Immigration Restriction

IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION

IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION. Although slaves are not usually considered immigrants, the first formal inhibition of immigration by the United States was the prohibition of the foreign slave trade in 1808, which still allowed slave "visitors" brought by foreign masters. Similarly, an 1862 law prohibited American participation in the coolie trade. But free immigration was unimpeded until 1875. U.S. policy was to welcome immigrants, who were needed to help fill up what Americans saw as a largely empty and expanding country. No one put this better than President John Tyler in his annual message of 1841: "We hold out to the people of other countries an invitation to come and settle among us as members of our rapidly growing family."

But even as Tyler spoke, anti-immigration forces had begun to mobilize. Legislation taxing or otherwise impeding immigration enacted by some seaboard states was disallowed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Passenger Cases of 1849 that immigration was "foreign commerce" and could only be regulated by Congress. In the mid-1850s, the Know-Nothing Party, a mass Protestant anti-immigrant movement, elected eight governors, more than a hundred congressmen, mayors in Boston and Philadelphia, and a host of other officials but failed to get its program of severe immigration restriction and harsher laws against foreign-born Americans through Congress.

The first restriction of free immigrants was the Page Act of 1875, generated by concern about Chinese immigrants in the West. The law, which had little effect but considerable symbolic importance, excluded criminals and prostitutes, placed further restrictions against the "cooly trade," and prohibited the entry of any "oriental persons" without their consent, but entrusted the enforcement to the collectors at the various ports. The congressional debates show that many wanted Chinese immigration either limited or stopped completely. Four years later, Congress passed a bill barring any vessel that carried more than fifteen Chinese passengers, but President Rutherford B. Hayes vetoed it. His message showed that he, too, favored limiting Chinese immigration but was inhibited by a clause in the 1869 Burlingame Treaty with China that granted mutual rights of immigration. Hayes promised to renegotiate the treaty. A new treaty, effective in 1881, gave the United States the right to "regulate, limit, or suspend" the immigration of Chinese "laborers." Congress then passed a bill suspending the immigration of "Chinese laborers" for twenty years, which President Chester A. Arthur vetoed. He stated that he would approve a "shorter experiment." Congress responded with a bill suspending the immigration of Chinese laborers, "skilled and unskilled," for ten years, which Arthur signed in May 1882.

This misnamed Chinese Exclusion Act—it did not exclude Chinese merchants and their families—would, with fourteen subsequent statutes, bar most Chinese from immigrating to the United States until all fifteen laws were repealed in 1943. It represented a kind of legislative Rubicon and began an era of immigration restriction that continues to the present. That era can be divided into two parts. The first, stretching from 1882 until 1943, was one of increasing restriction, based largely on race and ethnicity, but also encompassing ideology, economics, and morality. Since 1943 immigration restriction has been lessened. It is important to note that statutes involving only Chinese were, in both 1882 and 1943, the hinges on which the golden door of American immigration both narrowed and widened.

General Immigration Restrictions

In August 1882, the first general immigration law set up a system whereby the federal government paid states to supervise incoming immigrants, levied a head tax—initially fifty cents—on each incoming alien passenger to finance the cost of supervision, and added an economic restriction by barring persons "likely to become a public charge." This LPC clause, originally interpreted as bar-ring persons who, because of age or infirmity, could not support themselves, was later interpreted to bar the poor. A spate of subsequent laws over the next twenty-five years barred successively contract laborers (1885 and 1887); "idiots," "insane persons," those with a "loathsome or contagious disease," persons convicted of a variety of nonpolitical crimes, and "polygamists" (1891); and "anarchists or persons who believe in or advocate the over-throw by force and violence the Government of the United States" (1903). Then, on the eve of American entry into World War I, Congress enacted the Immigration Act of 5 February 1917 over President Woodrow Wilson's veto. It codified all previous exclusion provisions, imposed a much-debated literacy test that required the ability to read a passage in any recognized language, including Hebrew and Yiddish, expanded the grounds for mental health exclusion, and created a "barred zone" that was intended to keep out all Asians originating in nations east of Iran except for Japanese. However, the courts soon made an exception for Filipinos, who, it was ruled, were not "aliens" but "nationals" and thus could not be excluded from entry even though they, along with other Asians, were ineligible for citizenship. Japanese laborers, but not other Japanese, had been previously excluded by the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907–1908 and thus were not included in the barred zone, which mentioned no nations but was expressed in degrees of latitude and longitude.

During these years organized opposition to immigration grew, but, except for the short-lived American Protective Association, an anti-Catholic group that flourished in the 1890s, it consisted of pressure groups devoted to propaganda and lobbying rather than mass political organizations. The most significant of these was the Immigration Restriction League founded by Harvard graduates in 1894, which was the chief proponent of the literacy test. These forces were greatly strengthened by the general xenophobia of the World War I and postwar eras.

The lame duck session of Congress in 1921 overwhelmingly passed the first bill to impose numerical limits on immigration, but Wilson killed it with a pocket veto. This Quota Law was reenacted as a temporary measure in the first weeks of Warren G. Harding's administration. It kept all of the existing restrictions, placed an annual cap or quota on immigration of about 350,000—3 percent of the number of foreign-born in the 1910 census—meted out largely to the nations of northern and western Europe, based on the presumed number of American residents born there. However, this and all subsequent bills limiting total immigration contained categories of persons designated as "not subject to numerical limitation." In the 1921 act, the chief of these were persons from the Western Hemisphere, to which were added, in its more permanent 1924 successor, alien wives—but not husbands—of U.S. citizens and their children under eighteen.

The Immigration Act of 1924 based its quota allocation not on 3 percent of the newly available 1920 census numbers, which showed a significant increase in the foreign-born from southern and eastern Europe—mostly Italians, Poles, and eastern European Jews—but on 2 percent of the 1890 census, when the incidence of such persons had been much smaller. This resulted in an initial annual quota of 164,667. Other provisions of the 1924 law included a bar on the immigration of "aliens ineligible to citizenship," which unilaterally abrogated the Gentle-men's Agreement by ending Japanese immigration, and the establishment of a "consular control system" that required visas of European immigrants. It also established a national-origins quota system, which went into effect on 1 July 1929. That system required a group of specialists, mostly academics, to determine the national origins of the American people and find out what percent of the entire American population in 1920 came from each eligible country. The experts, under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies, were instructed to exclude from their calculations immigrants and their descendants from the New World and Asia, as well as the descendents of "slave immigrants" and "American aborigines." The result ensured that quota immigration was not only "white" but largely British: the United Kingdom's allocation went from 34,007 to 65,721, almost 44 percent of the new quota, and most other national quotas were substantially reduced. This system, with increasingly significant modifications over time, remained the general basis for the allocation of quota visas until 1965, but by that time, quota spaces were a minority of annual admissions.

Relaxing Restrictions

The repeal of Chinese exclusion in 1943 was followed by similar exceptions for Filipinos and "natives of India" in 1946. The otherwise reactionary McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 ended all ethnic and racial bars to immigration and naturalization and stopped overt gender discrimination as well. That act continued the national-origins system, but, beginning with the Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950, which admitted more than 400,000 European refugees outside of the quota system, a series of special legislative and executive actions for refugee admissions weakened its restrictive effect.

The passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, although technically a group of amendments to the 1952 act, greatly revamped and liberalized immigration law. It did away with national quotas by substituting numerical hemispheric caps (ending the Western Hemisphere's advantage) and expanded the annual number of visas and increased the percentage of visas reserved for family members of American residents. Spouses and minor children continued to be eligible without numerical limitation. Under its regime, total legal immigration increased steadily throughout the rest of the twentieth century. By 2000, for the first time in decades, the percentage of foreign-born in the population had reached 10 percent but still trailed the 13 to 14 percent levels that had prevailed between 1860 and 1920.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anbinder, Tyler Gregory. Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. The best account of mid-nineteenth-century nativism.

Anderson, David L. Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861–1898. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Good for the diplomatic side of Chinese exclusion.

Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. 2d ed. New York: Harper Collins, 2002. Contains summaries of policy and policy debates.

Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. 2d ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992. The classic account of nativism in its major phase.

Reimers, David M. Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn against Immigration. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Best account of late-twentieth-century nativism.

Sandmeyer, Elmer Clarence. The Anti-Chinese Movement in California. 2d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Solomon, Barbara Miller. Ancestors and Immigrants. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956. Definitive for the Immigration Restriction League.

Roger Daniels

See also Immigration ; Nativism ; and vol. 9: Gentlemen's Agreement ; Proclamation on Immigration Quotas .