The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendment of 1965 brought sweeping changes to immigration policy, including the elimination of the quota system. 

U.S. immigration policy, and ultimately the laws pertaining to marriage between aliens and citizens, has evolved in response to the American experience with earlier immigration, fear of change, and a number of major events that have affected U.S. history.

Many Americans believe they have the right to marry whomever they wish and to live with their spouses in the United States, even when their marriages are to residents of other countries.

Sociologist Milton Gordon’s concept of identificational assimilation helps to explain how minority groups develop a sense of peoplehood, an important stage in the assimilation of U.S. immigrants.

In 1938, shortly before he died, social historian Marcus Lee Hansen revolutionized the understanding of the assimilation of immigrant generations into American life by suggesting that assimilation and ethnic identity within the so-called melting pot of America were far more complex than had been assumed.

Ethnic enclaves have long played, and continue to play, significant and normally peaceful roles in bridging the periods between the arrivals of new and culturally different immigrant groups and their assimilation into United States society.

Schools are important sociopolitical entities within American communities. As such, they are a key arena where conflicting views about immigrants regarding identity, linguistic and cultural diversity, assimilation, accommodation, and other issues play themselves out.

As a concept cultural pluralism is an alternative to the “melting pot” view that immigrants should assimilate to American culture by abandoning their own cultures, languages, and other traditions.

As a result of family members or neighbors contacting others from their home countries for purposes of inspiring them to become their new neighbors in America, chain migration has had a significant impact on the history and growth of immigration to the United States.