Immigration

Immigration The largest international transfer of population in modern history to the United States has introduced fifty million newcomers since the early nineteenth century. The Supreme Court has assumed an important role in defining the proper relationship of the federal government to immigration. Its decisions established the legal basis of the modern system for regulating immigration.

In the antebellum era, the federal government did little to supervise immigration. Coastal states with large ports, such as Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, established mechanisms to monitor and process the accelerating influx of immigrants. New York, for example, passed laws requiring ships' masters to report the name, occupation, birthplace, age, and condition of passengers and to pay a small head tax on each of them. Coastal states established immigration boards, staffed by amateur volunteers, to execute these new laws. State lawmakers hoped that these measures would reduce the admission of potential indigents, diseased and insane people, and other custodial cases.

The New York laws were challenged in New York v. Miln (1837). The defendant, a ship's master, argued that the New York laws obstructed interstate and foreign commerce. The Supreme Court, however, sustained the laws as a legitimate exercise of the state's police power. Justice Philip P. Barbour stated that it was as competent and necessary for a State to provide precautionary measures against the moral pestilence of paupers, vagabonds, and possibly convicts, as it is to guard against the physical pestilence which may arise from unsound or infectious articles imported, or from a ship, the crew of which may be laboring under an infectious disease (pp. 142–143).

This conclusion affirmed the right of state governments to set criteria for the admission of immigrants and to reject those who did not fit those standards (see State Sovereignty and States' Rights). The problem of controlling immigrants was complicated by the intrusive problem of southern insistence on plenary state powers to control the ingress of free or enslaved blacks, abolitionists, and antislavery propaganda (see Slavery).

The Supreme Court reversed its position more than a decade later in the decision known as the Passenger Cases (1849). The Court found that state laws imposing taxes on immigrants infringed on the power of Congress “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations” granted by Article I, section 8 of the Constitution (see Commerce Power; State Taxation). This decision placed the immigration of free persons under the sole purview of Congress, with the exception of health and safety questions within the domain of state competence.

The Supreme Court went beyond this decision in 1875. In Henderson v. Mayor of New York, the Court held that all immigration laws of the seaboard states were unconstitutional because they usurped the exclusive power vested in Congress to regulate foreign commerce. In response to Henderson, states abolished their immigration commissions and port authorities. The entire burden of orienting foreigners and turning away the incapacitated fell to private, philanthrophic organizations. Overwhelmed by the strain that immigration put on their resources, charity workers petitioned Congress to have the federal government assume the duties of regulating the influx. (By the 1880s, more than half a million immigrants a year were disembarking in American ports).

In the 1880s. Congress began to bring immigration under direct federal control for the first time. It could no longer rely on volunteerism or informal processes to manage this powerful social force. In 1891 Congress established the first federal administrative agency for the regulation of immigration in the Treasury Department. Congress later refined and strengthened the control of immigration. Statutes that restricted immigration according to increasingly stringent standards of admissibility—terminating the period of free and unlimited immigration by the early twentieth century—were made possible by the Supreme Court's position that the exclusive constitutional power to regulate immigration resided in Congress.

Reed Ueda