"The United States Code is the official codification of the general and permanent laws of the United States of America. The Code was first published in 1926, and a new edition of the code has been published every six years since 1934. The 2012 edition of the Code incorporates laws enacted through the One Hundred Twelfth Congress, Second Session, the last of which was signed by the President on January 15, 2013. It does not include laws of the One Hundred Thirteenth Congress, First Session, enacted between January 2, 2013, the date it convened, and January 15, 2013. By statutory authority this edition may be cited "U.S.C. 2012 ed." As adopted in 1926, the Code established prima facie the general and permanent laws of the United States. The underlying statutes reprinted in the Code remained in effect and controlled over the Code in case of any discrepancy. In 1947, Congress began enacting individual titles of the Code into positive law. When a title is enacted into positive law, the underlying statutes are repealed and the title then becomes legal evidence of the law. Currently, 26 of the 51 titles in the Code have been so enacted. These are identified in the table of titles near the beginning of each volume. The Law Revision Counsel of the House of Representatives continues to prepare legislation pursuant to 2 U.S.C. 285b to enact the remainder of the Code, on a title-by-title basis, into positive law. The 2012 edition of the Code was prepared and published under the supervision of Ralph V. Seep, Law Revision Counsel. Grateful acknowledgment is made of the contributions by all who helped in this work, particularly the staffs of the Office of the Law Revision Counsel and the Government Printing Office"--Preface.

This is the first book on the landmark 1965 Immigration Act, which ended race-based immigration quotas and reshaped American demographics.

The year 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1965—a landmark decision that made the United States the diverse nation it is today. In The Law that Changed the Face of America, congressional journalist and immigration expert Margaret Sands Orchowski delivers a never before told story of how immigration laws have moved in constant flux and revision throughout our nation’s history. Exploring the changing immigration environment of the twenty-first century, Orchowski discusses globalization, technology, terrorism, economic recession, and the expectations of the millennials. She also addresses the ever present U.S. debate about the roles of the various branches of government in immigration; and the often competitive interests between those who want to immigrate to the United States and the changing interests, values, ability, and right of our sovereign nation states to choose and welcome those immigrants who will best advance the country.

“An incisive look at immigration, assimilation, and national identity” (Kirkus Reviews) and the landmark immigration law that transformed the face of the nation more than fifty years ago, as told through the stories of immigrant families in one suburban county in Virginia. In the years since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the foreign-born population of the United States has tripled. Americans today are vastly more diverse than ever. They look different, speak different languages, practice different religions, eat different foods, and enjoy different cultures. In 1950, Fairfax County, Virginia, was ninety percent white, ten percent African-American, with a little more than one hundred families who were “other.” Currently the Anglo white population is less than fifty percent, and there are families of Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American origin living all over the county. “In A Nation of Nations, National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten brings these changes to life” (The Wall Street Journal), following a few immigrants to Fairfax County over recent decades as they gradually “Americanize.” Hailing from Korea, Bolivia, and Libya, the families included illustrate common immigrant themes: friction between minorities, economic competition and entrepreneurship, and racial and cultural stereotyping. It’s been half a century since the Immigration and Nationality Act changed the landscape of America, and no book has assessed the impact or importance of this law as A Nation of Nations. With these “powerful human stories…Gjelten has produced a compelling and informative account of the impact of the 1965 reforms, one that is indispensable reading at a time when anti-immigrant demagoguery has again found its way onto the main stage of political discourse” (The Washington Post).

Who controls American immigration policy? The biggest immigration controversies of the last decade have all involved policies produced by the President policies such as President Obama's decision to protect Dreamers from deportation and President Trump's proclamation banning immigrants from several majority-Muslim nations. While critics of these policies have been separated by a vast ideological chasm, their broadsides have embodied the same widely shared belief: that Congress, not the President, ought to dictate who may come to the United States and who will be forced to leave. This belief is a myth. In The President and Immigration Law, Adam B. Cox and Cristina M. Rodríguez chronicle the untold story of how, over the course of two centuries, the President became our immigration policymaker-in-chief. Diving deep into the history of American immigration policy from founding-era disputes over deporting sympathizers with France to contemporary debates about asylum-seekers at the Southern border they show how migration crises, real or imagined, have empowered presidents. Far more importantly, they also uncover how the Executive's ordinary power to decide when to enforce the law, and against whom, has become an extraordinarily powerful vehicle for making immigration policy. This pathbreaking account helps us understand how the United States ?has come to run an enormous shadow immigration system-one in which nearly half of all noncitizens in the country are living in violation of the law. It also provides a blueprint for reform, one that accepts rather than laments the role the President plays in shaping the national community, while also outlining strategies to curb the abuse of law enforcement authority in immigration and beyond.

In 1965, a family-reunification policy for admitting immigrants to the United States replaced a system that chose immigrants based on their national origin. With this change, a 40-year hiatus in Asian immigration ended. Today, over three-quarters of US immigrants originate from Asia and Latin America. Two issues that dominate discussions of US immigration policy are the progress of post-reform immigrants and their contributions to the US economy. This book focuses on the earnings and human capital investment of Asian immigrants to the US after 1965. In addition, it provides a primer on studying immigrant economic assimilation, by explaining economists’ methodology to measure immigrant earnings growth and the challenges with this approach. The book also illustrates strategies to more fully use census data such as how to measure family income and how to use “panel data” that is embedded in the census. The book is a historical study as well as an extremely timely work from a policy angle. The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act set the United States apart among economically developed countries due to the weight given to family unification. Based on analyses by economists—which suggest that the quality of immigrants to the US fell after the 1965 law—policymakers have called for fundamental changes in the US system to align it with the immigration systems of other countries. This book offers an alternative view point by proposing a richer model that incorporates investments in human capital by immigrants and their families. It challenges the conventional model in three ways: First, it views the decline in immigrants’ entry earnings after 1965 as due to investment in human capital, not to permanently lower “quality.” Second, it adds human capital investment and earnings growth after entry to the model. And finally, by taking investments by family members into account, it challenges the policy recommendation that immigrants should be selected for their occupational qualifications rather than family connections.

The story of West Indian immigrants to the United States is generally considered to be a great success. Mary Waters, however, tells a very different story. She finds that the values that gain first-generation immigrants initial success--a willingness to work hard, a lack of attention to racism, a desire for education, an incentive to save--are undermined by the realities of life and race relations in the United States. Contrary to long-held beliefs, Waters finds, those who resist Americanization are most likely to succeed economically, especially in the second generation.