Immigration Law

para-3: 1915 changed to 1917Immigration Law. As early as 1798, the Alien and Sedition Acts provided for the deportation of enemy aliens and imposed a fourteen‐year residency requirement for U.S. citizenship. In general, however, early Congressional oversight of immigration was slight. The Steerage Act of 1819 directed ship captains to present lists of arriving passengers, and an 1855 law required that these rosters distinguish permanent immigrants from visitors. State laws relating to immigration were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as infringements of Congress's power to regulate foreign commerce. In 1849, for example, the Court voided New York and Massachusetts laws that taxed arriving passengers to cover the costs of caring for indigent immigrants.

Congress's first direct control of immigration came in 1875, when it barred criminals and prostitutes. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), a response to native‐born workers' complaints of job competition, suspended for ten years the immigration of Chinese laborers. The exclusion became permanent in 1904. The Immigration Act of 1882 established a system of immigration control under the secretary of the treasury. Congress subsequently barred numerous “undesirables,” including lunatics, beggars, persons with contagious diseases, and advocates of political violence. To identify such persons, officials conducted interviews and medical examinations at New York's Ellis Island and other entry points.

In 1907, as San Francisco prepared to segregate Japanese and other Asian schoolchildren, President Theodore Roosevelt averted an international incident by negotiating the so‐called Gentlemen's Agreement by which Japan reaffirmed a 1900 pledge to bar Japanese laborers from emigrating to America. That same year, amid rising anti‐immigrant sentiment, Congress created a Joint Commission on Immigration, popularly called the Dillingham Commission. Its 1911 report, reflecting contemporary assumptions about innate ethnic differences, found the recent wave of southern and eastern European immigrants generally inferior to the northern and western European immigrants of earlier eras. In 1917, culminating a long campaign, Congress passed over President Woodrow Wilson's veto a literacy requirement for immigrants.

As immigration resumed after World War I, Congress imposed the first numerical limits. The Quota Law of 1921 restricted annual immigration to approximately 350,000 persons. To reduce immigration from southern and eastern Europe, this law limited annual immigration from any one nation to 3 percent of the number of foreign‐born persons from that country living in America in 1910. The Immigration Act of 1924, while imposing even stricter and more discriminatory temporary restrictions, provided that, beginning in 1927, annual immigration by the end of the decade would be permanently limited to approximately 150,000, to be distributed proportionately to the ethnic composition of the U.S. population in 1920. The law also excluded Asians entirely.

Immigration from the Western Hemisphere, left largely unregulated by the 1924 law, was restricted by U.S. officials during the Great Depression of the 1930s under a provision barring persons “likely to become a public charge.” In 1943, however, responding to wartime labor shortages, Congress permitted the recruitment of temporary agricultural workers from Mexico and other Latin American nations. This bracero (farmworker) program continued until 1964.

In the 1930s, U.S. immigration laws were intepreted strictly to exclude all but a handful of Jewish and other victims of Nazi persecution. World War II and its aftermath brought some relaxation of immigration policies, however. In 1943, to counter Japanese propaganda about American racism, the United States granted China an annual quota of 105 visas. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948, extending a policy inaugurated by President Harry S. Truman in 1945, authorized the annual admission of 205,000 persons displaced by the war. In 1950, Congress raised the total to 415,744.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (the McCarren‐Walter Act), passed over Truman's veto, removed the ban on Asian immigration but retained the discriminatory national‐quota system. (This Cold War measure also barred “subversives” and authorized the deportation of immigrants who joined “Communist and Communist‐front” organizations, even if they were U.S. citizens.) Amid mounting criticism, the McCarren‐Walter Act was amended in 1965 to end, after more than forty years, the system that set different immigration quotas for people of different nations. After a further amendment in 1976, annual immigration from the Eastern and Western Hemispheres was set at 170,000 and 120,000 respectively, with a maximum total from any one nation of 20,000.

The issue of admitting refugees loomed large during the Cold War. Soviet dissidents, victims of Russia's suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, anti‐Castro Cubans, and Hmong and others allied with U.S. forces during the Vietnam War were at various times admitted by presidential action. While Congress chafed at this broad presidential power, refugee advocates urged a more inclusive approach to the problem. The Refugee Act of 1980, sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy, set at 50,000 the number of refugees who could be admitted annually and provided for consultation between the president and Congress regarding adjustments to that figure. This law also accepted the United Nations' nonideological definition of a refugee as a person in flight from persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, politics, or social class.

Illegal or undocumented immigration captured congressional attention in the 1980s. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 made it illegal for employers knowingly to hire aliens not authorized for employment in the United States. As a concession to employers of alien workers, the law granted legal residence to certain aliens who had labored in U.S. agriculture during recent growing seasons and, in a onetime amnesty, to undocumented aliens who had arrived before 1982 and had lived in the United States continuously thereafter.

As the 1965 reform measures took effect, critics worried about a rising tide of immigration, and particularly about the proliferation of “family‐reunification” visa requests—a loophole, they charged, that unfairly benefited recent arrivals from Latin America and Asia while disadvantaging European applicants. In response, the Immigration Act of 1990 set an annual limit of 675,000 immigrants but restricted in various ways the family‐reunification provision. This law also increased the number of visas available for skilled workers and set aside 55,000 “diversity” visas for applicants from nations underrepresented in recent immigration. As the twenty‐first century dawned, issues of immigration policy would clearly remain on the national agenda.
See also Anticommunism; Asian Americans; Immigrant Labor; Industrialization; Labor Markets; Migratory Agricultural Workers; Nativist Movement; Progressive Era; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Robert A. Divine , American Immigration Policy, 1924–1952, 1957.
Edward Prince Hutchinson , Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965, 1981.
Gil Loescher and and John A. Scanlan , Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America's Half‐Open Door, 1945 to the Present, 1986.
John Higham , Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativeism, 1860–1925, 2nd ed., 1988.
Stephen Yale‐Loehr, ed., Understanding the Immigration Act of 1990, 1991.

Thomas J. Archdeacon