IMMIGRATION IN THE UNITED STATES

- For the first centuries of American history, there was a vast continent to fill up, so the more people
came, the better. Although the word “immigration” does not appear in the American Constitution, the
founding fathers clearly favoured it, as is implied by the clauses that open all the offices under the
Constitution, except President and Vice-President, to immigrants and instruct Congress to “establish
an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” A broad pro-immigration consensus continued well into the
nineteenth century.

- The first anti-immigrant surge in American history was known as the Know Nothing Movement,
who were opposed to Catholics coming into the country and wanted official posts only for native-born
Protestant citizens.
- The first two successful American attempts to restrict immigration each involved race. The first
affected only enslaved people when, in 1809, Congress outlawed foreign slave trade but did not
interfere with slavery/the buying and selling of slaves within the US. The second restriction targeted
Chinese labourers. Although few Chinese had come to the United States in the 1780s, sustained
Chinese immigration occurred first in the California Gold Rush. As a result, Chinese immigrants were
frequently targets of violence. Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred the
immigration of Chinese labourers but permitted the entry of merchants, their families, students, and
“visitors for pleasure.” By 1917, most Asians were barred from entering the country.

- In the early 20th century, about 90 per cent of immigrants were Europeans, but the sources within
Europe were changing. Germans and British, who had long predominated, were only about one
immigrant in seven in 1900–14, while most of the rest came from eastern and southern Europe, with
people from Italy and the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires predominating. The United States
Immigration Commission, whose 1911 report would help shape immigration policy in the 1920s,
popularized the terms “old” and “new” to stigmatize the latter groups in pejorative language: The old
immigration was essentially one of permanence. These new immigrants had various religious
backgrounds, spoke strange languages and had odd-sounding names, which made them stand out more
easily.

- During the nineteenth-century heyday of German immigration to America, a small but significant
percentage of German-speaking Jews also arrived. By 1920, there were perhaps 4,000,000 Jews in
America, but they comprised less than 4 per cent of the population. Jewish immigrants were even
more likely to be big city residents than their fellow immigrants, and their concentration in New
York City became most pronounced.
- In general, immigrants formed ethnic enclaves (like Little Italy, Swedetown, Over the Rhine, and
Kleindeutschland) rather than get wholly assimilated into the rest of the population. However,
significant internal differentiations existed within all enclaves (e.g. Sicilians and Neapolitans in Little
Italy). The enclaves gave shelter to immigrant cultures.
- While Italians and Jews were concentrated in eastern cities, most Poles settled in interior northeastern
cities and did heavy factory work. Polish Americans displayed a fierce nationalism.

- The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 transformed American immigration. The war years
were marked by heightened ethnic tensions in the United States. As immigration climbed, fears of
being overwhelmed by immigrants and radicals caused Congress to reduce immigration drastically.
The US instituted a one-year quota bill restricting the number of immigrants per country who could
enter the US. Persons from the western hemisphere could enter “without numerical restriction,” that is
outside the quota limits, as could close family members of persons already in the United States. With
slight modifications, this system lasted until 1965.
- The first revision was introduced in 1921 when quotas for countries like Italy or Poland were reduced
while those of Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia were expanded. The new law also
stopped all immigration from Japan by barring the immigration of any person who was “ineligible
 for citizenship.” Since the naturalization law limited acquired citizenship to “white persons” and
“persons of African descent,” Japanese were added to the other Asians who had previously been
barred.
- The Great Depression and the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 further reduced
immigration from the Old World. An economy with more than 10 per cent of its unemployed workers
became one in which the needs of war production plus the diversion of millions of workers to the
armed forces produced labour shortages. One partial solution was to recruit supposedly temporary
workers from Mexico, the West Indies, the Bahamas, Canada, and Newfoundland. A separate
program brought in 50,000 Mexicans to work on railroads. A large but indeterminate number was
entered informally. The Mexican workers, called braceros, from the Spanish braccar (to wave one’s
arms), became a fixture and programs continuing their importation were maintained well into the
1960s.
- Towards the end of 1943, Congress repealed the law that excluded Chinese immigrants and
allowed them to become naturalised citizens. In 1946, they also made Filipinos and “natives of
India” similarly eligible for naturalization and immigration.
- In less than a decade, all purely racial barriers to immigration were removed, although much
discrimination continued.

- There was a growing scandal about the general neglect and frequent mistreatment of Jewish and other
“displaced persons” (DPs) by American military officials in Europe – even in America, polls showed
great opposition to Jewish immigration. It was in 1947 that an American President (Truman) spoke for
the first time of America's responsibility to take refugees, which continued to be referenced by his
successors.
- As the nature of the role that the United States sought to play in the world changed, so did its
immigration policy. By the 1950s, when American foreign policy aspired to lead what its statesmen
called the “free world,” immigration policy that barred most of the world’s peoples, as prewar
American immigration policy had done, would have been a serious impediment.
- This was reflected in the Immigration Act of 1965. It abolished and replaced the quota system with
an annual ceiling of accepted immigrants. However, these caps were illusory because many persons
could immigrate without numerical restriction.
- President Lyndon B. Johnson also proclaimed that people fleeing Cuba would be welcome in the
US. Within fifteen years, 387,000 Cuban refugees arrived, plus many other Cubans who came as
regular immigrants. This continued until the media began demonising Cuban refugees, leading to
new restrictions. For other people like Haitians, the rules were different. Haitians, unlike Cubans,
were turned back at sea when they attempted to flee what the US government insisted was merely
economic misery and not the “well-founded fear of persecution” necessary for amnesty.

- In 1980, Congress passed, and President Jimmy Carter signed the final major liberalizing immigration
statute of the twentieth century. It increased the supposed annual cap and recognized the right of
asylum for the first time. The law also provided an all but automatic process for anyone who achieved
refugee or asylee status to become a “permanent resident” and eligible to begin the process of
becoming an American citizen.

- The push and pull, however, continues to this day. New administrations revise immigration policy,
often attempting to restrict immigration. However, Congress failed to pass any legislation that would
effectively reduce immigration levels, which had risen in every decade since the 1930s.

- In general, and although the late twentieth century was more open to cultural change than was the late
nineteenth, similar nativistic reactions, directed chiefly against Hispanic migrants and their
descendants, occurred and were on the rise. By 2000, every eighth American was Hispanic, and early
in the twenty-first century, the Census Bureau reported that Hispanics outnumbered African
Americans and had become the nation’s second-largest group. Various aspects of Hispanic culture
began to slip into the mainstream, nowhere more heavily than in popular music. Hispanics, like most
 previous immigrant groups, were found chiefly in ethnic enclaves in large American cities, and their
use of Spanish set off the same negative reactions as had the use of German, Italian, Yiddish and other
immigrant languages in earlier eras. Yet the Hispanic label imposed by the larger culture confused as
much as it explained. Mexican Americans and Cuban Americans, to mention only the two largest
groups, had very different cultures.

- Some talk about the contemporary US as, first and foremost, being bicultural rather than
multicultural – two peoples with two cultures and two languages. As a result, several states (Florida,
Arizona, Colorado, California) moved to enact legislation to establish English as the official language.
- In 2003, for the first time since the 1850s, most newborn children in California were Hispanic, with
José becoming the most popular boy’s name in both California and Texas, supplanting Michael. Some
see this as a reconquest of territories previously lost to Mexico in the wars of 1835–6 and 1846–8.