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Asylum, Refugees, and Immigration

The rejection by King George III (reigned 1760–1820) and the British government of demands by colonial America for a more open immigration policy to attract newcomers to its shores was one of the causes of the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence in 1776 charged the King with attempting to keep the colonies depopulated, refusing to recognize naturalization acts passed by colonial assemblies, and restricting westward settlement. The framers of the U.S. Constitution made the foreign born ineligible for only one office in the federal government, that of the presidency.

In 1790, the Congress passed the first federal laws that loosely defined a uniform rule for the naturalization of immigrants: any fully white person who resided for two years within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States. In 1801, Congress changed the residency requirement to five years, which it remains today. The federal government kept no official records of immigration until 1820. It was not until 1850 that the U.S. Census Bureau distinguished between foreignand native-born citizens. In 1864, Congress established a Bureau of Immigration.

From 1820 to 1995, more than sixty-two million immigrants came to the United States. In the period before the Civil War (1861–1865), the large majority of immigrants, more than 80 percent, were from the northern and western parts of Europe. Many, with the exception of the French and the Irish, were Protestant, and most were farmers. A big change began in the 1880s and continued through World War I: during that time the large majority of immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe, and most were Catholics and Jews. Beginning in the 1960s, most immigrants have arrived from Western Hemisphere countries (Mexico, Canada, and Cuba principally) and, since the 1980s, also from Asia, mostly from the Philippines, Korea, and China. Today, more than 10 percent of the American population is foreign born.

United States Immigration Legislation

In 1875, Congress enacted the first federal statute to regulate immigration by preventing the entry of criminals and prostitutes. Before 1880, there was very little restriction of immigration into the United States. Scholars have characterized the period from 1880 to the mid-1960s as the restrictionist era in U.S. immigration policy. Beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Congress began to take an active part in the administration and control of immigration. This Act suspended the entry of Chinese workers for ten years and barred all foreign-born Chinese from acquiring citizenship. This marked the first time that Congress excluded a group from the United States because of its national characteristics.

The Immigration Act of 1917, passed over a presidential veto, required proof on the part of immigrants older than age sixteen that they were able to read and write in some language (their native language, English, or any other). Those who could not meet that requirement were sent back. This same statute also barred Asian persons (defined as those from India, Indochina, Afghanistan, Arabia, and East India), although this ban had nothing to do with literacy.

The Johnson Act of 1921, also known as the Quota Act or the Immigration Act of 1921, introduced a system of national quotas. The quota was determined as a percentage of the number of immigrants from the country in question at the time of a designated national census. The annual number of immigrants allowed from each nation was set at 3 percent of the foreign-born of that nationality as recorded in the 1910 census. The 1921 Act also set an annual limit of 350,000 on all European immigration and set quotas for Australia and New Zealand and for countries in the Near East and Africa. Congress imposed no quotas on immigrants from nations in the Western Hemisphere. In 1924, the year the 1921 Quota Act expired, Congress passed another National Quota Act, which set quotas at 2 percent of the foreign born from a given nation in the 1890 census. The new act also provided that, beginning in 1927, the overall European annual quota limit would be 150,000, apportioned according to the proportion of the foreign born from each European country in the 1920 census.

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