The 1965 Immigration Act opened US borders to over 600,000 Arab migrants.

Evidence

The third wave of Arab immigrants arrived after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which came on the tail end of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that provided the momentum to create more inclusive immigration policies. The 1965 act eliminated the quotas that had prevented migration from non-Western European countries, including those from Arab and South Asian countries. Consequently, professionals, unskilled laborers, and political refugees from Palestine, Iran, and Iraq were able to relocate to the United States in large numbers (Suleiman 1999). Between 1965 and 2000, more than six hundred thousand Arab migrants arrived in the United States. According to the Migration Policy Institute, by 2010, the immigrant population from Middle Eastern and North African countries living on American soil totaled more than eight hundred thousand individuals, who were largely Muslim (Batalova and Zong 2018). — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 98

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the standard immigration history timeline (quotas, 1965 act) that parallels how other racialized groups’ exclusion/inclusion was legislated.