from many parts of the Western
Hemisphere began to take advantage of it.
Statistics attested to the rising tide of
immigration from Hispanic America.
While the number of immigrants from all
of Latin America in the 120 years from
1820 to 1940 had amounted to only 13.5
percent of the total from Europe (4.4
million immigrants from Latin America,
32.5 million from Europe), the total
number of Latin American immigrants
from 1951 to 1960 leapt to 77 percent of
the European total for that period (1 mil-
lion from Latin America, 1.3 million from
Europe).
Partly because of concern that the
United States might be overwhelmed by
Latin American newcomers, U.S. leaders
in the 1960s reconsidered the lack of
restrictions on Western Hemisphere
immigration. The reconsideration was
also motivated by concern for civil rights.
Demands had been growing to eliminate
the quota system, with its racist bias
against certain ethnicities. If there had to
be ceilings on immigration, some con-
gressmen reasoned, they should be equal-
ly applied—and not just to the Eastern
Hemisphere, but to the Western
Hemisphere as well. The resulting law,
the Immigration Act of 1965, tightened
Latin American immigration at the same
time that it eliminated unequal quotas.
Under the new law, a maximum of
170,000 immigration visas per year would
be granted to the Eastern Hemisphere
and 120,000 to the Western Hemisphere.
Later, in 1979 and 1980, the two separate
ceilings were merged into a single,
reduced, worldwide ceiling of 270,000
visas. Under the 1965 law, no single
country in the Eastern Hemisphere could
receive more than 20,000 visas, a restric-
tion extended to the Western
Hemisphere in 1976. The 1965 law and
its amendments established a preference
system to determine which visa applica-
tions would receive greater priority, with
family ties to U.S. citizens or permanent
residents as the primary criterion and
labor market skills as a secondary one.
Political or religious refugees received
special consideration, though until 1980
refugee status was largely restricted to
people fleeing communist countries.
The ceilings on Latin American
immigration proved to be woefully low
compared with the demand. Many people
who wished to immigrate had virtually nochance of being able to do so legally.
The result was that many desperate Latin
Americans decided to immigrate illegally.
Some came by obtaining student, tourist,
or temporary visas and quietly remaining
in the United States after these expired.
Others traveled to Mexico first and
slipped across the border to the
Southwest, as undocumented Mexican
workers had long done. A number of
Latin Americans, like the Dominican
immigrants described previously, trav-
eled first to Puerto Rico and flew to the
mainland from there; still others, like the
Cubans fleeing Castro, hazarded their
way to Florida shores by boat. Whatever
the path of entry, illegal immigration
from Latin America has been a persistent
problem in the United States from the
enactment of the 1965 restrictions to the
present day.Immigration from
South AmericaUntil World War II, immigration from
South America was exceedingly small.
Afterward, it contributed significantly to
the United States’s ballooning Hispanic-
American population. Of the roughly 1.5
million South Americans who immigrated
to the United States from 1820 to 1995,
more than 90 percent arrived since 1950.
Though some came from non-Hispanic
countries like Brazil and Guyana, most
came from the continent’s Hispanic
nations.
The availability of affordable com-
mercial air travel after World War II was
a major factor in increased immigration,
at least for middle-class individuals who
could afford a plane ticket. Since the cost
of air travel was outside the range of
most poor South Americans, immigrants
from that continent tended to be better
educated and more prosperous than those
from other parts of Hispanic America. Yet
they had reason to seek a better life.
South America’s population more than
doubled between 1960 and 1990, putting
a strain on the continent’s resources. After
World War II, many South American
nations industrialized and modernized
their economies, creating social disloca-
tion and unrest as peasant farmers flocked
to urban areas only to find themselves
unemployed or underemployed, living in
squalid shantytowns. In most countries,186 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY