Immigrant Rights

A History of Immigration to the U.S.

by Dave Bennion

category: Nativism

Published October 06, 2008 @ 05:42PM PT

To understand the immigration debate that has come into high focus in the U.S. for the last few years, you have to take a look back at the history of immigration to this country.

Early Immigration

Starting with the colonists in Jamestown and Plymouth, Protestant immigrants from England settled in areas along the Atlantic seaboard that would later form the United States.

Wait-stop-rewind.

A century before Plymouth, the Spanish had invaded Florida and settled there.  The earliest permanent European settlements in what is now the U.S. were Spanish or French, predating English colonies by a good 50 years.  Each new European group to arrive displaced the native inhabitants, who had themselves immigrated to the continent some 10,000 to 20,000 years previously.

Large numbers of early immigrants to the U.S. were victims of trafficking, entering with varying levels of volition into indentured servitude or kidnapped and brought over from Africa as slaves.

Alien and Sedition Acts

The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were enacted in a time of unofficial war against France when the newly formed U.S. felt especially vulnerable to foreign attack.  The Acts made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government or its officials and extended the wait time for citizenship to 14 years.  They were formulated and implemented by the Federalists to target the opposition Democratic-Republicans, but backfired in the elections of 1800 and 1802 as the Federalists were swept from power.  One of the four component laws, which permitted deportation of male citizens of an enemy nation during time of war, was never repealed and is still on the books.

Anti-Catholic Nativism

Waves of Irish and German Catholic immigrants in the first few decades of the 19^th century unsettled established Anglo Protestant natives and led to anti-immigrant riots (pdf) in several major cities.  The 1850s saw an organized nativist political movement-the Know Nothings-that had some regional impact before dissolving as the political scene was shaken up by the Civil War.

Chinese Exclusion

From 1882 to 1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese immigration and made Chinese residents ineligible for naturalization.  Threatened by the economic power of Chinese communities and influenced by entrenched racism, people of the Western states acted to keep Chinese out and marginalize those who were there.  Chinese exclusion went hand in hand with anti-miscegenation laws, which survived the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act by several years.

Ellis Island

Ellis Island's peak years as a port of entry spanned scarcely more than three decades (from 1892 to 1924), but Ellis Island has reached iconic status in popular American history.  Having since joined the Irish and German communities as examples of "good" immigration, it's sometimes difficult now to remember that the Jewish and Italian communities that passed through Ellis Island were as feared and reviled as Mexican and Middle Eastern immigrants are today.  The Ellis Island period led to a nativist backlash resulting in anti-immigrant raids and strict quotas on immigration.

Red Scare/Palmer Raids/Immigration Act of 1924

National security fears after World War One and unease with the changing composition of immigration from Northern and Western Europeans to Southern and Eastern Europeans led to the Palmer Raids, which swept up citizens and non-citizens alike.  Public outcry stopped the raids, but soon afterwards, a national-origins quota system put a stop to the Ellis Island era of liberal immigration.  The restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 set quotas by country based on the numbers of nationals present in the U.S. in 1890, and was justified by eugenicists as a way to maintain racial and cultural purity.  The laws put in place in response to the Ellis Island period helped ensure that hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing from German persecution before and during World War Two did not enter the U.S., instead meeting their deaths in the gas chambers.

Racial Profiling - Japanese Internment and Operation Wetback

Geopolitics dictated immigration policy during WWII, as the end of Chinese Exclusion overlapped with the internment of Japanese-Americans, again on national security grounds.  President Roosevelt initiated the internment of 110,000 people of Japanese descent, 62% of them U.S. citizens, and the Supreme Court affirmed the program's legality.

In Operation Wetback in 1954, President Eisenhower ordered border officials to target Mexican immigrants in a massive detention and deportation effort.

Recent Decades - Global Migration

The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 (the Hart-Cellar Act), changed the system of national-origin quotas to a family-based preference system.  This led to large increases in overall numbers of immigration, and to major shifts in the nationalities of incoming immigrants from Europe to Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

This wave of immigration, as with earlier liberal periods, resulted in a backlash.  1986 saw the imposition of the first laws sanctioning employers of immigrants, and in the 10 years that followed, under pressure from a growing nativist movement, Congress made the immigration laws more punitive and more likely to result in separation of families and deportation of longtime residents.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 led the government to round up tens of thousands of men of Middle Eastern descent and detain and deport many of them.  Congress tightened the asylum laws, leading to higher rates of denial.  Meanwhile, tougher security measures led the U.S. to admit as refugees only a tiny fraction of Iraqis displaced by the 2003 U.S. invasion.  Straying ever further from the post-9/11 national security rationales for restrictive immigration policy, in 2006 and 2007 the federal government began targeting Latino immigrants in massive workplace raids and started construction on a border wall.  National pro-migrant demonstrations in May of 2006 led to a backlash as bipartisan efforts to pass comprehensive reform of the immigration system were defeated in 2006 and 2007.