“Brian Wilson’s California died decades ago”

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California, as Michael Anton writes in his book The Stakes, “was the greatest middle-class paradise in the history of mankind. Yet, in barely one generation, that California was swept away and transformed into a left-liberal one-party state.” How did that happen? It began with the passage of Hart-Celler in 1965, which transformed the basis of immigration and ushered in a period of rapid demographic change in America. The new immigration regime created by Hart-Celler abandoned the quota-based immigration system that had prioritized immigration from European countries that shared closer cultural, religious, and ethnic ties to the United States. Instead, immigration under Hart-Celler would be based on family reunification, the need for workers, and the protection of refugees. At the time, Democrats like President Lyndon B. Johnson and Sen. Ted Kennedy assured voters that Hart-Celler would not, in Kennedy’s infamous declaration, “disrupt the ethnic composition of our society.” They were wrong.

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