Resident Aliens

Antecedents

The legal use of the term alien was formally established in 1798 by the U.S. government when it was utilized in the Alien and Sedition Acts while the nation was engaged in hostilities with France. The four acts, signed into law during the administration of President John Adams, were created to offer protection from potentially seditious and hostile actions by French immigrants, French-sympathizing citizens, and Irish settlers. The Alien and Sedition Acts, considered by many to be oppressive and unjust, were controversial as a political point of contention in their day. They were abolished in 1802.

Thus, modern government policy considerations on the legal status of immigrant residents in the United States continued during the 19th century. Late-1700s immigration laws provided naturalization as citizens only to immigrants who were “free white persons” who had lived in the country for five years, but the Naturalization Act of 1870 was expanded to include African natives and people of African descent. As the Alien and Sedition Act of 1789 demonstrated, immigration laws have been used to bar people from entering the country, as was the case of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

In 1907, the U.S. government created the Dillingham Commission, with the purpose of [Page 1836]conducting a study on the state of immigration. The commission published its extensive report on immigration in 1911, establishing that recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe— as opposed to older immigrants from northern and western Europe—were considered undesirable. The commission's report served as the basis for the establishment of national quotas as well as the immigration reduction acts of the 1920s, which restricted the annual number of immigrants to 150,000. These acts sought to proscribe immigration from Asian countries and restrict the number of immigrant Jews.

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