Nonetheless, Latin American migration did grow. Thus the 1965 legislation in no way can be invoked to account for the rise in immigration from Latin America. These restrictions did not apply to spouses, parents, and children of US citizens, however. Subsequent amendments further limited immigration from the region by limiting the number of residence visas for any single country to just 20,000 per year (in 1976), folding the separate hemispheric caps into a worldwide ceiling of 290,000 visas (in 1978), and then reducing the ceiling to 270,000 visas (in 1980). The 1965 amendments changed all that, imposing an annual cap of 120,000 on entries from the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, before 1965 there were no numerical limits at all on immigration from Latin America or the Caribbean, only qualitative restrictions. Countries in the Western Hemisphere had never been included in the national origins quotas, nor was the entry of their residents prohibited as that of Africans and Asians had been. ![]() Although the amendments may have opened the door to greater immigration from Asia, however, the surge in immigration from Latin America occurred in spite of rather than because of the new system. Indeed, after 1965 the number of immigrants entering the country did increase, and the flows did come to be dominated by Asians and Latin Americans. The new system is widely credited with having sparked a shift in the composition of immigration away from Europe toward Asia and Latin America, along with a substantial increase in the number of immigrants. The 1965 amendments were intended to purge immigration law of its racist legacy by replacing the old quotas with a new system that allocated residence visas according to a neutral preference system based on family reunification and labor force needs. ![]() Amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act passed in that year repealed the national origins quotas, which had been enacted during the 1920s in a deliberate attempt to limit the entry of Southern and Eastern European immigrants-or more specifically Jews from the Russian Pale and Catholics from Poland and Italy, groups at the time deemed “unassimilable.” The quotas supplemented prohibitions already in place that effectively banned the entry of Asians and Africans. ![]() The year 1965 is often cited as a turning point in the history of US immigration, but what happened in the ensuing years is not well understood.
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