Kennedy's immigration legacy

Will Kennedy's death hasten immigration reform? From the San Francisco Chronicle:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?blogid=14&entry_id=46354

Much has been said in the past two days about Sen. Ted Kennedy's legacy with regard to health care and civil rights, but less attention has been paid to another area where the senator from Massachusetts left his mark: immigration.

In recent years Kennedy has been a vocal advocate for comprehensive immigration reform, teaming up with Republican Sen. John McCain in 2005 to author a bill that would form the basis for repeated efforts -- so far unsuccessful -- to enact an immigration overhaul.

But Kennedy's involvement with immigration reform dates back much further. He was a freshman senator in 1965 when he became the floor manager -- and a strong supporter -- of the Immigration and Nationality Act that reversed forty years of low immigration under a system that favored Europeans and excluded Asians almost entirely.

The spirit of the civil rights movement informed that bill, the Hart-Celler Act, which eliminated discriminatory "national origin" quotas, replacing them with a more color-blind system and one which offered safe haven to refugees and encouraged family "reunification" by extending the option to immigrate to relatives of citizens and legal immigrants.

In urging passage of the 1965 bill, Kennedy famously told his colleagues from the Senate floor, "First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually.... Second, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset."

In fact, the United States has lately granted roughly a million green cards -- permanent immigrant documents -- a year. And immigrants in the ensuing decades have come much more from Asia and Latin America than from Europe.

Advocates for restricted immigration have been damning Kennedy ever since, while those who believe immigration is a source of national vitality applaud the lasting mark he made on the United States.

Former Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner Doris Meisner, who is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington DC, had this to say upon the senator's passing: "Senator Kennedy helped change the character of the immigration system, and indeed the country, bringing the United States a step closer to its founding ideals of fairness and opportunity for all."