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Race And Immigration, Then And Now: How The Shift To "Worthiness" Undermines The 1965 Immigration Law's Civil Rights Goals, Elizabeth Keyes

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay looks at how far immigration reform has come from the explicit civil rights character of the 1965 immigration law that reshaped America. The optimism surrounding that law’s dismantling of national-origins barriers to immigration proved to be overstated in the intervening decades, as the factors determining an immigrant’s “worth and qualifications” too often became proxies for race. After briefly looking at work done by critical race theorists tracing some of ways race and immigration have long intersected in immigration legal history, the article closely examines modern-day immigration reform proposals, particularly the Senate bill that remains the most complete articulation …