To study a country’s immigration policy is to study its nationalist project. In many respects, immigration policy functions as an act of social engineering: Governments implement measures to encourage the immigration of individuals who align with their vision for the nation’s demographic, social and economic development, while seeking to restrict the entry of those they consider “undesirable.” In the case of the United States, the repercussions of this dynamic resound clearly and sharply, as the first federal immigration legislation arose in conversation with the establishment and flourishing of the field of eugenics—in other words, as the United States sought to sort out the “fit” from the “unfit.”
QuellentextWhat is eugenics?
The term eugenics (in German-speaking countries, also referred to as 'racial hygiene' until the end of World War II) comes from the Greek and roughly means 'good heredity' or 'good descent,' or literally 'the art of good inheritance.' The term was first coined in 1883 by British anthropologist Francis Galton (1822–1911), a cousin of the evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin. In the 20th century, eugenics, which was then considered a 'science,' gained significant popularity in politics and society in many Western countries, including the USA, Germany, and Great Britain. It was associated with the idea of improving the human race by promoting the reproduction of individuals who were considered 'genetically superior' due to traits such as intelligence, physical health, or social status, while preventing the reproduction of those deemed 'undesirable' or 'inferior,' often through forced sterilization. In Germany, the Nazis used eugenic theories to justify their racist and antisemitic policies. As a result, eugenic thinking also contributed to the Holocaust. Today, eugenics is regarded as pseudoscientific and ethically reprehensible. Modern genetics and biology clearly distance themselves from the eugenic ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Further reading: Philippa Levine, Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2027.
The United States did not restrict immigration on the federal level for about its first 100 years. Some states had enacted restrictions, primarily to exclude prospective residents who would require government-funded care, but even the state’s existing residents could be expelled if they fell into poverty. At the national level, the government had, for the most part, allowed immigrants to freely cross American borders since its founding.
Excluding Chinese immigrants, a prelude to restrictions on European immigration
That changed in 1875, when the United States Congress passed the Page Act, which barred Chinese women from entering the country. Officially, the law targeted “undesirable” forced laborers, prostitutes, and criminals from East Asia. In practice, however, federal immigration officials used the law primarily to target Chinese women, whom they collectively cast as immoral prostitutes who would negatively influence Americans. Although the Chinese Exclusion Act would also ban Chinese men from immigrating seven years later, the Page Act established a sexualized and gendered framework that for decades would be used to evaluate female immigrants.
In 1882, Congress passed a new, universal immigration law that would, among other restrictions, bar “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a charge.”
The next immigration law, passed in 1891, further excluded immigrants with “immoral” conditions like promiscuity, queerness, and polygamy, along with paupers and any immigrant considered likely to become a public charge in the future. In many cases, inspectors would make a fast decision on sight regarding whether to admit or reject an immigrant, often with substandard medical training. Many immigrants, especially those separated from their families or who didn’t speak English, were already overwhelmed by the immigration bureaucracy, and appeals of these decisions seldom succeeded.
Congress approved an increasingly severe series of immigrations restrictions in 1903, 1907, 1917, 1921, and 1924, dramatically expanding the lists of excludable physical and mental conditions, and lengthening the amount of time for which a new immigrant would remain vulnerable to deportation under the public charge law. These laws rested in part on a 1911 report published by U.S. Senator William Dillingham and the commission that he chaired, which found—in the forty-one volumes it produced, including a detailed “Dictionary of Races or Peoples”—that immigration from eastern and southern Europe should be curtailed, as it threatened the fabric of American society.
Restricting immigration though national origin quotas
Notoriously, in 1924, Congress passed the National Origins Act. Built on the 1921 law that had dramatically tightened the existing immigration restrictions, the legislation established quotas, or an annual cap on the number of immigrants permitted to enter from each individual country. First introduced in 1921, the government had now tightened the quotas to two percent of that country’s population residing in the U.S. as of 1890. Critically, however, the 1890 census immediately predated the most intensive increases in immigration rates from eastern Europe. Thus, the choice of 1890 as the base year for the quota system favored immigrants from northern and western Europe, as the majority of US immigrants at the time had come from these locations. The National Origins Act functioned to shore up western European and Nordic supremacy within the United States, while keeping out large swaths of southern and eastern Europeans who allegedly “polluted” the American racial stock.
Notably, the new quota-based restrictions applied only to immigrants from Europe. In 1917, an unprecedented and contentious literacy test for prospective immigrants exacerbated the challenges for many who would otherwise qualify for entry, and an “Asiatic Barred Zone” established the same year blocked most immigration from Asia and the Middle East. The 1924 law further precluded entry by anyone ineligible for U.S. citizenship, and Asians had been ineligible for citizenship since Congress passed relevant legislation in 1790 and 1870.
Immigration law in the United States remained largely static between 1924 and 1965, although as historian Libby Garland has pointed out, that did not mean a lack of immigration on the whole—rather, a lack of legal pathways for many immigrants to enter the country.
In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act—named for its authors and proponents, Arizona senator Patrick McCarran and Pennsylvania congressman Francis Walter—largely reinforced existing immigration restrictions. Although the law eliminated the Asiatic Barred Zone, it introduced very low quotas for Asian entry. Worse, the new Asian quotas were explicitly based on race, not national origin, implicating—for example—an immigrant from Italy with one Chinese parent. These were the only openly race-based quotas in the entire system, and U.S. president Harry Truman considered them to be so egregiously discriminatory that he vetoed the law, but Congress overrode the veto and passed the law anyway.
Shifting away from the quota system
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as the Hart-Celler Act for its two congressional sponsors, shifted the paradigm of U.S. immigration policy. The 1965 Act abolished the national origins quotas, replacing them with a new system that emphasized individual immigrants’ skills and qualifications. However, it also placed the first-ever numerical restrictions on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, reflecting underlying currents of American racism and xenophobia, now turning towards immigrants from Latin America.
Immigration rates rose in the 1970s as U.S. foreign policy continued to evolve and political instability spread overseas. The Refugee Act of 1980 established a uniform policy for admitting and resettling refugees, formalizing a previously ad hoc process. The national conversation about immigration continued into the 1980s, ultimately leading to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This law offered amnesty to undocumented immigrants who had lived in the United States since 1982, and introduced new penalties for employers who hired undocumented workers.
Meanwhile, the United States upheld its tradition of immigration restrictionism as President Ronald Reagan banned immigrants with AIDS from entering the country in 1987.
In 1990, another immigration law expanded immigration options. Congress incorporated a new Diversity Visa Program, designed to increase immigration from countries with historically low levels of migration to the U.S. Many immigrants arrived from Central America, Asia, and Africa, as the American immigrant population continued to grow. But a subsequent law in 1996 erected and reinforced significant barriers to entry, including strengthened enforcement, expanded grounds for deportation, and—neatly echoing the nation’s original immigration restrictions from 1882—new restrictions on government assistance for immigrants, including food and medical care.
Immigration policy after 9/11
The U.S. immigration landscape again became a hotly debated topic in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Congress responded with the USA PATRIOT Act, which militarized immigration enforcement, federal surveillance efforts, the previously domestic “war on drugs,” and local city-based policing.
Recent developments
President Barack Obama again shifted the country’s immigration policies in 2012, creating protections and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who had been living in the United States since childhood. Called DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program established protections from deportation and permits for legal employment, allowing these immigrants who had stayed in the country for almost their entire lives to more actively, visibly, and safely engage with their communities and with broader American civic life. In 2017, President Donald Trump moved to end the DACA program, a sign of heightened xenophobia during his tenure. He also attempted to ban travel from a list of predominantly Muslim countries, a breach of American law that nonetheless revealed the biases of the Trump administration and its supporters, and imposed draconian restrictions on migrants crossing the southern border to seek asylum. When President Joe Biden came to power in 2021, his administration quickly moved to reverse Trump’s travel ban, restore protection to those in the DACA program, and stop building walls on the border with Mexico. However, Biden also maintained (or even expanded) several of Trump’s most restrictive migration policies, like detention practices and expedited removals , and the deployment of the U.S. military to prevent crossings over the southern border. These policies continue to remain in place, and it remains to be seen how the upcoming November 2024 presidential election will shape the tenor of future immigration policy.
Since its origins in the late 19th century, U.S. immigration policy has reflected a steady parade of broader societal changes, as political priorities, economic conditions, and cultural movements shifted and oscillated both domestically and abroad. The evolving landscape continues to impact millions of immigrants, as well as those who wish to immigrate to the United States. Examining the surrounding debate offers a critical and constantly changing window into the range of American opinions regarding what their country should look like, as immigration policies—and their advocates—continue to shape the demographic, social and cultural fabric of the nation.