The 1965 Act’s opening to Middle Eastern immigration produced today’s largely immigrant Muslim population.

Evidence

Immigration laws successfully halted immigration from Asia and significantly slowed immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. The combined quota of Poland, Russia, Romania, and the Baltic countries hit Jewish immigrants particularly hard. For instance, the fixed national origin quota of 9,443 was a fraction of the 100,000 Jews who immigrated annually before World War I. Less than 3 million Eastern and Southern European immigrants came between 1930 and 1960, as compared to 9 million in the first decade of the twentieth century. Not until passage of the 1965 Nationality and Immigration Act were Asians, including people from the Middle East and North Africa, permitted to immigrate in substantial numbers to the United States. As a consequence, nearly 70 percent of Muslims in America today are foreign born or children of immigrants, making them a prime target for the new wave of White nativism in the post-9/11 era. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 245