US Immigration Policy: Historical Background

US Immigration Policy: Historical Background

To understand the complexities of current immigration policy, a historical background provides useful context. Part One addresses the early years.  Part Two will focus on more contemporary trends and issues.

 Population migrations have been pervasive throughout human history, without which the geographical world map as we know it would not exist.  Various push-pull factors provide a useful explanation of why certain groups leave one area and migrate (or seek to migrate) to another.  An Internet search for “8 of the Greatest Migrations in History” will reap rich rewards.

 The U.S. has drawn in new populations extending back to the colonial area. In the 17^th the 18^th centuries, English immigration dominated, which provided the colonies with the cultural, linguistic, political, and religious values and institutions that became incorporated into the new republic after the American Revolution. Dutch, Scott-Irish, and a smattering of Swedes and Germans also migrated to the American colonies during this period.

 In varying ways, these groups were motivated by the quest for a better life. Such was not the case for others as migration was forced upon several hundred thousand slaves taken from Africa and placed into involuntary labor throughout the southern and northern sections of what became the 13 colonies.  While relatively small compared to the broader Trans-Atlantic slave trade throughout the American hemisphere, by the time of the U.S. Civil War the slave population increased to about four million African Americans located in the U.S. south.  Factoring in the forced migration and decimation of large numbers of Native American people throughout the expanding continental U.S. lands through the 19^th century, immigration has proven anything but an unproblematic matter in the history of this nation.  Hopes and dreams of new life have intermingled with fear, hatred for the unwanted other, and outright racial discrimination and oppression of the undesirable alien within our midst.  Such duality continues to this day. 

 In the mid-19^th century Lutherans and Protestant Pietists from Germany and the Scandinavian countries spread throughout the mid-west, reflecting a blended culture of old and new world identities, depicted so poignantly in Willa Cather’s regional novels, O Pioneers and My Antonia.  While these populations ultimately assimilated into the “American way of life,” such was not the case for more “alien” groups. In the midst of the nation’s quest for “manifest destiny,” large numbers of Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, and Choctaw nation peoples were forced to leave their ancestral homelands in the southeast and to undertake the dangerous 2,000-mile trek known as the Trail of Tears in their relocation to allocated Indian territory in the far west.  This forced act of Indian removal resulted in much suffering from disease and starvation. In an eerie similarity, involuntary internal migration continued unabated through a widespread domestic slave trade, including the unconscionable breakup of families throughout the south.  That, too, is a trend that continues to raise its ugly head today.

 Mid-century European migration grew through a large Irish inflow as a result of a nation-wide potato famine.  The Irish immigration sparked a deep-rooted backlash in response to the dangers posed to the sanctity of the Protestant faith, the Bible, and the American way of life.  The Irish not only brought an “infidel” Catholic religion and the fear of Roman Popery domination.  More, the very image of the Irish drunkard, pushed hard against the temperance ideal, a main plank in what historians refer to as the benevolent evangelical empire by attacking one of its foundational epicenters, the sanctity of the Christian home designed to guard against the temptations of male debauchery brought about by “sin, rum, and Romanism.”

 Meanwhile, the second industrial revolution empowered by the mass factory system, stimulated the immediate need for expanded unskilled labor, which underscored the 30 million immigration wave from eastern and southern Europe from 1870-1920.  Poles, Russians, Italians, Greeks, and Jews brought a sense of otherness to the land, allayed to some degree by the evident need for labor and the expansion of urban life that changed the complexion of idyllic rural and small-town Protestant identity rooted in the various ideals embedded in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy.  While now firmly assimilated into the U.S. mainstream, those threatened by this onslaught portrayed these ethnicities in a disparaging manner comparable to current depictions of those who are “infesting” our country from Latin and South America. 

 Racial similarity with the more traditional groups mitigated sustained oppression of these newer European ethnicities. Such was not the case with the more “alien” others from Asia, as reflected in the 1882 Chinese Exclusionary Act that radically restricted immigration from that country based on an obvious white purity motivation.  This act, made permanent in 1902, was on par with enforced segregation laws against African Americans in the south and the continuing decimation and marginalization of Native Americans in an early 20^th century version of making America great again for white people. 

 The end of this period was accompanied by an Americanization backlash as Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which froze quotas on groups immigrating from southeastern Europe and Catholics and Jews from eastern Europe to 1890 levels.  In an obvious racial motivation, the Act also included a drastic reduction of new immigrants from Asia.  This policy remained intact until the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which abolished the quota system. Part Two will pick up at this point.

2018