Joe Biden and company love to talk about “root causes” of our present immigration crisis — you know, the one they invited by opening the border. But the real problems can be traced back to John F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy, who changed immigration law in the 1960s. Political analyst Daniel Greenfield explains:

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. …

It affected not only millions, but tens of millions, and it reshaped our lives and our country.

At the signing ceremony, LBJ was flanked by the newly minted Senator Ted Kennedy and a grinning RFK to cement the bill which ended national quotas for immigrants as the Kennedy legacy. The bill would be described as Senator Ted Kennedy’s “first legislative victory” which “helped change the face of the country” and “fashioned the modern day immigration system.”

“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,” Senator Ted Kennedy had promised in the Senate. All of these promises proved to be false.

The 1965 bill was a sequel to a battle that Rep. 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 in the House but Nixon cast a tie-breaking vote and the 1952 bill became law.

While Nixon won the battle, Kennedy won the war.

Kennedy published A Nation of Immigrants and intended to make immigration what his brother Ted called a “very central part of President Kennedy’s administration.” He didn’t fully deliver until after his assassination.

But what JFK could do was play on national opposition to Communism to open up the doors to refugees, which he did, 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.

Much as he had with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, LBJ would once again do what JFK could not, by signing on to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1968. This treaty is what forces us to process an asylum request by any migrant who walks up to the Mexican border. LBJ had promised the Senate that it would “not impinge adversely upon established practices under existing laws in the United States” and that “State laws are not superseded by the Convention or Protocol.” Those claims would also prove untrue.

States and cities have been swamped by masses of migrants crossing the border by making asylum claims and they are barred by the federal government from keeping them out.

A decade later, Senator Ted Kennedy would be hard at work codifying the UN treaty into immigration law with what would eventually become the Refugee Act of 1980. What had started out as an anti-Communist measure instead became a means of admitting Communists, Marxists, Islamists and an endless flood of migrants who could be persuaded to support them.

Greenfield recounts how this immigration policy brought us some notable entrees: Both of Kamala Harris’s parents, Donald J. Harris and Shyamala Gopalan, as well as Barack Obama Sr. In fact, he traces a lot of the radical leftist behavior that’s so prevalent today to the wave of migrants who came thanks to the Kennedys. Ultimately, he concluded:

The Kennedy administration had pitched its immigration reform plans as a way of overcoming American tribalism, but instead opened the door to the tribalism of the Third World.

Read the whole thing here.