Give me your Tired, Your Poor, Part 2: Anti-Immigrant Sentiment and Legal Changes

For more than a century, from 1776 until 1882, the United States had no laws or bureaucratic capacity to regulate immigration. Why should it? There was a huge expanse of land west of the Appalachian Mountains that, although it was hunted, trapped and farmed by the indigenous native American population, was wide open to new settlements. In the 19^th century, Midwestern farms averaged 130 acres, much more than could be farmed, given the technology of the time. Land was available to new settlers and there was an enormous demand for labor of all kinds. Wages on the frontier were up to 70% higher than those in more settled regions.

While all immigration into the United States was lawful until 1882, it didn’t mean there wasn’t resistance. Indeed, every wave of immigration generated hostility, as earlier immigrants felt the threat of new people with new cultures. Most prominent of these resistance movements were the Know-Nothings, operating in the 1850s. This group was primarily anti-Catholic, xenophobic, and hostile to immigration.  It started originally as a secret society, became a political party and then disappeared from the scene as quickly as it appeared.

Despite these paroxysms of anti-immigration sentiment, the first law putting restrictions on immigration wasn’t passed until 1882.  The Immigration Act of 1882 required screening of all passengers arriving in the United States and prohibiting “anyone deemed a convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself.” 

Anti-Chinese sentiment was much more virulent than the earlier strands of nativism. The Chinese first came to the United States during the California gold rush in 1849; later groups came to work on the trans-continental railroad.  By the 1880s, there were 60,000 Chinese working in the United States, largely in California. They were mostly single men, hard-working, and thrifty (sending much of their money home) and utterly alien to American workers. A typical complaint of the time was “The white man can do as much work, and as skillfully, as the Chinaman; but he cannot live so cheaply.” This sentiment sometimes resulted in anti-Chinese rioting and lynching, and ultimately, in the banning of Chinese immigratin.

In 1868, the U.S. signed the Burlingame treaty with China, which had to do primarily with consular matters between the two countries. However, it also promised the Chinese the right to free immigration and travel within the United States and allowed for the protection of Chinese citizens in the United States in accordance with the most-favored-nation principle. Another article of this treaty gave the citizens of the two nations reciprocal access to education and schooling when living in the other country (interesting in light of the current discussion on providing education for refugees).

However by 1917, Congress had passed three major laws to restrict Chinese immigration to the United States. In 1917, the provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act were extended to British India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.  These laws excluded Chinese and certain Asians from entering the United States altogether. 

Then in 1924 Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which, which established quotas on immigrants’ countries of origin –2% of each nationality’s proportion of the population in the 1890 census, thus dramatically reducing the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, as they only become an important part of the American mélange from 1900 on.  This law led to the United States largely prohibiting asylum for Jewish refugees from Germany and Europe during the run-up to WWII.  American popular opinion was against accepting more new arrivals. A Gallup poll taken on November 24–25, 1938, (two weeks after Kristallnacht) asked Americans: “Should we allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live?” 72% responded “no.”

The saga of the German liner “St. Louis” was particularly poignant.  In 1939, the St. Louis, which was carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Hamburg, was prohibited from disembarking its passengers in the United States, Canada or Cuba. The ship returned to Europe, where some refugees escaped, but 255 were killed during the Holocaust.  Somewhat belatedly, Congress passed the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, authorizing the admission of up to 205,000 refugees outside the quota system.

The last major restructuring of the immigration system occurred in 1965, with the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act which abolished the national origins quota system and replaced it with a system that emphasizes links to employers and to families living in the United States.  There would no longer be caps on “immediate relatives” of U.S. citizens.

Finally, in 1980, Congress passed a law defining who could claim asylum in the United States.  The law defines “refugee” as a person unable to return to their country of origin because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or particular opinion. That law is still in effect.

By and large, despite episodes of nativism and xenophobia, American opinion and immigration law have become increasingly more accepting of more diverse populations. This has led to a much more varied population in terms of race, religion and nationality, as shown in the figure below. The future of these policies of acceptance and toleration is, at best, uncertain.