Immigration Restriction

THE FIRST IMMIGRATION law in the United States was the Alien Act of 1798, which dealt with deportation and whose intent was less to deal with immigrants than to suppress the Jeffersonian opposition party. After Jefferson repealed the Alien and Sedition Acts, aside from the Naturalization Act of 1790 that limited citizenship to “free white persons,” immigration restriction was a nonissue for 80 years. Between 1820 and 1930, the United States received approximately 60 percent of all the world's immigrants. America was growing and in need of workers. Anti-immigrant impulses in the 1840s and 1850s resided in the Know-Nothing movement and the American Party, neither of which managed to effect restriction. Immigration control was regarded as a state power, not a federal one. And most states recruited immigrants rather than restricting them.

The exception was the west, where states from the 1870s began restricting Asian property ownership and citizenship. Westerners demanded national legislation; in 1875, Congress restricted citizenship to black and white people. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, law until 1943, forbade Chinese immigration. Under the Cable Act of 1922, repealed in 1936, women who married Asian men lost their American citizenship. From the 1890s to the 1920s, eugenicists, restrictionists, and advocates of Americanism wanted to overturn the changes brought by new immigrants with different values, ways of life, and religions. Laws barred entry by the poor, diseased, criminal, and mentally deficient. After World War I, the Ku Klux Klan joined the anti-immigrant chorus. The 1924 National Origins Act established quotas based on percentages of immigration numbers prior to the new immigration. Then came the Great Depression and World War II. By 1945, the United States was more homogeneous than at any time prior to 1890.

World War II made Americans view Chinese Americans more sympathetically. A war against racism was indefensible while the United States exercised racist policies itself. The exclusionist phase waned. Latin Americans won the right to citizenship in 1940. Jews found refuge from Adolf Hitler's Holocaust. A half-million Mexican Braceros worked in 21 states. In 1942, Filipinos became eligible for military service and citizenship. Asian Indians got the right in 1944. The 1940 Alien Registration Act required registration and fingerprinting of all aliens over the age of 15. Koreans, confused with Japanese, remained under immigration restrictions, as did the interned Japanese. In the 1940s and 1950s, war brides were allowed to immigrate.

The McCarran-Walter Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 replaced the National Origins Act of 1924, allowing citizenship regardless of place of origin but keeping quotas. Loosened immigration led to a backlash from the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, which asked for a moratorium. The answer was no and the door was left half open. The Immigration Reform Act of 1965 eliminated quotas for Asians and set quotas for the Western Hemisphere at 120,000, with the rest of the world getting 170,000. The assumption was that the new immigrants would be from the same countries as the old new immigrants [Page 695]and that they would easily blend into a European-American United States. Surprisingly, the influx proved to be Asian, African, and Latin American. Also, Haitians, Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cubans came in the 1970s under various refugee asylum programs. And a massive surge in illegal immigration, especially through Mexico, overwhelmed the southwest and moved slowly north.

...