Immigrants have long provided labor and skills for America’s
economic development. For nearly 400 years, the “unpeopled” continent of North America attracted Europeans who
sought free land and the opportunity for advancement that
came with it. From the time that settlers arrived in
Jamestown, Virginia, there was more available land than
labor to work it, and even after land became scarce, workers
still found employment in America’s factories and mills. The
nation’s immigration policy, whether written or not, welcomed immigrants with open arms, then closed the door,
and then welcomed them again.
Predominant tendencies allow a loose periodization of
American immigration. Between 1776 and 1880, the United
States welcomed immigrants. Then began a period of reduction lasting from 1880 to World War I. A period of exclusion
was formalized in 1924, and it lasted until 1965, when the
United States once again opened its doors to refugees and
other foreign immigrants.
Indians, Indentures, and Slaves
Early experiments in using the labor of Indians, a potential
workforce numbering in the millions, failed because most of
the native peoples disappeared into the countryside. Those
who did not frequently died from various European diseases,
and war reduced the native population to a small percentage
of their precontact 18 million souls. Another attempt at increasing the labor pool by establishing tenants in a transplanted English manorial system proved unsuccessful because nobody wanted to work for someone else unless faced
with no other choice. Those who lacked the means to get to
the empty land or the tools to break off into the wilderness
had to sign work contracts, or indentures, to get their passage
and a small grubstake at the end of the term, which varied
from four to seven years. But once in America, the indentures
(indentured servants) had a disconcerting habit of heading
off across the mountains into the wilderness. Or they could
blend into the neighborhood of the next colony, with no
questions asked. Indentured servitude brought between
100,000 and 300,000 people to America from 1607 to the
early eighteenth century. By 1800 cheap transatlantic transportation largely ended the practice.
Slavery, a system that provided another source of labor,
flourished in the plantation economy that had arisen after the
Jamestown settlers began cultivating tobacco instead of
searching for gold. About 500,000 individuals were transported to America by the slave trade between 1619 and 1808.
By comparison, the Caribbean had 3 to 4 million, and the
total for the four centuries of the trade equaled around 11
million slaves. By 1750 America had some 200,000 slaves; by
1860 the nation, primarily the South, had more than 3 million. States such as Virginia, whose agricultural economy had
faded compared to the virgin soils of the frontier South, developed a highly profitable slave-breeding business. Slavery
lasted until 1865, fueling the expansion of the cotton and textile industries, establishing the shippers and merchants of
New England and the middle states, and providing the bulk
of the foreign exchange available to the United States for 80
years. Involuntary immigrants made an immeasurable economic impact, and American policy, if not allowing it, at least
tolerated it.
Immigration in the Early National Period
The mass of immigrants in this period came voluntarily in
wave after wave with the ups and downs of the European and
American economies, and they provided the mudsill grunt
labor. They usually rose through the ranks over time or returned home. All of this happened without a great deal of
government involvement. The first immigration law, that of
1790, set a standard two-year residency for naturalization;
Congress replaced the measure in 1795 with a five-year residency requirement. Between 1790 and 1875, Congress enacted only a dozen more immigration laws. By contrast,
twentieth-century Congresses enacted that many immigration laws each decade.
Congress formulated the first American immigration policy for political rather than economic reasons. After the
American Revolution, France experienced an extremely
chaotic period from the beginning of its own revolution in
1789 through the Napoleonic Wars that ended in 1814. Wild
swings in type of government and a great deal of violence
against those with different ideas led to an influx of French
refugees in America, individuals who used the safety of the
United States to agitate for their particular brand of politics.
American political leaders were split between pro-French
(Jeffersonian) and anti-French (Federalist) policies. When
the anti-French were in power, they enacted the Alien and
Sedition Acts, which eased deportation while increasing barriers to citizenship. America’s first immigration policy sought
to repress immigrants who deviated from the official definition of appropriate political ideas for good Americans.
The founding fathers also disagreed on the future structure
of the United States. The Jeffersonian, pro-French faction included mostly small-government agrarians. The anti-French
Federalists supported manufacturing as a means of attaining
self-sufficiency, a need made evident by the economic difficulties arising from the European conflicts between 1789 and
1812. After the War of 1812, Henry Clay introduced his proimmigrant American System, with its internal improvements
that helped attract immigrants to the interior region as farmers. Whether Germans, Scots-Irish, Huguenots, or other, these
people dispersed or set themselves apart; they were mostly
Protestant and similar to the old-stock Americans. The next
wave of immigrants produced more friction than the handful
of French who had just arrived.
The First Great Wave, 1830 to 1860
The first great wave of immigrants included over 4.9 million
individuals. In 1860 some 13.2 percent of the total population
of 31.4 million Americans claimed foreign birth. The 1830s
saw the beginnings of a massive influx of Irish Catholics, who
would build the railroads and populate the cities. As the population of Ireland exploded beyond the capacity of the land in
the early years of the nineteenth century, Irish began to immigrate in large numbers. Ship captains and owners encouraged
the immigration of these people as substitutes for the slaves
they had transported before the slave trade was outlawed in
1808. Federal Passenger Acts in 1819, 1847, and 1855 set standards that made travel more attractive to Northern and Western Europeans. The 1855 act also drew the distinction between permanent and temporary immigrants.
With population pressure already great, the famine in Ireland in the mid-1840s forced a large number of Irish to flee
their homeland. By the 1860s the United States had 2.5 million Catholic Irish, most of whom worked as manual laborers or domestic servants. Beginning in the 1850s, Germans,
whose livelihoods had fallen prey to industrialization, provided another source of labor. Nearly a million of them went
to the United States. And in the old Spanish Southwest, Mexicans arrived to work in agriculture, ranching, and railroad
construction. In an unofficial expression of immigration policy, the American Party (more commonly known as the
Know-Nothing Party) emerged in opposition to the influx of
foreign competition.
Members of the Know-Nothing Party viewed immigrants
and Catholics as threats to the Protestant United States. One
of their goals focused on the exclusion of unassimilable immigrants. But growth, not nativism, remained their main
policy. The Know-Nothings did not desire exclusion except in
the case of the Chinese, whose presence generated the first
laws indicating that, to some Americans at least, economic
growth should not continue if it meant accepting all types of
people into American society. Ethnic difference mattered in
the 1850s.
After the discovery of gold in California, 200,000 Asians,
mainly Chinese, exercised the grand American right of going
where the opportunities existed. They built the transcontinental railroads and provided food, laundry, and other services for the forty-niners, who failed to strike it rich but did
strike against Asian workers. Although the number of Orientals remained small, a good number of people felt there was
something “un-American” about their appearance and about
their ability to work for less than European Americans. The
big difference involved housing, not wages. The smaller quarters offered to Asian workers saved the employer as much as
10 to 20 percent and made Asians more appealing economically. Initially, local and state governments enacted head taxes
on Asians as well as other discriminatory legislation. The
anti-Asian movement culminated in federal legislation. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred
the entry of any Chinese citizens for ten years. Exclusion became permanent in 1904 and remained in effect until the
measure was rescinded in 1943.
The Chinese Exclusion Act became the first immigration
restriction act since the Alien Act passed under the administration of John Adams; a later act, the 1906 Gentlemen’s
Agreement, extended exclusion to the Japanese. Filipinos, as
American colonial subjects, remained exempt from exclusion.
The Great Wave and the New Immigrants, 1880 to 1914
The population of the United States in 1870 totaled 38.5 million, a number that would rise to over 100 million by 1914.
Total immigration between 1860 and 1880 equaled 5.1 million; between 1880 and 1920, immigrants reached a peak of
27.5 million. Foreign-born persons comprised from 13 to 15
percent of the total population of the United States.
During the Civil War, the need for labor kept the military
recruiters active. The United States even advertised in Irish
papers for immigrants to join the war effort to replace dead
or wounded soldiers. The economic boom that occurred
after the war continued to attract immigrants, who helped
build more railroads and farm the plains. During the Gilded
Age, industrialization changed the nature of American work,
eliminating the craftsmanship that had attracted the older
English, Irish, German, and other Northern European immigrants. And those who wanted to farm found their efforts
stymied by the disappearance of cheap arable land, made official by the closing of the frontier with the Census of 1890
and the final land runs in Oklahoma in 1889. The “good immigrants” stopped coming because better opportunity existed elsewhere.
Industrial labor proved mind-numbing, unskilled, and
attractive only to those who intended to finance a better life
in the old country or who had to leave their homelands
under duress. These individuals comprised the new immigrants—Slavs, Southern Europeans, and even some Turks
and Jews.
Americans had encouraged mostly free and open immigration during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
But in the late nineteenth century, that approach slowly
changed. Some of the states began to regulate immigration in
the years after the Civil War. In 1875 the Supreme Court ruled
that regulation of immigration remained the responsibility of
the federal government alone. At the same time, the economy,
especially in agriculture, began to sour. But still the immigrants continued to come. Congress began passing immigration legislation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and laws
on alien contract-labor in 1885 and 1887 prohibited specific
categories of immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1882
levied a head tax of $.50 on each immigrant; it also prohibited immigration of “idiots,”“lunatics,” convicts, and persons
likely to become public charges. Additional restrictive legislation in 1891, 1903, and 1907 barred entry to other so-called
undesirable classes, including prostitutes, polygamists, carriers of infectious diseases, and individuals who espoused unpopular ideas.
As one source of people dwindled, others flourished. But
instead of people from Anglo-Saxon stock (and the Irish fell
within this category by that time), these immigrants included
Jews in flight from the horrors of Russian and other Eastern
European persecution. Italians came after their livelihoods
failed due to overpopulation, industrialization, and a general
need to escape the problems of their homeland and test the
land of opportunity. Similarly, economic, political, and social
dislocation brought masses of Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and
Slavs. Indeed, 13 million of these people arrived between
around 1900 and 1913, with their peak year being 1907 when
1.28 million immigrated. Between 1890 and 1914, nearly 4
million Italians migrated to the United States, some to stay
and many to return home but all to impact the American
economy and society.
In 1891 Congress established an immigration service that
operated under the Department of the Treasury. The federal
government began the task of processing the millions who
migrated to the United States. Ellis Island, which processed
22 million people between 1892 and 1924, became the most
important of the immigration stations. Aside from the inspection, detention, and hearing and administrative areas,
the facility also housed hospitals, cafeterias, ticket offices,
and space for the many immigrant aid societies. Of the 180
immigration service employees in 1893, 119 worked at Ellis
Island.
Unlike the earlier immigrants who disappeared into the
wide-open spaces and dispersed more broadly into inconspicuousness, the new immigrants swelled the ranks of the
cities. Factories offered new opportunity, but immigrants remained restricted economically to the ghettos. Thus, these
new immigrants were highly visible and very different, and
their arrival resulted in a renewed nativism, the Red Scare,
and the restrictions of the 1920s.
Exclusion, 1914 to 1965
In the aftermath of World War I, the combined effects of nativist restrictions, the Great Depression, and a second world
war reduced annual immigration to an average of less than
100,000. As overall population rose 50 percent to 150 million
in 1950, the percentage of foreign-born individuals declined
to 6.9 percent.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
the United States fell under the influence of Social Darwinism, also known as “the white man’s burden”—the distorted
version of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. According
to Social Darwinism, humanity consisted of various races,
with the Nordic race superior and all others ranked in descending order by degree of inferiority. The new immigrants
ranked low on the scale.
Between 1907 and 1910, the Dillingham Commission examined the rampant immigration of the previous few
decades. Its report reiterated the alleged inferiority of the new
immigrants and recommended a slowdown in the number of
immigrants the United States would accept. The new immigrants needed time to acculturate, and the United States
needed time to Americanize them. Congress attempted to
pass restrictive legislation several times up to 1915, but Presidents William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson vetoed
each attempt. However, the pressure became too great with
the onset of the Americanization movement and the distraction of the Great War. The Immigration Act of 1917 required
a literacy test for all immigrants over 16 years of age, expanded coverage of the Gentlemen’s Agreement to almost totally stop immigration from Asia by creating the “Asiatic
Barred Zone,” and introduced the concept of guests, who
were allowed short visits to the United States but were not allowed to remain in the country.
World War I greatly reduced immigration and heated up
the economy. The conflict, along with the Red Scare of 1919,
led to the final closure of the open immigration policy. During World War I, the Creel Committee, along with various hyperpatriotic private organizations, placed intense pressure on
those who displayed less than 100 percent loyalty to and zeal
for America. Rabid patriots forced Germans to Americanize
their names and habits. Congress passed legislation strongly
reminiscent of the Alien and Sedition Acts of a century earlier. The antiforeigner fervor went unchecked and unshaken
by the sudden end of the war. And fueled by the Russian Revolution and then the Bolshevik betrayal, the anti-immigrant
sentiment grew through 1919.
In 1918, with hysteria and Americanism running wild and
Wilson’s government failing in leadership, the wartime economy shifted without plan and almost overnight. The helterskelter demobilization and the too-rapid end of government
controls over industry led to massive unemployment and a
recession. Organized labor struck; black veterans refused to
return to mudsill status. Frustrated patriots reacted with
anger against nontraditional groups such as Russian Jews,
and socialists and the radical labor organizations that immigrants often dominated. Older, established American labor
groups and earlier immigrants frequently found themselves
included among these so-called undesirables. During this
time, lynching, murder, riots, and suppression through violence and intimidation occurred. Immigrants became victims
of government, too: Several hundred were deported with
only minimal due process in 1919.
During the isolationist and disillusioned 1920s, Congress
acted. Decades of Social Darwinism, general racism, and nativism culminated in two major laws that severely restricted
immigration and attempted to reestablish the old immigrants at the expense of the new. The 1921 Quota Act (Johnson Act) established the first American immigration quotas.
The act limited immigration to a number equal to 3 percent
of the total number foreign-born residents of a given nationality in the 1910 census. Immigration from the Western
Hemisphere remained unrestricted. The 1924 Immigration
Act (Johnson-Reid Act) limited Eastern Hemisphere immigration to 154,227 individuals per year. Within this limit,
Congress based the quota for each country on its U.S. population as of the 1920 census. As a result of these laws and easier immigration elsewhere, immigration fell from 800,000 in
1921 to less than 150,000 in 1929. By 1933, with the Great Depression in full force, America attracted only 23,000 immigrants from the entire world. As a result of the laws enacted
in the 1920s, individuals from countries that encouraged immigration did not face restrictive quotas and people whose
countries had quotas did not desire to emigrate to the United
States. The depression finished the work the restrictionists
had begun 40 years earlier.
The restrictions of the 1920s had an unfortunate effect before and during World War II. Some refugees fled to the
United States—but not as many as might have come from
among the millions affected by the racism and barbarism of
the fascist regimes and the war. America still had a strong undercurrent of anti-Semitism in this period, and organized
fascist and Nazi parties formed. The restrictions set into place
in the 1920s meant that no adequate quota for the millions of
persecuted Jews, Gypsies, and other dislocates existed. Yet
America made room for approximately 100 German and
Austrian physicists between 1932 and 1945. Five refugees—
Peter Debye, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, James Franck,
and Victor F. Hess—had won Nobel Prizes before they arrived in the United States. In addition, Hans A. Bethe, Felix
Bloch, Emilio G. Segre, Otto Stern, Eugene P. Wigner, and
Maria Mayer earned Nobel Prizes while living in America.
These immigrants proved vital to the nation’s atomic
weapons program.
As American men and women joined the military in
World War II, the jobs they left behind went to women and
African Americans previously excluded from the labor force.
The Bracero program, which brought Mexican workers into
the American Southwest, provided an additional source of
labor. Mexican workers had long served as field hands, miners, railroad workers, and in light industry, with 55,000 Mexicans immigrating to the United States between 1850 and
1880. In the ensuing decade, the construction of a railway between the United States and Mexico employed a labor force
in which up to 60 percent of the workers were Mexicans. Beginning in 1916, Mexico’s economy declined after the Mexican Revolution. World War I drew unemployed Mexican
workers into industry, trades, and service work within the
United States, but American business exploited Mexican immigrants, leading Mexico’s president, Venustiano Carranza,
to establish terms in 1920 by which Mexican workers could
help American farmers and ranchers. Accordingly, immigrants had the right to have their families with them, but they
had to have contracts before crossing the border; the contracts defined pay, work schedule, location of the work, and
other conditions. In effect, the contracts served as the prototype for the Bracero program.
Meanwhile, in 1924, the United States created the Border
Patrol and defined undocumented workers as illegal aliens.
When the depression hit, American employers did not want
Mexican workers. The United States denied visas to Mexicans
without proven employment and deported those they found
illegally residing in the United States. But the depression gave
way to the war, and the demand for labor rose again. In 1942
the United States and Mexico signed the Bracero Treaty, and
between 1942 and 1964, 4 million Mexicans entered the
United States as contract ranch and agricultural workers and
as industrial laborers. At the conclusion of the war, the demand ended. Employers removed Mexicans, African Americans, and women from the better-paying sectors of the economy. After the war, the mechanization of farming and
increased immigration saturated the agricultural labor market. Although made permanent by law in 1951, the Bracero
program ended in 1964. The Border Patrol enforced immigration restrictions under a program known as Operation
Wetback.
The McCarran-Walter Act, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, became law over the veto of
President Harry S Truman. It retained the national origins
quotas of the 1920s and the annual ceiling of 154,277 immigrants. It also repealed the anti-Asian laws and allowed 100
visas for each Asian country, and it established a preference
within the national quotas for relatives and skilled workers.
Latin American and Caribbean immigrants remained exempt from the quotas.
The Recent Immigrants—Refugees, Asylum-Seekers,
Legal or Illegal, 1965 to the Present
By 1970 the American population passed 200 million and the
percentage of foreign-born residents fell to an all-time low of
4.7 percent. Once immigration was liberalized after 1965,
legal and illegal immigration led to a doubling of the percentage of foreign-born residents, to over 10 percent by the
end of the century.
The mid-1960s brought concern that the United States
would lose the cold war race to attract highly intelligent professionals. The solution called for bringing in people with education and technical skills through the Immigration Reform
and Control Act of 1965 (IRCA). To liberals and President
John F. Kennedy, immigration quotas remained unfair, disadvantaging some groups (such as the Irish who wanted greater
access to American visas) while other groups (such as the
English) failed to use their allotted number of visas. Meanwhile, the fight over civil rights dominated the public agenda,
and that meant agitation for the equal treatment of immigrants as well. Officials favored the immigration of talented
and meritorious individuals regardless of country of origin.
Reform dictated expanding the 1952 law by increasing the
in-migration of relatives and skilled individuals. The humane
impulse and the economic impulse both led in the same direction because the reformers assumed that the new immigrants would come from the same places as earlier immigrants had, albeit in different proportions. And the
descendents of the old new immigrants thought their native
lands would also benefit by Congress overturning the exclusions of the 1920s. They did not see that the United States no
longer acted as an economic magnet, as both Northern and
Southern Europe prospered in the 1960s. Instead, the 1965
law attracted a set of new immigrants, non-European in origin. The influx of Asian and Central American immigrants
renewed the anti-immigrant feeling of the old, settled Americans, even among third-generation new immigrants. In fact,
the demand far exceeded the available number of visas, and
Congress began passing special refugee legislation periodically. Not until the Refugee Act of 1980 did the United States
have a policy on the admission of refugees.
European immigration did not disappear, but the largest
numbers of immigrants were now from Latin America,
Africa, and Asia. As had others throughout American history,
they left homelands plagued with economic, social, and political dislocation. And as they could manage it, they brought
members of their extended families. During the ten years
after the IRCA, European immigration dropped 38 percent
while Asian immigration rose by 663 percent. Overall, 60 percent more immigrants entered the United States. Simultaneously, legal Latin American immigration continued to accelerate. In 1976 Congress established quotas for Latin America,
and ten years later it began penalizing employers who hired
illegal aliens but at the same time amnestied illegal aliens residing in the United States since before 1982. And from 1980
on, Congress persisted in broadening the definition of a
refugee, increasing the number who qualified and entered the
United States. This policy became a problem because refugees
more often than not lacked economic assets or cultural tools.
For instance, Cubans fled Fidel Castro’s regime after the
revolution in 1958. In the initial wave, from 1959 to 1962, the
Cuban refugees were anti-Castro leaders with education,
skills, and resources. Those in the second wave still came
from the middle class and arrived between 1965 and 1973.
The third wave, made up of the Mariel boatpeople of 1980,
appeared to many Americans as the dregs of Cuban society—prisoners and drug abusers, many of whom were black.
Because the Marielitos tended to seek residence in the older
Cuban communities, especially in Miami, they provoked
conflict and hardship. Some Americans questioned the policy of having an open door for refugees from communist
regimes.
With Cubans disturbing America’s tranquility, along came
the Haitians. Because the Haitian government remained a
friend of the United States, immigration officials almost always denied Haitians asylum. U.S. policy assumed that
refugees from communist countries were fleeing repression,
whereas refugees from noncommunist allies were classified as
economic immigrants. And economic immigrants were subject to quotas: The rejection rate neared 99 percent. Those
who got in, most of whom were black and from lower-class
backgrounds, crowded in close proximity to the Marielitos
and previously established Haitians. They often placed a
drain on the social and economic resources of the places
where they settled.
The Vietnamese arrived next. The first wave, composed of
those who arrived after the 1973 collapse of Saigon, had resources and a cultural affinity for America. People in the next
wave possessed less of both. The final wave included the boatpeople. Problems in the U.S. economy, nose-diving from the
oil crisis of 1973, created economic friction that affected even
those in the second wave. Hard-working and ambitious, these
immigrants conflicted with the Louisiana and Texas gulf
communities in 1975. Americans suffered from stagflation.
Living expenses rose rapidly, wages remained stagnant, and
trawlers overfished the Gulf of Mexico. Into this economic
malaise came the Vietnamese. They were “different,” they
overfished and undercut, and they had government assistance. Some Americans became increasingly upset that their
government continued to help their competition, the Vietnamese and the Cubans, who seemed too alien to them in the
first place.
The situation continued to worsen. For instance, some
Americans felt that the Hmong, who came from Laos in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, appeared markedly different and
would require a long time to assimilate. These Americans
noted that the Hmong had had a written language for only a
generation; their illiteracy rate remained high; their culture
was nonindustrial and Oriental; and they seemingly did not
have the skills to make the transition but were able to get onto
welfare. Then they clustered together and practiced their
strange customs and their animistic religion (animism). Even
their food seemed odd.
Colombians, Salvadorans, and others who sought sanctuary from right-wing political regimes seemed less conspicuous and controversial. Their cultural and economic values
tended to be similar to those of the surrounding communities, and they fit in nicely—when they could get in. Others,
such as the new Irish, felt fully at home within the industrial
West but often ended up in the underground economy, frustrated by the insufficient numbers of visas needed for them to
become legal, mainstream, fully employed workers utilizing
their education, skills, and talents. And the illegal aliens continued to cross the 2,000-mile-long border between poverty
and opportunity. They came from Latin America and Mexico
at a rate of 250,000 to 750,000 per year. They located first in
California, Texas, and the Southwest, finding work as cheap
labor and, some said, placing a burden on social services.
Then they moved to the midwestern cities, medium and
large. By the early years of the twenty-first century, evidence
indicated that Europeans, Asians, and Africans as well as
Latin Americans all used the southern route of entry.
Immigration restriction proved a hopeless policy. De-
mand did not falter, and the process did not improve despite
amnesties in 1982, 1986, and the late 1990s. Among his first
actions as president, George W. Bush proposed legalizing the
3 million illegal Mexicans already in the United States in
2001. Yet, as some saw it, amnesties did nothing more than legitimate huge numbers of illegal aliens. And the volume of illegal aliens did not seem to decrease. The continuing failure
of policy and the accommodation of illegality increasingly
outraged those who felt that the United States already had a
sufficient number of tired, poor, and huddled masses.
In the 1980s the first major, widespread backlash occurred. Broader than the Texas and Louisiana friction of the
1970s but based again in a time of economic downturn, this
effort took several forms. Supporters of the English-only
movement wanted to require English as the official language
of government and business. The movement failed to achieve
the passage of legislation, which caused some people to lose
interest until the issue reemerged later.
In California and many other places, the problems of
American society were obvious: crime, moral decay, increased income disparities, racial conflict, and a general
malaise and cynicism. California set the pace for immigration
restrictions and reforms, and the federal government
changed the Immigration and Naturalization Service and immigration laws once again. Meanwhile, on one hand, some
Californians fought to eliminate bilingual education, welfare
for illegal aliens, social services, and what they perceived as
the unfair tax burden they had to assume to support illegal
residents who seemed to steal their jobs. Pro-immigrationists, on the other hand, managed to forestall the most
drastic changes that would have adversely affected immigrants, arguing that the immigrants filled the low-end jobs
and moved quickly out of social services to self-sufficiency: In
fact, they rapidly brought more resources to California. Although reformers demanded change and supporters of
change argued the economic benefits of either leaving the
issue of reform alone or opening it up, Congress passed, on
an average, one new reform law each year through the 1990s.
Illegal or legal, the immigrants still had a role in the American economy. They no longer built the railroads, but they
replicated the patterns of the late nineteenth century. They
moved into neighborhoods that were badly decayed. In New
York City they helped to revitalize burned out neighborhoods in the south Bronx and east Brooklyn. Minorityowned businesses in New York grew between 1987 and 1992,
with black businesses rising from 17,400 to almost 36,000;
Hispanic from 10,000 to over 34,000; and Asian from 27,000
to 46,000. Ninety percent of those businesses belonged to immigrants. They did not open manufacturing businesses already in a long decline. Rather, the emphasis remained on
service businesses—delivery services, phone parlors, remittance shops, and import/export firms. Immigrants worked as
day laborers and contractors—the dirty, low-profit, low-end
counterparts to the stoop labor of the migrants who harvested the Southwest and the Midwest. Koreans ran grocery
stores. Russians, then Haitians, then Pakistanis, and then
Ethiopians, Dominicans, and Nigerians drove taxis. They
even filled the niches, running jitneys after hours or in neighborhoods where the licensed cabs would not run. The multiplier of these tiny businesses came in the multishift operation, the gasoline and tires, and the ability of the stranded and
unemployed to get out of the neighborhoods and move to
where the jobs were. Entrepreneurial immigrants are also
consumers of housing, transportation, and services.
Concern grew that illegal aliens would become an increasing problem because American immigration policy did not
match the economic needs of the country; this concern produced a strong restrictionist movement late in the twentieth
century. Although supporters of the movement were vocal,
they failed to move policy, which remained an inconsistent
hodgepodge of enforcement, amnesty, and other flip-flop
measures.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform
(FAIR), established in 1979, was the first of the restrictionist
organizations; in the late 1990s, it had approximately 70,000
members. Restrictionists also founded the Carrying Capacity
Network, Californians for Population Stabilization,
Population-Environment Balance, and American Immigration Control Foundation. Groups of this sort did not espouse
nativism. Their concerns were social and environmental.
They pointed to problems of assimilation and the shortage of
land or jobs. And they cited pollution as a consequence of
overcrowding. As did all, they noted how poorly the Immigration and Naturalization Service operated and how porous
America’s borders were, giving easy access to criminals and
terrorists. FAIR cited an estimated cost for post-1969 immigrants of $65 billion in 1996 and noted that other estimates
reached upward of $80 billion. The group projected enforcement costs beyond $100 billion by 2006. The ten-year total
equaled $866 billion. Limited restrictionist success came in
the 1990s, as in 1996 when Congress increased funding for
the Border Patrol, tightened asylum rules, and increased the
deportation of undesirables. Most notably, welfare reform
took food stamps and disability payments from immigrants.
Although state and federal governments restored some welfare benefits for pre-1996 immigrants, the U.S. Supreme
Court upheld the welfare restriction laws in 2000.
Congress modified the rules in 1965, 1976, 1978, 1980,
1986, and 1990, each time enlarging the numbers of immigrants eligible to enter the United States. The 1976 Amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act extended the
preference system to all Western Hemisphere countries and
established a ceiling of 20,000 immigrants from any one
country. The 1978 amendments combined the Eastern and
Western Hemisphere ceilings to a single worldwide quota of
290,000. The 1980 Refugee Act set a separate policy for
refugees, eliminated the previous emphasis on anticommunism, set a refugee target of 50,000, and reduced the worldwide ceiling to 270,000.
The 1981 “Report of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy” recommended stopping illegal immigration and called for a clearly defined, fair immigration
policy and an efficient organization to carry it out. The 1986
Immigration Reform and Control Act provided amnesty
and temporary status to all illegal aliens who had lived in the
United States continuously since before January 1, 1982; it
400 Immigration Policy
Table 1 Nativity of the population and place of birth of the native population, 1850 to 1990
Native population
Born abroad
Total Born in the In outlying Of American Foreign-born
Year* population Total United States Total areas† parents population
Number
1990‡ 248,709,873 228,942,557 225,695,826 3,246,731 1,382,446 1,864,285 19,767,316
1980‡ 226,545,805 212,465,899 210,322,697 2,143,202 1,088,172 1,055,030 14,079,906
1970ठ203,210,158 193,590,856 191,329,489 2,261,367 891,266 1,370,101 9,619,302
1960‡* 179,325,671 169,587,580 168,525,645 1,061,935 660,425 401,510 9,738,091
1950‡ 150,216,110 139,868,715 139,442,390 426,325 329,970 96,355 10,347,395
1940 131,669,275 120,074,379 119,795,254 279,125 156,956 122,169 11,594,896
1930 122,775,046 108,570,897 108,304,188 266,709 136,032 130,677 14,204,149
1920 105,710,620 91,789,928 91,659,045 130,883 38,020 92,863 13,920,692
1910 91,972,266 78,456,380 78,381,104 75,276 7,365 67,911 13,515,886
1900 75,994,575 65,653,299 65,583,225 70,074 2,923 67,151 10,341,276
1890* 62,622,250 53,372,703 53,362,371 10,332 322 10,010 9,249,547
1880 50,155,783 43,475,840 43,475,498 342 51 291 6,679,943
1870 38,558,371 32,991,142 32,990,922 220 51 169 5,567,229
1860** 31,443,321 27,304,624 27,304,624 —†† — — 4,138,697
1850** 23,191,876 20,947,274 20,947,274 — — — 2,244,602
Percent Distribution
1990‡ 100.0 92.1 90.7 1.3 0.6 0.7 7.9
1980‡ 100.0 93.8 92.8 0.9 0.5 0.5 6.2
1970ठ100.0 95.3 94.2 1.1 0.4 0.7 4.7
1960‡* 100.0 94.6 94.0 0.6 0.4 0.2 5.4
1950‡ 100.0 93.1 92.8 0.3 0.2 0.1 6.9
1940 100.0 91.2 91.0 0.2 0.1 0.1 8.8
1930 100.0 88.4 88.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 11.6
1920 100.0 86.8 86.7 0.1 — 0.1 13.2
1910 100.0 85.3 85.2 0.1 — 0.1 14.7
1900 100.0 86.4 86.3 0.1 — 0.1 13.6
1890* 100.0 85.2 85.2 — — — 14.8
1880 100.0 86.7 86.7 — — — 13.3
1870 100.0 85.6 85.6 — — — 14.4
1860** 100.0 86.8 86.8 — — — 13.2
1850** 100.0 90.3 90.3 — — — 9.7
* Starting in 1960, includes population of Alaska and Hawaii. For 1890, excludes population enumerated in the Indian Territory and on
Indian reservations, for whom information on most topics, including nativity, was not collected.
† Puerto Rico is the only outlying area for which the number has ever exceeded 100,000.The numbers for Puerto Rico are: 1,190,533
in 1990; 1,002,863 in 1980; 810,087 in 1970; 617,056 in 1960; 226,010 in 1950; 69,967 in 1940; 52,774 in 1930; 11,811 in 1920; 1,513
in 1910; and 678 in 1900.
‡ Indicates sample data.
§ The data shown in Table 1 are based on the 15 percent sample. For 1970, data based on the 5 percent sample show total population
as 203,193,774, native population as 193,590,856, born in the United States as 191,836,655, born abroad as 1,617,396, in outlying
areas as 873,241, of American parents as 744,155, and foreign-born population as 9,739,723.
** In 1850 and 1860, information on nativity was not collected for slaves.The data in the table assume, as was done in 1870 census
reports, that all slaves in 1850 and 1860 were native. Of the total black population of 4,880,009 in 1870, 9,645, or 0.2 percent, were
foreign-born (1870 Census, vol. I, Dubester #45,Table 22, pp. 606–615).
†† Dash represents zero or rounds to zero.
extended a more lenient amnesty to farmworkers and provided sanctions for employers of illegal aliens.
In the 1990s the Diversity Lottery (through which 55,000
permanent resident visas are given per year on a lottery basis
for people around the world) specifically targeted the underrepresented, including Africans. This step led to an influx of
immigrants from countries that had previously been underrepresented in American society, though the number was still
minuscule compared with the number of illegal Hispanics.
The total for the entire history of African immigration
amounts to less than the number of illegal aliens in a single
year. But the Africans began moving to St. Paul, Minnesota,
and other cities and making the same positive contributions
and creating the same dislocations of welfare and culture that
other immigrants had.
By 1990 the government began to cave in to pressures for
change. The 1990 Immigration Act (IMMACT) increased the
total number of visas approved annually to 700,000 and
bumped up the number of available visas by 40 percent. The
act kept the family reunion provision while doubling employment immigration. It also encouraged increased immigration from underrepresented areas to enhance diversity. Individuals seeking asylum also benefited as the law became
more liberal almost every year in the 1990s.
As rules tightened and loosened, as funding fluctuated, as
enforcement waxed and waned, the immigrants continued to
come (see Table 1). The 1930s total was only 528,000. World
War II brought just 120,000. But by the 1970s one year’s immigration almost exceeded the two-decade total. By 1978 the
annual legal number hit 600,000, which was the average for
each year of the 1980s. The 1990s averaged a million per year,
and the total of that decade remains the greatest of any
decade in American history. On top of the legal millions, another 275,000 to 500,000 illegal aliens enter the United States
annually.
America became more diverse after 1970. From 1970 to
1996, the percentage of nonnative-born residents rose from
4.8 percent to 9.3 percent. And America’s immigrants—
whether legal or illegal, refugees or asylum-seekers—were the
world’s migrants, not just those of Europe.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, immigration has become more difficult. The Customs Service, now
part of the Department of Homeland Security, has received
additional resources to prevent illegal immigration across
U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico. In addition, a proposed amnesty for illegal immigrants who have lived in the
United States for more than five years is no longer being considered in Congress.
—John Barnhill