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Home History Timeline of South Asian Organizing 1945-1965- Reopening the Borders
1945-1965- Reopening the Borders |  |  |
Towards the end of Second World War, President Roosevelt started to lift immigration restrictions on Asians. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. The Indian Regional Exclusion Act was however, stuck in the congressional committee web. Roosevelt had to send his personal envoy to the hill to lift the ban on Indians. However, Indian immigration didn't pick up until after the immigration reform act was passed, making immigration a little less racist and a little more equitable. After the passage of the Luce-Celler bill in 1946 immigration increased and between 1945-1965, from India 6907 and from Pakistan 1497 immigrants were admitted. After the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 the number of immigrants from South Asia rose steadily, with around 40,000 immigrants per year admitted during the decade of the 1990's. In 1965 the U.S. government passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, the most important change of immigration policy since 1924. Certain people from countries outside of Northern/Western Europe would be allowed to immigrate in more significant numbers, in a time in which the Civil Rights movement drew attention to the country’s racism while the U.S. was claiming to the world to be the supreme democracy. In particular, the new immigration system was created in a Cold War context in which the U.S. needed to import technically skilled labor to meet the demands of its urgently expanding weapons, space, and healthcare enterprises. India’s engineers, scientists, and doctors were the largest group to come to the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s under the professional/technical immigration category.
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