Secondary Source
“Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act. Ostensibly a progressive piece of legislation, it eliminated national origins quotas, first introduced in 1924 and reaffirmed in 1952. The act, often referred to as Hart-Celler, after its principal sponsors, sought to bring immigration policy in line with civil rights legislation. Specifically, it sought to make the immigration process more fair. To that end, instead of national origins quotas, numerical limits were instituted by hemisphere.
The problem, of course, was that not all countries were equal in their need for legal visas nor in their likelihood to send large numbers of their citizens to the United States. By placing all Western hemisphere countries under one numerical limit at precisely the same time the Bracero Program ended, the law inadvertently created the modern problem of ‘illegal immigration.’”
- Eladio Bobadilla, Historian, “Immigration Policy, Mexican Americans, and Undocumented Immigrants, 1954 to the Present,” 2018