“The 1965 act really changed the look and feel of the country in a fundamental way, but it took 50 years for the country to come to terms with that,” said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the New York office of the Migration Policy Institute.
Madeline Hsu, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of Austin, Texas, said there were only about 12,000 Indian immigrants in the United States in 1960. The foreign-born Indian population last year stood at about 2.6 million, according to the Brookings Institution, and it had risen by almost half since 2010.
The 1965 law opened up the United States to people from India like Jagdish Patel.
He recalls that at his engineering college back in the Indian state of Gujarat, “when America started to allow people from different countries to come, we all decided to get ready to go.”
Mr. Patel immigrated in 1968 and enrolled at Youngstown State University in Ohio, where he earned a master’s degree in structural engineering. He returned in 1971 to marry, and because he had a green card, he was able to sponsor his wife, Amita.
In 1977, he became a United States citizen, and sponsored his brother Jay and Jay’s wife for green cards. By 1985, he had also sponsored his mother, five sisters and their husbands and children, most of whom settled in the New York-New Jersey area.
And he had American-born children of his own. His son, Satya, is now a venture capitalist in San Francisco, after working as an executive at Google and at Twitter; his daughter, Sita Montgomery, is an interior designer in Salt Lake City with 140,000 followers on Instagram.
Now retired, Mr. Patel savors time to play golf and to travel — so far, he has visited 50 countries. He devoted a year to planning the Patel reunion in June.
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