The proposed Senate bill’s proponents are trying to make President Trump the scapegoat for the border crisis by accusing him of torpedoing the proposed—flawed and rightfully defeated—Senate bill for his own political purposes.
This from frontpagemag.com.
When LBJ signed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act into law, JFK had been dead for two years, “but it, more than the Cuban missile crisis or the race to the moon, was his real legacy which still impacts us today when there are no more Americans on the moon or nukes in Cuba.”
At the signing, LBJ paid tribute:
[To] the vision of the late beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Little did the 36th president know that the 44th president, born to a radical Kenyan student, was already growing up in this country due to JFK’s personal intervention during his 1960 presidential campaign.
President Johnson argued:
This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives… Yet it is still one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration.
Actually, that bill affected not only millions, but
tens of millions, and it reshaped our lives and our country.
The bill would be described as Senator Ted Kennedy’s:
[F]irst legislative victory [which] helped change the face of the country [and] fashioned the modern day immigration system.
Senator Ted Kennedy had promised in the Senate:
The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants.
It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.
It will not relax the standards of admission.
It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.
Actually, each of these promises have proven to be false.
The 1965 bill was a sequel to a battle that Senator John F. Kennedy had narrowly lost to Senator Richard Nixon over the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. President Truman had vetoed the 1952 bill because it imposed national restrictions on immigration, favoring Western European immigrants, and drastically limiting immigration from the rest of the world.
Kennedy had upheld Truman’s veto but
Nixon broke the tie and the 1952 bill became law.
“While Nixon won the battle, Kennedy won the war.” In 1958, Kennedy published A Nation of Immigrants which argued that restricting immigration by national origin “violated the spirit expressed in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal.’”
JFK was preparing to relaunch it in 1963
for his big immigration push before his assassination.
Senator Ted Kennedy would describe immigration as a “very central part of President Kennedy’s administration.”
He later recalled:
President Kennedy elected in 1960, one of the first pieces he introduced in the Congress of the United States was reform of our immigration laws. I remember being on the Judiciary Committee after being elected in 1962, and my brother Bob coming up and testifying for the Immigration Reform Program.
In opposition to Communism, JFK opened the doors to refugees, ushering in the 1962 Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, initially meant to provide refuge to Cubans and Eastern Europeans fleeing Communism to come here, “but which would become a key element in a virtually endless system of asylum migration.”
Contrary to those promises by Ted Kennedy above:
– States and cities have been swamped by masses of migrants crossing the border by making asylum claims and [we] are barred by the federal government from keeping them out.
– [The Refugee Act of 1980 [transformed] an anti-Communist measure [into] a means of admitting Communists, Marxists, Islamists and an endless flood of migrants who could be persuaded to support [the left], and
– Refugee admissions led directly to the current border crisis.
Next, a quick action and reaction historical account:
– [I]n 1949, Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood leader and godfather of Islamic terrorism, fled Egypt to study in Colorado, and came away loathing everything about America and calling for war against it, he was able to do it because of the lobbying by the Institute of International Education (IIE),
– The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, for all that it was denounced as racist and exclusionary, had actually increased immigration from Asia and dramatically transform America,
– [The] JFK Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act increase[d] the number of foreign students in 1961—Barack Obama Sr and Shyamala Gopalan, the mother of Kamala Harris, had both moved to America in 1959,
– Donald J. Harris, Kamala’s father, arrived in 1963, as part of the growing number of foreign students benefiting from the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act,
– The IIE’s promotion of foreign students led not only to visits by Qutb and Obama Sr, but by a generation of radical Marxists and Islamists who soon set up operations in this country,
– [T]he wave of Third World radicals who came to study at American universities and stayed, or, like Barack Obama Sr and Donald J Harris left their children behind here, or, like Qutb, learned enough to figure out how to best wage war against the United States of America was the beginning of what happened to America beginning on September 11,
– [P]ro-Hamas riots in the streets of New York City, [began] with the arrival of Archibald Wickeramaraja Singham, a Sri Lankan Marxist, to study in America. He became a powerful academic and his Maoist son, Neville Roy Singham, made a fortune, moved to Shanghai and directs anti-war groups from China. His story is far from unique, and
– The Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act was also known as the Fulbright–Hays Act of 1961 after Senator J. William Fulbright [has funded] foreign students to come to America also partly subsidized by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.
Now, back to Senator John F. Kennedy who had bragged on the campaign trail at NYU in 1960:
Do you know that we brought more foreign students to the United States ten years ago than we do today?
Foreign students had been excluded from immigration quotas, but many did become immigrants, joining universities and firms as a new kind of intellectual cheap labor force.
These men and women, engineers, doctors, bureaucrats, and academics, became the backbone of the Third World Marxist and Muslim Brotherhood presence that transformed America.
The elites “who had been restrictionist eugenicists at the turn of the century” were now eager to open up to the world.
The Cold War as it played out in world capitals was less a matter of nuclear buildup and defense drills (which the elites dismissed as nonsense) but of a global influence operation playing out across cultural, political, and academic battlefields.
JFK’s political genius rebranded immigration, “often viewed as a means of Communist infiltration,” into the ultimate anti-Communist measure, turning a political weakness into a strength, and accusing the Republican administration, as it had once accused the Truman administration, of losing the world in the struggle against Communism.
America could only defeat Communism, he argued, by being open to the world, taking in immigrants and students, forming the Peace Corps to go out to the world, and, as he had in Europe as a student, to learn about the world.
But what JFK really believed was that through exposure to the world, America would change, as he had been changed by his time in the United Kingdom and traveling across Europe.
It was a message highly appealing to the elites who believed America was inferior to the world.
And bringing these foreign students to America was not so much about changing them, as it was about changing us.
JFK hoped to unify a new rising liberal coalition, fusing elites with urban and suburban Catholics and Jews, bringing in new voting blocks of black and Asian voters, and reinventing the Democratic Party and America for a new generation.
Now, the one question that remains, ‘Would John Kennedy be proud of what he has created—this nation of strangers at odds with one another, angry, conspiratorial, resentful, and lacking a common language, common values, and a mutual love and respect for our homeland?’
Final thought: To read the full original article, click HERE. Limited space and attention span encouraged me to cut approximately half.
