigrants coming from a different part of the world, coming so quickly and changing parts of America in ways that they were transformed forever.

I think of New York, for instance, which overnight just had a flood of Italian and Jewish immigrants who left just a really powerful and you know, permanent imprint on the city that you can see if you spend any time, um, in New York.

And this was so stunning to people though, because these were people who were Catholic, they were Jewish.

They had different religions, they spoke different languages.

They seemed really different in different ways.

And this set off a lot of alarm among in particular white Protestants.

And they were thinking, Oh my goodness, you have all these different people coming in.

And so they begin to pass ethnic quotas in the '20s to stop this, you know, big migration from Southern and Eastern Europe.

RUBENSTEIN: So the concern was not so much though it was a little bit, I guess, that these people were coming in and they were not well-educated and they would work for lower wages than existing American citizens.

But also, I assume the main point you're making is that there was a concern that there would be people who were not going to assimilate.

They weren't going to be white, Anglo, Saxon, Protestant types, and the culture of the United States would dramatically change.

Was that the main concern?

YANG: Yeah.

And it was about the stability of the democracy in these people's minds.

Um, and they had, they had a kind of science backing them.

I mean, this is also a time when eugenics is completely mainstream.

This is of course the science, the kind of studying, um, you know, breaking up all of the human race down to the smaller groupings of ethnicities and race and measuring the sizes of your head and, and trying to say, like, if you're Jewish, this means that you have these inherent traits.

If you're Italian, you have these traits.

And so there was sort of this prejudice, um, especially from people I would say in the white elite.

but they also could point to this kind of pseudo-science, which was later discredited, of course, by Nazi Germany.

But at the time this was fully accepted among, um, American elites and intellectuals that, Oh, I'm uncomfortable personally with these people.

But also the science tells me, these are kind of inferior people who we don't want coming into the US and intermarrying and having children and kind of diluting the quality of the, um, you know, typical American.

RUBENSTEIN: If somebody who was Jewish or Italian or Greek or whatever they were, they would just show up on a boat, they come into New York or wherever they can, and then say, here I am.

And there was no way to say, go back.

Is it, they just were here and you couldn't kick them out.

Is that right?

YANG: There was a literacy test that had been added in 1917 as kind of an early effort to begin to restrict all these different seeming people who were coming, but it wasn't all that effective.

Um, there were also some rules around, they didn't want people with epilepsy, people who seem mentally ill.

But you know, very few people were talking, a minuscule percentage of people were turned away.

And again, because there weren't visas, you did need to go to a consulate in your home country before you came, you just came on the boat.

If you could make the journey, you show up at Ellis Island and they basically say, you know, yes or no.

And if yes, then you're in and that's it.

And I would add too, people weren't deported either.

So once you came in and you began to settle, it was unthinkable that you would be forced to leave.

RUBENSTEIN: So what happened in 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act passed.

What is that act and why was it so, uh, uh, significant in terms of changing the way we let people into the country.

YANG: So as we've been talking about it's open borders, uh, you can just show up.

There's no paperwork really needed.

And in 1924, based on this sort of world of eugenics ranking, all these races and ethnicities, Congress passes a series of very strict ethnic quotas that says, we're going to codify that we want people who are white Anglo-Saxons from Northern Western Europe.

And we don't want people from other parts of the world.

So they literally created quotas, you know, um, they would say, we want most of the people coming to come from these countries and only, you know, a few hundred from places where there had been no numerical limits before.

And it wasn't just that there were quotas.

I mean, it was the symbolism of it, right?

It was a very explicit way to say as a nation, that America is defined by the race, the races of the people who are living in the country.

YANG: And once these quotas are passed, overnight, there was a dramatic difference.

You know, Ellis Island is suddenly quiet because you have to have a visa to come and people, people don't have them.

And the ethnic makeup of the country is sort of as designed, frozen in time, the percentage of immigrants really plummets.

So that by the time you get to the '50s '60s, even into the '70s, the percentage of foreign born just keeps dropping because these older immigrants who had come in this wave that we've been discussing were dying and there weren't new people coming in.

And so by the '50s, it's astonishing to me, people thought about immigration as kind of like a, a past era of American history, right?

That there was this mass migration before, but we had turned away from that.

That was all part of the past and we were never going to do that again.

RUBENSTEIN: So many people thought in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, that this legislation was racist, anti-Semitic among other things, and was hurting the country, some people would say, because you weren't getting immigrants coming in and you weren't expanding your population, which we do with immigrants to some extent.

So were there were efforts made to change the legislation in the '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, what happened?

YANG: Very much.

There were people immediately in particular Jewish Americans who understood what these laws symbolized right away.

And in fact, it wasn't a mystery that people who supported them were, you know, quite openly anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic.

And so from the beginning, when they were passed, they were passed quite easily.

There was really mainstream support for this.

This was a time of enormous isolationism in America generally, but for the moment they were passed, um, Jewish activists and lawmakers in particular, really tried to overturn them.

And this became, in particular, huge tragedy during World War II, because during the Holocaust, there is, of course, a huge demand for people to escape, Nazi Germany, and escape all the countries that the Nazi troops were invading and all these Jewish refugees looking for a place to resettle.

And they can't come to the US because of these quotas.

And so motivated by just how, um, just how awful the quotas seemed to be, especially those who watched what happened during World War II.

You know, people like President Truman tried to overturn them.

Um, in 1952, there was a huge fight on the Hill over it, but they kept failing.

Um, they kept failing because the quotas just seemed very much by then I think common sense to people like we want to keep America this way ethnically.

And it was just very hard.

And so people like Manny Cellar, a Congressman from Brooklyn, um, you know, we'll be able to discuss later some more, but they're all trying and trying and trying, and they keep failing.

But it's really an interesting group of people who are all themselves descended from immigrants too.

RUBENSTEIN: During World War II, you point out in your book that there were many people who went to president Roosevelt and said, uh, Jews are being killed, uh, in Europe, we, we have to either let them in on a special refugee exception or some other way change their, the existing quotas.

Uh, can you describe what happened there?

YANG: So this ship arrives with all these Jewish refugees who, um, you know, have kind of uncertain paperwork and they are desperate to get to the US, in fact, they, they get so close that, you know, there are reports from the time that they can see like the lights of Miami there's, that's how close they are to the US, but essentially they don't have the right papers.

Um, and they have the scheme that they're going to go through Cuba somehow, but that all falls through.

And so this ship is really sitting there unable to dock because the state department, um, in the US which at the time was also quite anti-Semitic, I would say, you know, they're the ones really going through all the visa applications and, and saying yes and no, and, and really determining people's the fates of people's entire families.

And they basically see this ship and say, you know, we get that this is a desperate situation, but you don't have the right visa, so we do have to turn you away.

And, um, you know, there were people on board who were, who were, you know, threatening to commit suicide.

They were so desperate and the ship had to go back.

RUBENSTEIN: So, and when they went back, uh, several hundred were ultimately, uh, those passengers were killed by the Nazis in, uh, either concentration camps, or other kinds of things like that.

Um, you'd mock talk about president Truman wanted to change the law, but he couldn't get it done.

And in fact, the law actually probably got worse in some respects, because, uh, there were some constraints imposed that he was not in favor of, and then Eisenhower didn't do very much.

And then you write about a young man running for Congress named John Kennedy, and all of a sudden the man who'd never really worried about immigration before and he's Irish, but an Irish Brahman, you could say, why does he care about immigration in his first congressional election?

And why does he actually take this up as an issue?

YANG: He really, when he runs for Congress, he's faced with essentially a demographic challenge, which is at the district he wants to win in Boston is filled with immigrants.

So Massachusetts at this point has, you know, probably some of the highest percentage of, uh, of, uh, foreign born of any state in the country.

And so if you want to be successful politically, Massachusetts, you've gotta be able to speak to immigrants.

He's got to relate to these, you know, fairly working class immigrants and children of immigrants in Boston that he's trying to, he's trying to win them over, um, and get their votes.

And so he begins to invoke the memory of his mother's father, Honey Fitz, who was, you know, a very successful Irish politician in Boston, who became the mayor of the city, sort of on the Vanguard of Irish Catholics and political power in America.

And so he kind of plays up this part of his heritage and begins to build a body of work politically when he gets to the Hill on immigration reform in particular.

RUBENSTEIN: So he ultimately, when he gets to Congress and, and the house and the Senate, he's pretty supportive of changing the existing law, but doesn't have the power to get anything done and nothing really is done.

But when he runs for president, he does talk about this a bit.

And he ultimately, when he's elected says, well, I guess I'm going to do something about it.

So what did he try to do in his, uh, early years of his presidency?

YANG: By this time, you know, when we're in the late '50s, early '60s, the quotas have become actually quite among sort of the elites and among the Democratic and Republican parties.

It's this bipartisan issue that maybe the quotas aren't so great.

Um, and to sort of set the backdrop a little bit, you know, this is, this is the Cold War, and there's a sense that these quotas are kind of, they're pretty indefensible at this point, right?

They're based on race science discredited by Nazi Germany.

They are discriminatory, and they are making it hard in this war with, uh, the Soviet Union over ideology and moral purity, it's hard to defend them.

And so by the time JFK arrives with the White House, there's sort of a general agreement that they should, they should go.

And he sort of picks this up and gets the Department of Justice and the State Department under him to begin to really figure out what kind of legislation they can send to Congress saying, "Here's how to abolish these quotas, and here's what you can replace them with."

RUBENSTEIN: When Lyndon Johnson succeeds him as president Lyndon Johnson took up much of the Kennedy agenda.

But why was Johnson concerned about this particular area?

Why did he care about immigration?

There weren't a lot of immigrants in his district in, uh, in Texas, presumably when he was a Congressman or even an, a Senator?

YANG: You know, I think when he gets to the White House and he's looking at how to try to heal the country and take what JFK left unfinished, and really run with it and try to make it a reality, you know, we think a lot about the civil rights legislation.

He does that with on immigration.

He picks it up, I think because he sees it as of a piece of the civil rights fight, right?

So he sees it as, like the fight against Jim Crow, this too is about discriminatory laws that are all about treating people of one race, uh, differently, just simply because of their race.

And so when his aides say to him, "You know, we should really go for this," it really clicks for him that this is a really important moral fight.

And for someone like LBJ, I mean, he's not really a, he's not really a technocrat, right?

He's not all about those deep, those technocratic details and policymaking.

Once he decides that he wants something done and there's sort of a moral sweep to the argument, as we saw, of course, unfortunately with the Vietnam War, he gets really behind it.

And by the time he picks up this legislation, unlike JFK, he famously is a total, you know, genius at working the levers of Congress.

And once he injects that interest and attention, the legislation really does have a chance to finally after 40 years, um, to pass.

RUBENSTEIN: In those days, the chairman of the judiciary committee is Senator Eastland from Mississippi, not famous for, uh, I'd say an interest in civil rights or in immigration from, um, people who are Jewish, let's say, so, uh, how did he get persuaded to do this?

YANG: I think he kind of sees the writing on the wall.

I mean, he's, he's a practical person.

He's deeply prejudiced.

Uh, very much, you know, one of the hardcore segregationists during this period and so powerful because he's running the judiciary committee, all of this important legislation runs through him, all the judicial appointments, but he kind of sees that, you know, the votes are there.

There's, there's, there's momentum for this.

It doesn't really make sense to stand in the way of it.

And he sort of steps back and says, you know, I can't stop it anymore.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, in the house side, Manny Celler.

He's a Congressman who had now was then I think in his 50th year as a member of the house, chairman of the, of the House Judiciary Committee from Brooklyn and, uh, had a big Jewish constituency.

So was he the leading advocate in the house for getting this done?

YANG: The quotas that we've been talking about are passed right after he joins Congress.

And he really has been at the center of fighting against them for a long time.

And by you, by the time we get to the '60s, you know, he's a truly liberal Congressman who's behind every liberal 'cause you can imagine.

So he's actually a very powerful figure as chair of the House Judiciary Committee on all those civil rights legislation that's being passed.

So the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, all of it has his fingerprints all over it.

But I think probably nothing was closer to his heart than this immigration law, which has, which bears his name, the Hart Celler Act.

I think because he sees the very beginning of the fight, right, all through World War II and the Holocaust, all through the Cold War and Truman through JFK up to this point in '65.

And it's also so personal, he's the grandson of German Jews.

His constituents are Jews and Italians.

And he really takes personally this idea that the US has this really bedrock system of immigration that openly discriminates against people like him and his constituents.

RUBENSTEIN: So the legislation passes, there's a big signing ceremony, but what actually is in the legislation that changes the way our immigration system now operates.

YANG: So the 1965 Act is fascinating because they're debating what to put in, put in place of these ethnic quotas.

And they come down to a couple of criteria that should sound familiar to all of us now because they're kind of still, they're still with us now.

One is family reunification.

Meaning if you have immediate family already in the US, you get priority over somebody else.

Um, this preference is so interesting because the people who wanted it as the number one preference, the number one thing that would help you get in, were trying to keep America a little bit stable racially, because their thinking was, if we get rid of these quotas, we still have to have some kind of mechanism to keep America white, more or less.

We can't allow things to get out of control.

And you know, the people who are here are already white, if their immediate family members get preference, that shouldn't change things very much.

Number two is people with special skills, people with technical skill, people with graduate degrees, people who were scientists, people with just, you know, some special thing that the US government felt like it needed more of.

Um, and that second preference is actually what my, my parents benefited, my mom in particular benefited from to be able to come here.

RUBENSTEIN: Okay.

So, uh, what about, uh, the situation where, uh, you came from the Western hemisphere?

Was there a concern about people coming from, let's say, Latin America and how was that dealt with?

YANG: When these ethnic quotas were passed, there was a kind of a huge carve out for the Western hemisphere, because this is so different from how it is now, but it was thought for a very long time, but it didn't make sense to restrict immigration from places like Mexico, because these countries in Latin America, were our, are our neighbors, and because they're neighbors, we have to treat them with some deference.

And part of treating them with deference is saying, "Any of you can immigrate with no limit."

So even in these '20s quotas, everything, Western hemisphere was basically sort of carved out of all of it.

And there were no quotas, no limits.

Now you get to 1965 and people are saying, well, why do we have this weird system where the Western hemisphere has no limits, and yet all these other countries are, you know, the rest of the world does, why don't we just unify all of it?

And so in 65, oddly enough, the Western hemisphere loses that kind of limitless immigration system and becomes part of this overall numerical cap.

RUBENSTEIN: So, uh, let me just conclude by saying, what did you come away with as the most important thing you would like to have somebody know about, uh, immigration and what you write about in your book?

YANG: I think once you understand the history of our system and how much it's changed, how much we see-saw between embracing immigrants and rejecting them and how much we've built up this extremely complex system of laws on immigration, you begin to see just how manmade all of it is.

You know, I look at my own family and if not for this 1965 law and a number of flukes of history that, that allowed it to pass after decades of failed attempts to get rid of these ethnic quotas, you know, it really, it really humbles me when I think about how my family, just because of this handful of lawmakers, like Manny Cellar, presidents like JFK and LBJ, that's why my family's here.

There isn't some, we don't have some kind of inherent right to be here that was guaranteed by the founders.

These are laws that are fought over, that have been fought over, that are being fought over very fiercely right now.

And these questions of who's allowed here, who's not, they determine the fates of entire families.

Um, they can feel completely arbitrary.

I mean, you can talk to anyone who's gone through the system, it can feel very, just sort of, um, like a fluke, like this one line in the law lets me in, but this one doesn't.

I just think we have to look at it as kind of a legalistic structure that we've built together, and that one day it can change.

Just as it's changed before it can change again.

RUBENSTEIN: We've been in conversation with Jia Lynn Yang about her book "One Mighty and Irresistible Tide".

Thank you very much for a very interesting and, uh, I think, eye opening conversation about immigration in the United States.

YANG: Thank you so much.

It was wonderful to be here.

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