Immigration Legislation

Race as a Criterion of Membership

During the first century of its existence, the United States paid little heed to who entered the country. The issue was who would be entitled to citizenship through “naturalization.” A 1790 law set a uniform residence requirement and also specified that only “free White persons” could be naturalized, a restriction that stayed in place, remarkably, until 1952 when the McCarren-Walter Act finally swept it away. Decades of jurisprudence interpreting the “Whiteness” requirement were suddenly moot.

Congress began to take piecemeal steps toward immigration regulation in 1819, with the adoption of federal reporting rules. No one was excluded until 1875, when prostitutes and convicts were barred. The excluded categories expanded in 1882 to include “lunatics,” “idiots,” and “those likely to become a public charge.” Race also became a ground for exclusion in the aptly named Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882 and 1888. Approximately 110,000 Chinese laborers entered the United States between 1850 and 1882 to do the arduous work of building the nation's railroads and developing its mines. However, once this work was completed, Chinese immigration was no longer seen as desirable.

Racism was a defining feature of the debate over Chinese labor. Whites in the western states made their views known with riots that destroyed Chinese homes and businesses and through discriminatory legislation. California and other western states lobbied vigorously for the Chinese Exclusion Acts. They found a receptive audience in Congress, whose members spoke of these residents as “locusts,” “rats,” “flies,” and “leeches” in debating the bill. Race-based restrictions on Chinese, Indian, and other Asian immigration survived until 1943. The Japanese were also unwelcome. A 1907 [Page 375]“Gentleman's Agreement” severely limited their immigration.

During this period of increasing restrictions and racialized criteria for entry, the U.S. federal government was creating a bureaucratic apparatus to carry out its laws, including the power to deport persons already present. Congress enacted a series of national quota laws in the 1920s, limiting admissions for each nationality based on the proportion already in the United States. This system helped to maintain the nation's White, northern European character. In 1952 Congress limited immigration from the eastern hemisphere, leaving the western hemisphere unrestricted. The Senate Judiciary Committee claimed that it was not “giving credence to any theory of Nordic superiority” but was developing “a rational and logical” means to “best preserve the sociological and cultural balance of the United States.”

The need for agricultural workers in the Southwest, however, necessitated exempting Mexicans from the federal quota system. These workers entered the United States in large numbers, legally and illegally, during the prosperous 1920s. Local laws segregated them from Anglo residents, and employers paid them a lower, “Mexican” wage. Their right to remain in their ancestral homeland was never secure. When hard times hit in the Depression, they were forcibly repatriated. It was a system of “imported colonialism” arising out of Mexico's subordinated relationship to the United States.

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