In 1924, Congress passed a package of immigration laws — including the National Origins Act and the Asian Exclusion Act — establishing a quota system giving preferential treatment to European immigrants. Under these laws, the number of immigrants who could be admitted from a given country was capped at a percentage of the number of people from that nation who were living in the United States in 1890. Because Americans were overwhelmingly of European descent in 1890, the practical effect of these laws was an enormous thumb on the scale encouraging white immigration.

These quotas were eliminated by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, an act which is widely credited for opening up our nation to new Americans of Asian and Central and South American descent. At last night’s CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential candidates’ debate, however, Bachmann claimed this decision to eliminate our past, misguided immigration policy was a big mistake.

The immigration system in the United States worked very, very well up until the mid-1960s when liberal members of Congress changed the immigration laws. What works is to have people come into the United States with a little bit of money in their pocket, legally, with sponsors so that if anything happens to them they don’t fall back on the taxpayers to take care of them.

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It’s worth noting that the 1924 laws that Bachmann believes to have worked so very well singled out certain people for particularly harsh treatment. As immigration scholar Roger Daniels explains:

1924 law also barred “aliens ineligible to citizenship” – reflecting the fact that American law had, since 1870, permitted only “white persons” and those “of African descent” to become naturalized citizens. The purpose of this specific clause was to keep out Japanese, as other Asians had been barred already.

It is anyone’s guess why Bachmann thinks America was better off when our immigration policy actively fought to maintain the nation’s white majority and wrote Asians out of the American story.

At last night’s CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential candidate’s debate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) repeatedly refused to answer whether he still believes that Social Security is unconstitutional, but Perry wasn’t always so shy. Just last December, Perry addressed a group of conservative lobbyists and state lawmakers at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s National Policy Summit, and he openly and proudly declared his belief that most of the 20th Century violates the Constitution:

The nearly unlimited scope of the federal government contradicts the principles of limited, constitutional government that our founders established to protect us. [...]

The assault on those boundaries continued into the Roosevelt New Deal. [...] [T]he New Deal’s legacy is a glut of federal programs, and [sic] including a bankrupt Social Security system. I don’t know how you would call it anything other than that. I promise you, my two twenty-something year old kids understand that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. It is a Ponzi scheme on the scale that would make Bernie Madoff look like an amateur. [...]

Then came along President Johnson and its Great Society, and it further eroded our founding fathers’ boundaries that they had put upon the federal government. Medicare! Medicaid!

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So Perry knows perfectly well how to explain his belief that America’s seniors must be left in the cold without Social Security or Medicare. He’s just too afraid to say it again now that he wants to be president.