Was it JFK? He was dead in 1965 & his brother Teddy the Swimmer rammed through the Immigration Act which LBJ signed.
I recall Kennedy & LBJ assuring us that it would not transform America’s ethnic makeup. Yeah, right.
European immigration was mostly cut off in 1924, IIRC.
JFK anti-Protestant? Sounds like a Northern Ireland thing IMO.
Yes it was JFK who had devoted his political life to the cause of replacing the American voters.
When JFK ran for president, the democrats had only won the Protestant vote twice, in 1932, and 1936, that was it, and they had never lost the Catholic vote, except possibly in 1956, as some polling indicates.
The democrats knew that the original Americans would not vote democrat, and so they needed to replace them.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s.
In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960.
In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin.
After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”