Immigration During the Cold War

The Cold War, from about 1947 to 1991, drastically changed American immigration and foreign policy. In this period, the U.S. competed ideologically with the Soviet Union, influencing who got in and why. Most importantly, Cold War thinking hugely transformed U.S. immigration policies. They moved away from excluding people based on race and ethnicity - which defined immigration in the early 20th century, and shifted towards considering ideology, admitting refugees, and eventually making big legal changes.

The Legacy America Inherited:

To understand Cold War immigration policy, one must first understand what America started with. The National Origins Act of 1924 established a strict quota system that heavily favored immigrants from Western Europe while severely limiting Southern and Eastern Europeans and nearly completely excluding Asians. The Bracero Program, launched in 1942, brought in temporary Mexican agricultural laborers to fill wartime labor shortages, creating patterns of migration and dependence that would generate political tensions for decades to come. By the late 1940s, this racially structured system had become a serious liability and concern; the Soviet Union was actively using American immigration restrictions as propaganda, pointing to them as evidence of America's claims about freedom and equality were hypocritical.

Early Cold War

America's first major Cold War response to immigration was obviously not to open the doors wider, but to add a new layer of ideological screening. The Internal Security Act of 1950, also known as the McCarran Act, barred entry to anyone affiliated with Communist or totalitarian organizations, and allowed the deportation of naturalized citizens deemed threats to national security. Two years later, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, or the McCarran-Walter Act, kept the old national origins quota system largely in place while explicitly excluding Communists from admission. President Truman vetoed the bill, calling it discriminatory and an embarrassment to American values, but Congress overrode him. The 1952 act did make one notable concession, which was it granted Asian immigrants the right to naturalization for the first time.

The Cold War Refugee Problem

The rigid quota system was completely unprepared to deal with the refugee crises that Cold War conflicts generated. When Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, roughly 200,000 Hungarians fled their country. The Eisenhower administration used an obscure executive "parole" authority to admit tens of thousands of them outside the normal quota limits because no other legal mechanism existed.  A few years later in 1959, the Cuban Revolution created a similar situation, as waves of Cuban exiles arrived and were again handled through outside of the book methods rather than any formal refugee framework. These back-to-back crises made it painfully clear that the United States didn't have any sort of real policy for political refugees.

The Turning Point: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also called the Hart-Celler Act, was the single most important immigration law of the twentieth century. Both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had argued that the national origins quota system was not only morally wrong, but strategically damaging as it was undermining American credibility in the developing world at a critical moment in the Cold War. The Civil Rights Movement had made ethnic discrimination in federal law politically illegal and unconstitutional, and Congress abolished the quota system entirely.  They replaced it with a preference based system grounded on family reunification and occupational skills. Lawmakers they assumed the change would primarily benefit Europeans with family ties in America, but instead immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa surged dramatically in the following decades. The 1965 act permanently transformed the demographic character of the United States, and its effects continue to shape American society today.

Refugee Policy Takes Shape due to the Cold War Selectivity Problem

Throughout the entirety of the Cold War, American refugee policy had a glaring double standard: people fleeing Communist governments were welcomed, while people fleeing U.S.-allied authoritarian regimes were largely turned away. The Cuban Refugee Program of 1961 provided structured federal support for Cuban exiles and became a model for future admissions, but Salvadorans and Guatemalans fleeing governments backed by Washington were routinely denied asylum during the same period. The fall of Saigon in 1975 triggered the largest refugee crisis the United States had faced since World War II, leading to the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act and the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians over the following years. Congress finally responded with the Refugee Act of 1980, the first comprehensive refugee law in American history, which adopted the United Nations definition of a refugee based on individual persecution regardless of country of origin and created the formal asylum system that still exists today. The new law was tested almost immediately when the Castro's Mariel boatlift brought 125,000 Cubans to Florida within a matter of months, straining the system before it had even gotten off the ground.

The 1980s

By the 1980s, the unresolved tensions in American immigration policy were becoming impossible to ignore. The Central American asylum crisis put the ideological selectivity of our refugee policy on full public display, as hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans and Guatemanans fleeing civil wars (funded in part by the United States) were denied asylum, directly fueling the sanctuary movement. Congress attempted a all-encompassing fix with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. It offered amnesty to roughly three million undocumented immigrants already living in the United States, and introduced penalties for employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers. It also significantly increased border enforcement, mosly in big ports and our border with Mexico. The law was an attempt at political compromise that satisfied neither immigration advocates nor restrictionists, and it failed to reduce undocumented immigration because it created demand for labor without providing adequate legal channels to meet it.

The End of the Cold War and Its Immigration Legacy

The end of the Cold War resulted in the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990 which greatly expanded the total number of immigrants allowed into the U.S. and established the Diversity Visa Lottery as a method to allow immigrants who were coming from countries with low rates of immigration to enter the U.S. In addition to creating the Lottery, the Act also expanded the types of visas available to skilled workers. Between 1989-91, the collapse of the Soviet Union eliminated the ideological framework upon which U.S. refugee/immigration policy had been based for over 40 years. Policy makers attempted to adapt a system that was based on Cold War categories to a world where there existed increasing numbers of ethnic conflicts, growing levels of economic inequality, and increasing numbers of people being displaced due to climate change. The demographic composition of the U.S. was fundamentally changed by the decisions made during this time; however, the most significant change occurred as a result of the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Furthermore, the issue of undocumented immigration which IRCA did not address continues to remain at the forefront of debates over immigration in the U.S. The Cold War caused American immigration to shift from a system that focused on race/ethnicity to a system that focused on ideology, family connections/relationships, and skills. Refugee admission policies were greatly influenced by geopolitical interests. Each of the major legislative changes that occurred during this time (i.e., 1965, 1980, 1986, 1990) were partially influenced by the pressure/contradictions of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. The demographic, political, and legal consequences of those decisions are not simply history, they are the foundation of every immigration policy and debate happening in the United States right now.