One of LBJ’s signature civil rights achievements, the 1965 Hart–Celler Immigration Act still stands in providing the overarching structure for immigration regulation in the US today. Its enactment ended decades of overtly racist immigration laws, crowning the almost equally long campaigns by immigration reformers seeking a more egalitarian system. In securing passage of the legislation, LBJ provided essential leadership but accepted significant compromises to do so. The immigration overhaul succeeded in abolishing the most discriminatory aspects of the old system for immigration regulation, even as it has implemented new forms of inequalities that have criminalized migrations particularly from the US’s closest neighbors. This law has transformed the US through the most diverse immigration in national history, even as it has produced a large and persistent caste of second-class residents whose unauthorized immigration bars them from citizenship.

As Imperial Germany came into being in 1871, it entered into the consciousness of people who already belonged to an emigrant nation.It contained people who lived far outside that nation-state’s borders, and it included many who considered themselves German plus other things. It was tied together by dynamic forms of communications: ever-more-efficient methods of correspondence, a growing German-language press, not to mention the pedagogical networks that thickened during the last decades of the nineteenth century and ever-more-powerful networks of trade, transport, and travel. The global consciousness that had grown over the previous century now included a consciousness of German communities around the globe and an ever-greater comfort with mobility. That not only extended older forms of labor mobility beyond Europe’s borders but also witnessed an increase in families extending their membership into an ever-greater variety of transcultural places. There were, in fact, millions of Germans living transnational lives in transcultural communities by the end of the century—some in Europe and some far from it.