drew migrants from Great Britain to British North America. Many of these individuals financed their passage by entering into indentured servitude contracts. This arrangement meant that migrants exchanged future years of their labor for passage to North America. At the end of their contracts, the indentured servants would be discharged with a small amount of cash, skills, and sometimes land on the new continent. During the 1700s, a significant share of Europeans coming to British North America were indentured servants.
The Transportation Act granted English courts the ability to sentence convicts for up to 14 years as indentured servants and forced emigration. Before the American Revolution, Britain transported about 50,000 convicts to the American colonies.
The largest population of forced migrants to North America were not criminals from Britain but 388,000 African slaves.
Slavery was a massive generator of wealth for the United States, propelling its development into a world economic power. By the start of the Civil War, the total value of enslaved people was estimated to be between $3.1 and $3.6 billion (equivalent to as much as $42 trillion in today's dollars, accounting for inflation and compounding interest). This made enslaved people the largest single asset class in the entire U.S. economy, exceeding the value of all manufacturing and railroads combined.
Parliament passed the Plantation Act to ease the colonial naturalization process and spur settlement. The Pact created a uniform naturalization system that granted new, non-Catholic colonial settlers English naturalization after seven years of residency contingent upon a religious test, a pledge of allegiance, and a statement of Christian belief to which some people, such as Jews, were exempt.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 extended citizenship to free white persons of good character who had resided in the United States for two years and took an oath of allegiance. The law excluded indentured servants, non-whites, and slaves from naturalization. Despite these exclusions, the Naturalization Act of 1790 was arguably the most liberal naturalization law to date, as it created a short and uniform path to citizenship that lacked gender requirements, religious tests, skills tests, or country of origin requirements.
The Naturalization Act of 1795 increased the residency requirement for naturalization from 2 years to 5 years and added a clause requiring prospective citizens to declare their intention to naturalize 3 years before doing so. Notably, the Naturalization Act of 1795 held a religious and moral subtext that changed "good character" to "good moral character." The 1795 Naturalization Act reflected a fear that foreign-born populations with voting rights could undermine national security.
Due to the looming war with France, Congress passed a series of bills in 1798 collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts that expanded the federal government's involvement in immigration policy. Together these acts subjected aliens to the threat of national surveillance and arbitrary arrest and granted a new power to the president to deport noncitizens via decree. Notably, these acts increased the residency period for naturalization to 14 years and required that prospective citizens declare their intent to naturalize five years before doing so.
In 1819, Congressional legislation required ship captains to provide a passenger manifest to track immigration flows for the first time. Due to the economic depression in England, legislation lowered the carrying capacity of passenger ships and increased the price of travel, reducing the number of poor immigrants who could afford passage.
President Abraham Lincoln contended that "our immigrants [are] one of the principal replenishing streams which are appointed by Providence to repair the ravages of internal war and its waste of national strength and wealth."
The 1862 Homestead Act - offered land grants to citizens and immigrants willing to settle and develop land for five years.
The 1864 Act to Encourage Immigration also known as the Contract Labor Act - allowed private employers to recruit foreign workers, pay their transportation costs, and contract their labor. Immigrants would work for a period of up to one year to pay off their passage to the U.S., a practice similar to indentured servitude. It aimed to address labor shortages caused by the Civil War.
The Lincoln administration had a longer-term effect on American immigration policy when it appointed Anson Burlingame as the U.S. Minister to China in 1861. Burlingame negotiated the Burlingame-Seward trade treaty with China in 1868. Recognizing the "mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens," the Burlingame-Seward Treaty ensured that Chinese citizens had the right to emigrate and enter the United States. It was a Chinese law that did not permit immigration to the U.S., the treaty required the Chinese government to allow emigration to the United States. By 1870 14.4% of the U.S. population was foreign born.
"all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside," except for emigrants and descendants of China. The federal government held this position toward Chinese immigrants and their descendants until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision.
Restricted the immigration of Chinese contract laborers, convicts, and Chinses women, most of whom were the wives of male workers on the grounds that they were prostitutes. These restrictions were in violation of the 1868 Burlingame-Seward Treaty and were the result of nationwide anti-Chinese sentiment.
Imposed a $0.50 federal head tax on each alien passenger to fund immigration enforcement. It also mandated that state officials identify and deny entry to "any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge."
Imposed a 10-year ban on Chinese laborers and Congress extended this ban through 1943.
Led to the Supreme Court decision that Congress had "the power to pass a law regulating immigration as a part of the commerce of this country with foreign nations" and overrode state immigration policies.
Justice Stephen Field penned the ruling opinion that recounted California's constitutional convention, which had found that "the presence of Chinese laborers had a baneful effect upon the material interests of the state, and upon public morals; that their immigration was in numbers approaching the character of an Oriental invasion, and was a menace to our civilization." Field then reasoned that the United States had the power to "preserve its independence, and give security against foreign aggression and encroachment," such as Chinese migration. The Supreme Court's decision created a "constitutional oddity" that subsequently decreased judicial oversight of immigration law.
Expanded the list of excluded immigrants, enabled the deportation of immigrants present for less than a year if government authorities later found them excludable, and established the Office of the Superintendent of Immigration within the Treasury Department — later reformed as the Bureau of Immigration. The act also made immigration inspectors' rulings final and ended the possibility of judicial review, although the Treasury Secretary could still review them.
Expanded the list of excludable immigrants and excluded aliens from "due process protection hitherto provided by the Fourteenth Amendment to all 'persons' rather than 'citizens.'" In 1903, Congress also relocated the Bureau of Immigration to the Department of Commerce and Labor.
A 41 volume study composed of cherry-picked data to reach the predetermined conclusion that immigrants from Northern and Western Europe were innately superior to those from Southern and Eastern Europe. When data revealed large numbers of Northern and Western Europeans sought welfare in American cities, the Dillingham Commission returned the data "for further information or for corrections." Despite its methodological flaws, policy-makers embraced the report and its recommendations because it confirmed their prejudices.
Many argued that immigrants impeded the achievement of an ideal society, committed crimes, and abused welfare. Others proposed that the government had a duty to protect natives from immigrants who supposedly depressed innovation and lowered native-born American wages. Scholars of the era contended that certain ethnicities possessed immutable intrinsic characteristics that would prevent assimilation into American society. To combat these perceived ills, Progressives championed mandatory literacy tests, as well as various other eugenics-inspired racial and ethnic exclusions of Jews, Asians, and Africans. The immigration of Japanese laborers was blocked via the informal 1907-08 Gentlemen's Agreement. It called for U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt to force San Francisco to repeal its Japanese-American school segregation order in exchange for Japan agreeing to deny emigration passports to Japanese laborers, while still allowing wives, children and parents of current immigrants to enter the United States.
What started as a collective of private nonprofit organizations that backed civics classes, language lessons, and the destruction of the “hyphenated American” morphed into a series of government programs that wrote school curricula to push for immigrant assimilation, including banning the German language from being spoken in public schools.
Sanctioned legal immigrants' detention and deportation if they committed a deportable crime within five years of their arrival. It also imposed literacy tests and other measures to limit immigration from Africa and Asia.
Established a cap on the number of quota admissions equal to roughly 358,000 for immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, exempting immediate relatives. This was the first American immigration law that substantially emphasized family-based immigration over economic immigrants. Of the total quota admissions, the bill allocated 55% to Northern and Western European countries.
Reduced the annual quota from roughly 358,000 to about 164,000 immigrants. The law also established per-country cap allocations:
Established three categories of immigrants:
This law required the prescreening of immigrants at embassies and consulates abroad, the implementation of a visa system, and the deportation of illegal arrivals. To enforce the law, Congress also created the U.S. Border Patrol. Additionally, Congress allowed Immigration Bureau agents to arrest illegal border crossers without obtaining warrants, to board and search vessels, and to access private lands within 25 miles of the border. Despite these powers, an estimated 175,000 illegal entries occurred annually.
Five years before the 1924 act an average of 554,920 legal immigrants arrived each year, during the five years after the act, the average number of legal immigrants per year dropped to 304,182. By 1932 the inflow of legal immigrants had fallen to 35,576. Through the decade of 1930s, legal immigration averaged 69,938 annually. From 1924 to 1940 the number of immigrants to the United States dropped by 90%. This is through the height of the Great Depression.
A 1933 Executive Order merged the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization into the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) with the Department of Labor. As the country entered the Great Depression, Secretary of Labor William N. Doak thought that deporting illegal immigrants would create jobs for natives. As a result, the federal government deported more than one million Mexicans and persons of Mexican ancestry in what was euphemistically known as "repatriation," even though approximately 60% of the deportees were U.S. citizens born in the U.S. to Mexican parents. The repatriation efforts only increased unemployment rates for native-born Americans.
Regarding the 1933 Repatriation to Mexico, a 2017 paper circulated by the non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research states "The repatriation of Mexicans, who were mostly laborers and farm workers, reduced demand for other jobs mainly held by natives, such as skilled craftsman and managerial, administrative and sales jobs... our estimates suggest that it may have further increased their levels of unemployment and depressed their wages."
Forced noncitizens to register with the federal government, provide fingerprints, and notify the government in the event of an address change. The law also made prior involvement in the Communist, Fascist, or Nazi political parties grounds for deportation.
Two months after the United States entered into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, establishing concentration and detention camps for Japanese and Germans inside the United States.
The postwar revelation of the Holocaust shamed the United States for its pre-war anti-refugee policy and generated political support for the 1948 Displaced Persons Act. The temporary 2-year act provided for the admission of 200,000 displaced persons and attempted to favor Catholic and Protestant refugees over Jewish ones by enacting preferences for agricultural workers.
Although Asians received no refugee visas, the act enabled several thousand Chinese already residing in the United States to gain legal permanent status by claiming asylum. As they were highly educated and well-connected, with strategic skills and knowledge, many Chinese immigrants were given asylum (particularly so that they would not return to communist China).
As a result of these and other provisions, the United States admitted more than a half million refugees between 1945 and 1953. Another motivating factor for liberalizing refugee flows after World War II was the realization that the United States could use refugee policy to increase its international prestige relative to that of the Soviet Union to combat Soviet propaganda.
The 1942 Bracero Program (due to an executive order called the Mexican Farm Labor Program) was similar to the temporary-worker programs of 1917 and 1922 that allowed for the entry of 50,000 to 80,000 Mexican laborers. Between 1942 and 1964, the Bracero Program facilitated roughly 4.5 million Mexican agricultural workers' legal entry.
Undocumented immigration increased substantially in 1947 when the Bracero Program temporarily ended. This influx of immigrants prompted the federal government to arrest 142,000 undocumented workers between 1947 and 1949 before returning them to the border to grant them temporary work visas, a process that eventually morphed into a revamped Bracero Program.
In 1951, there was legal reform and expansion of the Bracero guest worker visa program.
Removed almost a million undocumented immigrants. However, the government legalized many of those apprehended. Some immigrants took "a walk-around the statute" to gain a bracero worker visa — a process where they were driven down to the Mexican border by the INS or Border Patrol and made to take one step across the border and then immediately reenter the United States with a bracero work visa. The combination of a legal migration pathway with consequences for breaking immigration laws incentivized Mexican migrants to come legally.
In 1964, after Congress canceled the Bracero Program in response to political pressure from labor unions and labor organizers, undocumented immigration jumped because Congress failed to replace it with another effective lower-skilled guest worker visa program.
Increased the quota for Europeans from outside of Northern and Western Europe, granted the Department of State the ability to deny entry to those it thought would lower native wages, repealed the 1880s' prohibitions against contract labor, and set a minimum quota of a hundred visas for immigrants from every country. The bill promoted family reunification by continuing the exemption of children and spouses of citizens from the numerical caps. The 1952 act introduced four preference categories:
The 1952 act also created nonimmigrant visa categories that are still familiar:
Povided 214,000 visas to refugees, primarily from Europe but with 5,000 designated for the Far East. The program was designed mainly to aid those fleeing the Soviet Union, Eastern Germany and other areas of Communist expansion in Europe and was set to expire in 1956.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act ended the national quota system and replaced it entirely with a preference system for immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere. The 1965 act created categories of immigrants that included the unmarried and married sons and daughters of U.S. citizens; siblings of U.S. citizens; spouses and unmarried sons and daughters of green card holders; members of the professions that include, architects, engineers, lawyers, physicians, surgeons, and teachers; scientists and artists of exceptional ability; skilled and unskilled workers in occupations for which labor was in short supply; and some refugees. Green cards were allotted to:
Immigration was limited to 290,000 annually - 170,000 from the Eastern Hemisphere, and 120,000 from the Western Hemisphere. Demographically, the removal of racial restrictions significantly increased the number of Asian immigrants and slightly increased the number of Latinx immigrants. Geographically, Florida, California, New York, Texas, Illinois, and New Jersey received the bulk of new immigrants.
The 1980 Refugee Act came about due to waves of refugees fleeing communism from 1967 to 1980 temporarily raising the refugee limit from 17,600 to 50,000 and establishing a new category for asylum seekers. From 1980 to 2000, the federal government accepted an average of 97,000 refugees per year. Under the Refugee Act of 1980, the president sets worldwide and regional refugee numbers.
The bill granted roughly three million undocumented immigrants amnesty and created 109 new INS offices to enforce immigration laws. IRCA boosted the number of Border Patrol agents along the southwest border to roughly 3,350 agents by 1988, but undocumented immigration continued to increase. IRCA had two main components:
The 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act created a category of offenses called aggravated felonies that subjected noncitizens to deportation after completing their prison sentence. By 2016, more than 30 types of offenses were deemed aggravated felonies, including minor crimes with a sentence of one year or more.
In 1989, legal immigration flows surpassed one million, the first time since 1914. By 1990, the immigrant population was 19.8 million - 7.9 percent of the U.S. population.
Increased the number of green cards issued annually to 675,000; the per-country ceiling was raised to 25,620. Origin of immigrants issued green cards:
Much of the shift was due to economic development globally. Whereas Europe and Canada were wealthy regions relative to the rest of the world, developing nations were wealthy enough that their citizens could emigrate, but not yet wealthy enough to entice them to stay.
Much of the shift was due to economic development globally. Whereas Europe and Canada were wealthy regions relative to the rest of the world, developing nations were wealthy enough that their citizens could emigrate, but not yet wealthy enough to entice them to stay.
The bill allocated 55,000 immigration visas to a Diversity Visa program that awarded visas to nationals from countries with low levels of immigration to the United States; it did so to target Ireland. In 1994 almost all diversity visa recipients were from European countries.
Undocummented immigration increased from about 3.5 million in 1990 to 5.7 million in 1995.
Increased the penalties for illegal entry, created mandatory detention for many classes of noncitizens, and expedited deportation procedures for certain cases. The bills also limited judicial review of certain types of deportations and allowed secret evidence in removal proceedings for noncitizens accused of terrorist activity.
Increased the interior deportation apparatus in the United States and prevented illegal immigrants from using the legal system to earn a green card through the so-called three-and-ten-year bars, which prevented illegally present immigrants who leave the United States from legally returning for any reason.
Made most noncitizens ineligible for means-tested welfare, authorized the states to deny providing welfare such as Medicaid to immigrants, and delayed the possibility of receiving welfare for most immigrants for five years.
Temporarily raised the annual H-1B cap and permanently exempted universities and nonprofit research institutions from the visa cap.
The new century began with the prospects of increased immigration and the legalization of undocumented immigrants. For example, in 2000 Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush appealed to Latinx voters by supporting expanded legal immigration and legalization for undocumented immigrants. The original version of the DREAM Act to grant residency and work rights to undocumented immigrants who enter the United States as minors dates back to April 2001. Unfortunately, the 9/11 attacks caused a slew of protectionist laws.
Reduced the rights of immigrants by expanding deportation powers to suspected terrorists and allowed the attorney general to detain aliens without charge or recourse to due process.
onsolidated 22 federal departments and agencies into the new Department of Homeland Security. This act moved many federal agencies that were responsible for immigration enforcement under the department's purview and restructured them as Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Expanded the budget, staffing, and powers of the immigration enforcement bureaucracy and ordered that all internal Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) databases be linked together and be fully interoperable with the then-in-development biometric-based system.
In 2012 the Obama Administration introduced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which granted a two-year work permit and a reprieve from deportation to undocumented immigrants who met many of the latest DREAM Act requirements:
Rather than Trump's openly racist policies for deportation, a generous U.S. Federal Immigration Policy will grow the U.S. economy over at least two generations and will expand the population which will in turn expand social infrastructure through a larger taxable populace that will feed revenue to Social Security, national infrastructure, the economy at large and could fortify aging and depopulating rural communities. A smart U.S. Immigration Policy means conservatives and progressives collaborating to assist asylum seekers and poor immigrants in need in general. Rather than conservative leaders shipping humans to liberal cities and towns, why not work with one another to define small towns and rural communities that are quickly disappearing to present new immigrants with homes and infrastructures that need active and eager residents to reinvigorate swaths of this great nation?