On October 3, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson, standing in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, signed into law the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

The Act ordered elimination of the national origins quota system established in 1882 in favor of a worldwide quota blind to national origin. Immigration was redistributed by pooling unused quotas and making them available on a first-come, first-served basis to oversubscribed nations. Learn more about the 1965 Act and its aftermath.

On October 3, 1990, the German Democratic Republic was absorbed by the Federal Republic of Germany, reunifying the country for the first time since the Second World War. Today, the event is marked annually by German Unity Day.
Read the Unification Treaty, signed in Berlin on August 31, 1990.