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2. What the immigration processing system was like (pp. 61 -
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Getting out of Europe - Reaction from the community
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The Journey out of Europe and Mexico
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Passports and Medical Exams
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Immigration becomes Big Business
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The Inspection Routine - avoiding disease
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Conditions on the ships
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Seeing America for the first time
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Immigration Processing
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Castle Garden, NYC
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Laws on immigration
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Concern for health - inspections
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- grounds for exclusion
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Mexico
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Ellis Island - 1892
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Food served at Ellis and Angel Islands
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Health Inspections
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Jewish support societies
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INTRODUCTION:
A SHORT HISTORY OF IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED
STATES
H
ow important has immigration
been in American history? One
leading historian of immigration,
Harvard's Oscar Handlin, wrote in 1951,
"Once I thought to write a history of the
immigrants in America. Then I discovered
that the immigrants were American history."
Of course, Handlin was clearly exag-
gerating, but he was not exaggerating by
very much. What he meant, at a time
when the history of immigration was not
highly thought of, was that it is not possi-
ble to understand American history with-
out understanding America's immigrants.
Except for some 2 million American
Indians, immigration in the past four cen-
turies has been responsible for the pres-
9. ence of the more than a quarter of a bil-
lion people who now populate the United
States. Immigrants and their descendants
are the authors of American diversity, of
what can be called the American mosaic.
They have created a culture that, despite
its largely European roots, is clearly not
European, any more than it is African,
or Amerindian, or Asian, or Caribbean,
or Latino. Americans are, as the French
sojourner Michel-Guillaume Jean de
Crevecoeur noted in 1782, new persons,
who, over time, have been transformed
by their new environment and ever
changing heredity. It is impossible to
imagine what America would be like if no
immigrants had come; nor is it possible to
imagine what it would have been like had
only Europeans come, or only British, and
so forth. The American people are a
product of what they have been, and
where they have come from, as well as of
what has happened to them in the United
States. When nativists—opponents of
immigration—rant and rave about the
dangers of being overrun by immigrants,
or about losing control of our borders, or
complain that immigrants and some of
their children do not speak English well,
they are denying the validity of an essen-
tial and enhancing part of the American
An 1 898 Judge magazine cover portrays immi-
grants as a source of strength. The left eye refers
to the annexation of Hawaii, which took place
earlier that year.
10. experience. They are denying the vitaliza-
tion that has come from the constant
enrichment and reenforcement of Ameri-
can society by the muscles, brains, and
hearts that every generation of immi-
grants has brought with them to America.
The history of immigration to the Unit-
ed States can be divided most conveniently
into four distinct periods: the formative era,
up to 1815; the so-called "long" 19th cen-
tury stretching from 1815 to 1924; the era
of restriction, 1924-1965; the era of
renewed immigration, since 1965.
The Formative Period (1565-1815)
During the formative period, which begins
with the settlement of St. Augustine, Flori-
da, by Spanish in 1565 and ends with the
conclusion of a series of wars between
Britain and France in which Americans
took part, the overwhelming majority of
7
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
immigrants came either from the British
Isles or from Africa. We must remember,
however, that the first permanent Euro-
pean settlements in what is now the United
States were made by Spanish people at St.
14. Augustine and in New Mexico in 1598,
and that immigrants from other European
countries, particularly France and Ger-
many, were in almost every colony. Of the
roughly 1 million people who came in this
period, more than half were not free. All of
the 350,000 Africans came in chains, and
perhaps half of the 650,000 Europeans
were indentured servants or convicts.
Most of the British who came were
from England, and most of them were
from the southern part of England. Smaller
but still substantial numbers of Scots and
Irish came, as did a yet smaller number of
Welsh. Even in modern times, immigration
statistics are often incomplete or unreli-
able, and they were less reliable in the 17th
and 18th centuries. The most useful esti-
mates come from the first United States
census, taken in 1790, which found some
3.15 million white Americans and 750,000
African Americans. The 1790 census did
not count most Native Americans, and the
census takers did not try to do so until
1880. Scholars have analyzed the informa-
tion contained in that first census and tried
to estimate the number and percentage of
the population represented by each ethnic
group. The vast majority of the 3.9 million
Americans had been born in what became
the United States, as there had been rela-
tively little immigration between the begin-
nings of the American Revolution in the
mid-1770s and 1790.
15. The distribution of the members of the
different ethnic groups was uneven. Most of
the German Americans lived in Pennsylva-
nia, where they were about one-third of the
population. Similarly, most of the Dutch
were in New York and adjoining states. By
region, New England was the most heavily
English, while the South was home to most
African Americans, who, in some districts,
Estimated Non-Native
American Population in 1790
English
African. American
Irish
Germans
Scots
Dutch
French
Miscellaneous and
unassignftd
6.5%
2,5%
9,7%
Amedcan His|0iieal Association, Annual
outnumbered whites. This clustering of eth-
nic groups in certain regions and smaller
areas, called enclaves or neighborhoods, is
typical of the immigrant experience every-
where in the modern world.
16. The United States Constitution,
which went into effect in 1789, required
that a census be taken every 10 years, but
it said very little about immigration: in
fact, the word immigration does not
appear anywhere in the document. But
the founding fathers clearly foresaw and
encouraged continued immigration, as
three separate provisions testify. In Article
1, Section 8, Congress was told to "estab-
lish a uniform Rule of Naturalization."
The following section provided that Con-
gress could not interfere with the African
slave trade before 1808, and Article 2,
Section 1 provided that the President—
and by extension the Vice President—
must be "a natural born Citizen." This
left immigrants eligible for all other
offices under the Constitution. From the
beginning of the United States immigrants
have filled these offices, serving in Con-
gress, in the cabinet, and on the Supreme
Court. For example, the first secretary of
the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, was an
immigrant from the island of Nevis in the
West Indies and Madeline Albright, Secre-
tary of State under Bill Clinton, was an
immigrant from Czechoslovakia.
8
49%
16%
7.6%
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I N T R O D U C T I O N *
In the second year of the American
republic, 1790, Congress passed a natural-
ization statute that provided for the natu-
ralization of "free white persons." The
law was intended to exclude Africans and
indentured servants: later interpretation by
the Supreme Court expanded the ban to
include Asians, but for much of the 19th
century some Chinese and Japanese were
naturalized. In 1798, Congress passed the
short-lived Aliens Act, which threatened to
deport aliens who were involved in poli-
tics, but no one was deported.
Only two other laws passed in the first
half of the 19th century affected immigra-
tion. In 1808, at the first legal opportunity,
Congress abolished the slave trade but not
slavery, and in 1819 it ordered that incom-
ing immigrants be counted, but not those
leaving the United States.
The "Long" 19th Century (1815-1924)
Historians sometimes define centuries not
by the calendar, but by events: for Ameri-
21. can immigration two events define the
19th century more effectively than do the
"normal" dates, 1801-1900. The first
date, 1815, marks the end of a series of
wars between Britain and France and our
War of 1812 with Britain. The end of the
fighting signaled a renewal of immigration.
The second, 1924, denotes the enactment
of a "permanent" restrictive immigration
law by the United States. During that
"long" 19th century, more than 36 million
people immigrated to the United States.
This is an absolute majority of all the
immigrants who have ever come. The
table on the right shows, by decade, how
many came after 1819 and the rate of
immigration in relation to the total U.S.
population.
The mere numbers of immigrants do
not tell the whole story. In the earlier part
of the "long" century of immigration, the
relative impact of immigration was higher
than the table on the left seems to indi-
cate because the population was much
smaller. The table below shows the rate of
immigration per thousand pre-existing
inhabitants. Thus, for example, the rate
for the 1850s is much higher than for the
1890s even though 42 percent more peo-
ple came in the latter period. Immigration
was discouraged in the 1860s by the Civil
War and in the 1870s and 1890s by hard
times in the United States.
22. This mass immigration was dominated
by Europeans, and, to a lesser degree, the
descendants of European immigrants com-
ing from Canada. It also marked the begin-
nings of large-scale immigration from Asia,
largely of Chinese and Japanese. Historians
now believe that even though the interna-
tional slave trade had been outlawed by
Congress in 1808, perhaps 50,000 illegal
slaves were brought into the United States
between then and 1865, mostly from
Caribbean islands. Toward the end of the
19th century, free Afro-Caribbeans began
to come to the United States.
In the years before the Civil War
(1861-65), immigration was dominated by
Irish and Germans. Even before the dreadful
1820-1924 Immigration
Immigration to the
United States
Rate of Immigration
per Thousand
of U.S. Population
1820-30 ,.-"..... 151,824 1.2
1831-40 . . . . . » . 599,125 .. 3.9
1841-50,..... 1,713,251 . .. 8.4
1851-60...... 2,598,214 .., 9.3
1861-70...... 2,314,824 .6.4
1871-80...... 2,812,191 6.2
1881-90,..... 5,246,613 ........... 9.2
23. 1891-1900.... 3,687,564 5.3
19QMO...... 8,795,386 .......... 10.4
1911-20...,-., 5,735,811 .. 5,7
1921-24...... 2^44,599 5.3
TOTAL...... 35,999,402
U.S. Bureau ol the Ceimis
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10
I N T R O D U C T I O N *
A German-language map from 1853 indicates routes used by
German and other European immi-
grants coming to the United States in the 19th century.
potato famine of the 1840s, large numbers
of Irish—mostly poor male laborers—
came, and heavy Irish immigration of all
kinds continued throughout the century,
during which a total of 4.5 million Irish
came. Almost all the Irish were Roman
Catholics and most settled close to the
northern Atlantic seaboard, particularly
in New England.
Even more Germans—almost 6 mil-
lion—came in the same period. No dread-
ful event pushed Germans out of Europe,
and few were as poor as many of the Irish.
Many Germans settled in eastern cities
27. between New York and Baltimore but
even more went to interior cities and
farms, particularly in the so-called "Ger-
man triangle," the area bounded by
Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.
Most German immigrants were Protes-
tants, but there was a sizable Roman
Catholic minority and a smaller but sub-
stantial Jewish one.
Two other groups, Scandinavians and
Chinese, began their mass migration
before the Civil War. More than 2 million
Scandinavians—Swedes, Norwegians, and
Danes—came during the century. There
were more than a million Swedes,
700,000 Norwegians, and 300,000
Danes. This was largely a migration of
families, of whom an overwhelming
majority settled in the upper Middle
West, particularly in Nebraska, Iowa,Co
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I N T R O D U C T I O N *
Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Most were
farmers and practiced Protestant religions,
chiefly variants of Lutheranism.
A smaller number of Chinese, per-
haps 350,000, were the first large group
of immigrants to cross the Pacific. They
were, at first, chiefly gold miners and rail-
31. road workers in California and other
western states and territories, and all but
a few were single males who practiced
Buddhism or Taoism. For both economic
and cultural reasons they suffered from
severe discrimination in both custom and
law: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
stopped the further immigration of Chi-
nese laborers. This law began the system-
atic restriction of voluntary immigrants.
Before 1882 there was no effective restric-
tive immigration legislation. Anyone not a
slave who reached American shores or
crossed a land border could enter legally.
After the Civil War
the pace of migration
increased, and,
although British, Irish,
German and Scandina-
vian immigrants contin-
ued to come from
Europe, they were soon
outnumbered by eastern
and southern Euro-
peans—Poles, eastern
European Jews, Italians,
southern Slavs and
Greeks. The migration
of these latter groups
was aided by the
improvement of Euro-
pean steamship lines
and railroads. European
shipping companies,
such as the Cunard
32. Line, based in Liver-
pool, England, and the
German-based Ham-
burg-Amerika and
North German Lloyd lines, built special
ships for the immigrant trade and coordi-
An advertisement from about
1872 shows how Minnesota,
like California and other
states, competed for immi-
grants. As the ad states, they
got special reduced rates on
transportation.
nated their sailings with railroad sched-
ules. By the end of the century, a person
in Poland could buy one ticket that would
cover rail fare to Hamburg, an ocean pas-
sage, and a railroad ticket to an American
city. Or, as often happened, a recent
immigrant in an American city—Detroit,
for example—could buy a ticket for a
family member or friend in Krakow,
Poland, for example, and have it delivered
to that person in Poland. Similar condi-
tions prevailed in the Pacific, where
Japanese steamers, mostly of the NYK
line, brought perhaps 275,000 Japanese
to the United States. Historians call this
kind of migration "chain migration,"
because immigrants send for and follow
one another, like links in a chain.
Most of the members of these eastern
33. and southern European immigrant groups
had several things in common: almost all
worked at industrial and urban occupa-
tions, they lived in American cities rather
than in small towns or on farms, and very
few were Protestants. Except for the Jews,
and, after 1907, the Japanese, these popu-
lations were heavily male and large num-
bers of them, including Japanese, would
work in the United States for a time and
then return home. Such return migration
was important in this era, because for
every three immigrants, perhaps one went
home, although, to be sure, many came
back, sometimes more than once. Where-
as Italian men worked largely in construc-
tion of all kinds, Polish and eastern Euro-
pean men worked at the dirtiest jobs in
heavy industry, and Jewish and Italian
immigrant women worked in the garment
factories that clothed America. Large
numbers of these folks would have pre-
ferred to work on their own farms, as
many earlier immigrants had done, but
the era of free land was long past. And
even if free land had been available, few
of these immigrants had the capital neces-
sary to get started. The only immigrant
group in this era that settled largely onCo
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37. This cartoon from the 1860s attacks both
Irish and Chinese. The Irishman (left) and the
Chinese are devouring America, represented
by Uncle Sam in his striped trousers; then the
Chinese devours the Irishman.
the land was the Japanese, who did so in
the expanding agricultural economy of
the West Coast.
The restriction of immigration began
with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882, which became the hinge on
which the "golden door" of immigration
began to swing closed. A whole succession
of laws between 1882 and 1924 narrowed
the opening through which immigrants
came, although only in the 1920s did the
total number of immigrants admitted begin
to fall as a result of legislation.
The reasons that large numbers of
Americans have supported immigration
restriction are various and complicated,
but two reasons stand out: fear of eco-
nomic and cultural competition, and
racial and ethnic prejudice. This was true
in the mid-18th century when Benjamin
Franklin and other English-speaking
Pennsylvanians expressed fear that Ger-
man immigrants and the German lan-
guage would "take over" their colony. It
was also true in the mid-19th century
when many in the Northeast opposed the
entry of Irish immigrants who were both
poor and Roman Catholic. It was true
38. again in the 1860s and in the following
decades, when many westerners insisted
that "the Chinese must GO!", both
because of their race and the fact that
they, like many immigrants, were willing
to work for very low wages. White work-
ers feared that this would depress their
own wages. And, in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries many—perhaps
most—Americans felt that too many east-
ern and southern Europeans were filling
up American cities and competing for
unskilled and semiskilled jobs.
These anti-immigrant notions were
greatly stimulated by an official govern-
ment commission, the U.S. Immigration
Commission, whose 1911 report put forth
many of the arguments used to justify dras-
tic immigration restriction in the following
decade. It argued that most of those then
coming to the United States—what it called
"new immigrants," people from eastern
and southern Europe—were essentially dif-
ferent from and inferior to most of those
who had come previously—what it called
"old immigrants," people from the British
Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia.
Similar kinds of arguments had been
raised against Irish and German immi-
grants early in the 19th century and
would be raised in the closing decades of
the 20th century against Asians and Latin
Americans.
39. These opponents of immigration, or
nativists, were and are largely motivated
by fears of all kinds, particularly fears
about their economic well-being and
about their culture being swamped by
incoming strangers. Few noted that,
although the number of immigrants rose
steadily from about 230,000 a year in the
1860s to about a million a year in the
early 20th century, the relative number of
foreign-born people living in the United
States remained remarkably constant. In
every census between 1860 and 1920—a
period of remarkable change in almost
every aspect of American life—one signifi-
cant social statistic remained constant:Co
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I N T R O D U C T I O N *
Tfeis s/7/p's manifest—a passenger list from January 2,1892—
sA;oM/s nine immigrants and one
returning American. Such lists are a major source of
information about immigrants.
immigrants, persons who were foreign
born, were just about 14 percent of the
population. In other words, every seventh
person was an immigrant. By 2000, for
the sake of comparison, the figure was
about 10 percent, or every 10th person.
43. The Era of Restriction, 1924-65
Although the beginning date of 1924 is
commonly assigned to the era of restric-
tion, the process had begun long before.
Before 1882 there was nothing in Ameri-
can law to stop a free immigrant from
entering the country. If you could get here,
you were in. To be sure, many countries
tried to prevent their inhabitants from
leaving, but that is a different matter. The
U.S. restriction of free immigration began
in 1882 with the passage of the Chinese
Exclusion Act, which barred the entry of
Chinese laborers who had not been here
before. Once that first restriction had been
made, more restrictions followed.
The restrictions came piecemeal, as
various categories of people were declared
ineligible for entrance. By the end of
World War I (1918), the once free and
unrestricted immigration policy of the
United States had been limited in seven
major ways as the following kinds of
immigrants were barred from immigrat-
ing: Chinese laborers and other Asians,
except for Japanese and Filipinos; certain
criminals; people who failed to meet cer-
tain moral standards, including prosti-
tutes and polygamists; people with vari-
ous diseases; paupers; certain radicals,
including anarchists and people advocat-
ing the overthrow of the government by
force and violence; and illiterates.
44. Only the test to keep out illiterates
caused significant political controversy. It
was vetoed four times over a 20-year peri-
od by presidents as diverse as the conserv-
ative Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1897,
the liberal Republican William Howard
Taft in 1913, and the progressive Democ-
rat Woodrow Wilson in 1915 and 1917. It
was enacted in 1917 over Wilson's second
veto. Unlike the 1901 Australian literacy
test, which allowed government inspectors
to choose the language or languages that
immigrants had to read, the American law
was reasonably fair. It allowed each immi-
grant to specify the language in which he
or she would be tested. It also exempted
close female relatives of any age and close
male relatives over 55 years old joiningC
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14
• I N T R O D U C T I O N
2674
Class No. 4 Serial Number French
Tu tires le fondement de ta puissance de la bouche des
petits enfants et de ceux qui tettent, a cause de tes adversaires.
afin de confondre 1'ennemi et celui qui veut se venger.
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained
strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the
enemy and the avenger.
48. (Ps. 8:2) (French Ps. 8:3)
A number of the texts used for the literacy examinations of
immigrants were drawn
from the Bible. This one, from the eighth Psalm, is the copy the
examiner used,
which had the text in both French and English.
immigrants already in the United States,
and it provided that if any adult member
of an immigrating family was literate the
whole family could be admitted.
Despite this impressive list of restric-
tions, nothing was done before 1920-21
to place any kind of numerical cap on
immigration, and in no year before 1921
did the percentage of prospective immi-
grants turned away at Ellis Island and
other ports of entry reach 2 percent. The
fluctuations in the numbers of immigrants
were due to either economic conditions—
during hard times in the United States
fewer immigrants came—or political ones:
during the American Civil War (1861-65)
and World War I (1914-18) immigration
was significantly reduced.
Amid the political and social reaction
of post-World War I—a period one histo-
rian has called the "tribal twenties"
because of the many social and cultural
issues that divided the American people—
drastic immigration restriction became
politically expedient. In 1920 the House
49. of Representatives voted 296-42 to bar all
immigration for one year. The Senate sub-
stituted a more rational bill, which Wilson
vetoed in 1921 just before he left office.
Within months Congress repassed it and
President Warren G. Harding signed the
Emergency Quota Act of 1921. A similar
but more restrictive measure
was enacted three years
later: the Immigration Act
of 1924. Most of the provi-
sions of that act remained
in effect until 1965.
The thrust of the 1921
and 1924 laws was undis-
guised ethnic discrimina-
tion directed largely
against people from south-
ern and eastern Europe. It
put numerical limits on
the number of immigrants
who could enter in any
given year from each of
more than a hundred countries and politi-
cal entities. The number for each country
was based on the presumed number of
people from each place who were already
in the United States. But when the 1920
census figures became available they
showed what restrictionists in Congress
thought were "too many" Italians, Poles,
and Jews. So in 1924, Congress chose to
base the new quotas on the 1890 census,
50. taken nearly 35 years earlier, when fewer
southern and eastern Europeans had been
present. The quotas were relatively gener-
ous toward immigrants from the British
Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia—in fact
many of the "slots" for those countries
went unused year after year—and strin-
gent toward the rest of Europe. Asians
were not allowed to immigrate, except for
Filipinos, who were American nationals
as long as the United States owned the
Philippines, from 1898 until a law
promising independence for the islands
was enacted in 1934.
Yet it is an indication of how different
American concerns were then from what
they are today that the 1924 act placed no
limits at all on immigration from Mexico
or from any other independent country in
the New World. It also allowed a very lim-
ited kind of family reunification: an immi-
grant who was the minor child, or spouseCo
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15
• I N T R O D U C T I O N
of a United States citizen could enter as a
"nonquota immigrant."
Textbooks often illustrate the 1924
act by reprinting contemporary cartoons
showing immigration reduced to a trickle.
54. Those cartoons overstate the effect of the
1924 law. The new law did reduce annual
immigration to about 300,000 annually.
This was far below the 1 million a year
that had been coming before World War I,
but was hardly a trickle. In the 1930s im-
migration was really reduced to a trickle—
an average of 50,000 a year. But it was
not Congress but the worldwide Great
Depression that slowed the traffic. Eco-
nomic conditions were so poor in the
United States that in two different years—
1932 and 1933—more people left or were
excluded from the United States than
immigrated to it. This had not happened
since the Loyalists (or Tories, as their
opponents called them) fled the country in
the 1780s after the successful American
Revolution, and it has not happened since.
Late in the 1930s large numbers of
refugees from Nazi Germany, most but
not all of them Jews, tried to enter the
United States, and, although eventually
some 250,000 did find a permanent or
temporary refuge in the United States,
large numbers were turned away by con-
sular and immigration officials, some of
whom were prejudiced against Jews. Con-
gress refused to pass a bill to let in several
thousand Jewish refugee children. Some
escaped elsewhere but others became part
of the millions who were later sent to the
death camps of the Holocaust. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, although sympa-
thetic to the plight of the refugees, provid-
55. ed no significant leadership on this issue
until late in the war. In 1944 he estab-
lished, by executive order, the War
Refugee Board, which brought about a
thousand mostly Jewish refugees to the
United States and set up camps for many
others in Europe and Africa. Many years
later, in 1979, Vice President Walter Mon-
This cartoon, entitled "The Only Way to
Handle It," reflects what many people
thought would happen after the passage of
the Immigration Act of 1921. The restriction
was actually much less severe.
dale described the situation well: in regard
to the Jewish refugees from Nazism, he
judged that the United States and other
western democracies "failed the test of
civilization."
Many of the refugees who did get to
the United States made outstanding contri-
butions both to the war effort and to
American culture. Much of the research
that developed the atomic bomb was done
by refugee scientists such as the Italian
Enrico Fermi, the Hungarian Leo Szilard,
and the Austrian Lise Meitner. The moral
authority of the German-born Albert Ein-
stein, perhaps the greatest scientist of the
20th century, had been crucial in persuad-
ing President Roosevelt to consider estab-
lishing the project which led to the cre-
ation of the bomb. American culture was
enormously enriched by the temporary or
56. permanent residence of such composers as
the German Paul Hindemith and the Hun-
garian Bela Bartok, the Italian conductor
Arturo Toscanini, the German authorCo
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16
• I N T R O D U C T I O N
Thomas Mann, and a great number of
painters, sculptors, and architects.
The years of World War U (1939-45)
were, historians now agree, years of great
social change in the United States. From the
special point of view of immigration history
a crucial turning point was reached in late
1943 when Congress, at the urging of Pres-
ident Roosevelt, repealed the Chinese
Exclusion Act and, even more important,
enabled Chinese, but not other Asians, to
be naturalized. After the war was over and
the United States began to exercise global
influence more powerfully than ever before,
it became apparent that U.S. naturalization
and immigration policies were not congru-
ent with American foreign policy. It was
difficult to be "the leader of the free world"
when much of the world's population was
ineligible to immigrate to the United States.
These peoples naturally resented the dis-
crimination. Following the pattern of Chi-
nese exclusion repeal, both Filipinos and
"natives of India" were made eligible for
60. naturalization and thus immigration in
1944, and in 1952 all ethnic and racial bars
to naturalization were dropped.
In contrast to its refusal to make
exceptions to the quota system for
refugees during the war, in 1948 and 1950
Congress passed two bills that allowed
some 450,000 "displaced persons" to
enter without reference to quotas. Dis-
placed persons were refugees in Europe
who were unable or unwilling to be set-
tled in their former homes, largely because
the Soviet army had occupied their home-
lands and installed totalitarian regimes in
them on the Russian model. Few of these
refugees were Jews: most European Jews
had perished in the Holocaust and most of
the relatively few survivors went to Israel,
not the United States.
In 1952 the McCarran-Walter Act, a
major modification of immigration law,
was passed over President Harry S. Tru-
man's veto. In addition to its broadening
of naturalization, it continued the quota
1,762,610
528,431
1,035-039
2,515,479
1,450,312
7,291,871
Immigration During
61. the Era of Restriction
1925-30
1931-40
1941-50
1951-60
1961-65
TOTAL
US. Bureau of the Census
system, applied new and more rigorous
political tests on incoming immigrants and
visitors, and greatly expanded the family
reunification provisions of the law to
include special preferences for brothers,
sisters, and unmarried children of U.S. citi-
zens and for spouses and children of resi-
dent aliens. Under its provisions, immigra-
tion began to climb steadily, so that during
its 13-year existence nearly 3.5 million
persons immigrated to the United States.
The Era of Renewed Immigration,
1965 to the Present
In 1965, at the high point of the period of
social reform that President Lyndon B.
Johnson called the "Great Society," Con-
gress finally scrapped the quota principle
and substituted an overtly two-track system
that began the era of renewed immigration
and is still our basic law. In place of nation-
al quotas, equal numerical caps were estab-
lished for each hemisphere, and, at the
same time, close relatives of both U.S. citi-
zens and resident aliens were given pre-
ferred status; some could come in without
62. regard to numerical restriction. The table
on the next page compares the preference
systems under the 1952 and 1965 acts.
The growth in the number of immi-
grants has increased sharply and steadily.
There were 2.5 million in the 1950s, 3.3
million in the 1960s, 4.5 million in the
1970s, more than 7 million in the 1980s,
and more than 8 million in the 1990s.
Even more important than the increas-
ing numbers were the changes in theCo
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17
I N T R O D U C T I O N
sources of immigration and the kinds of
immigrants who were coming. Through the
1950s, Europe was the chief source of
immigration to the United States, although
the preponderance of Europeans was
diminishing. By the 1960s, Europeans were
only a third of all immigrants; in the 1970s
they were less than a fifth; and in the 1980s
and 1990s they were just over a tenth.
Replacing them were persons from Latin
America and Asia in roughly equal num-
bers. Between 1981 and 1996, about 13.5
million legal immigrants were admitted to
the United States. Of the top 10 countries
of origin, which accounted for 58 percent
of all immigrants, half were in or around
66. the Caribbean and half were in Asia.
In more recent years, partly because
of the collapse of the Soviet Union and
partly because of the diversity programs
enacted in 1988, there has been a signifi-
cantly wider distribution of immigrants.
In 1996, for example, the top 10 coun-
tries accounted for a little less than half of
all immigrants (49.5 percent) and two
European countries, Ukraine and Russia,
were numbers 8 and 9 of the top 10.
But it was not just the regional and
national origin of immigrants that
changed. Large numbers of recent immi-
grants have been very well educated and
possessed of valuable entrepreneurial and
Preference Systems: 1952 and 1965 Immigration Acts
Immigration and Nationality Act, 1952
Exempt from preference requirements and
numerical quotas: spouses and unmarried minor
children of U.S. citizens.
1. Highly skilled immigrants whose services are
urgently needed in the United States and the
spouses and children of such immigrants.
50 percent.
2. Parents of U.S. citizens over age 21 and unmar-
ried adult children of U.S. citizens. 30 percent.
3. Spouses and unmarried adult children of perma-
67. nent resident aliens. 20 percent.
4. Brothers, sisters, and married children of U.S.
citizens and accompanying spouses and children.
50 percent of numbers not required for 1-3.
5. Nonpreference: applicants not entitled to any of
the above. 50 percent of the numbers not required
for 1-3 above, plus any not required for 4.
Immigration Act of 1965
Exempt from preference requirements and
numerical quotas: spouses, unmarried minor
children, and parents of U.S. citizens.
1. Unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens.
20 percent.
2. Spouses and unmarried adult children of
permanent resident aliens. 20 percent (26 percent
after 1980).
3. Members of rhe professions and scientists and
artists of exceptional ability. 10 percent: requires
certification from U.S. Department of Labor.
4. Married children of U.S. citizens. 10 percent.
5. Brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens over 21.
24 percent.
6. Skilled and unskilled workers in occupations
for which labor is in short supply in the United
States. 10 percent: requires certification from
U.S. Department of Labor.
68. 7. Refugees from communist or communist-dominat-
ed countries, or the Middle East. 6 percent.
8. Nonpreference: applicants nor entitled to any of
the above. (Since there are more preference appli-
cants than can be accommodated, this has not
been used.)
Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1997 Statistical
yearbook
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
Leading Countries of Origin,
1981-96
1. Mexico 3,304,682
2. Philippines 843,741
3. Vietnam 719,239
4. China 539,267
5. Dominican Republic 509,902
6. India 498,309
7. Korea 453,018
8. H Salvador 362,225
9. Jamaica 323,625
10. Cuba 254,193
U.S. Bureau of the Census
professional skills. Large numbers of oth-
ers, however, including many refugees
from Southeast Asia, had little education
and few marketable skills.
72. The difference in treatment received
by immigrants from two adjacent
Caribbean islands, Cuba and Haiti,
demonstrates the wide gulf that has exist-
ed between contemporary groups. The
nearly 1 million Cubans who have been
admitted since 1959 from Fidel Castro's
Cuba as refugees from communism were
given special status and relatively gener-
ous financial support by the United States
government. The much smaller number of
Haitians, whom the government refused
to regard as refugees, were often rejected
and returned to Haiti; those admitted
received relatively little financial help.
By the 1980s, many Americans were
again becoming nervous about "so many
foreigners" coming to the United States.
Many advocates of restricting immigra-
tion pointed out, correctly, that the total
volume of immigration was approaching
that of the peak years before World War
I, when an average of about a million
immigrants entered annually. But they
rarely pointed out that the incidence of
foreign-born people in the population was
much lower than in those years. Despite
much debate and many laws enacted by
Congress since 1965, none has changed
Spanish-speaking members of the International Ladies
Garment Workers Union proclaim their loyalty in two
languages at a New York City parade in 1985.
73. significantly the volume of immigration.
These laws have been aptly described as
"thunder without lightning"— that is,
laws without much effect. Although pub-
lic opinion polls showed that, when
asked, a majority of Americans was likely
to say that there were too many incoming
immigrants, when asked, in other polls
what issues concerned them most, few put
immigration high on the list. Many seri-
ous students of immigration believe that
as long as the American economy remains
reasonably prosperous, there is little like-
lihood that major bars against immigrants
will be raised. A major reason for this is
that immigrants in contemporary Ameri-
ca, like their predecessors in other eras,
come here to work. The work that they
do, whether unskilled, semiskilled, or
highly skilled, will continue to be a vital
element in American economic growth.
18
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25
Chapter 2
Regulation and exclusion
Anti-Chinese agitation
The path to regulation and exclusion began in the
77. extraordinary
melting pot that was California, newly admitted to the United
States after it was seized from Mexico in the Mexican-American
War (1846–48). Isolated though it was from the major
transatlantic shipping lanes and without rail links to the eastern
seaboard until 1868, at the time of the 1840s Gold Rush
California
had nonetheless attracted thousands of Americans and
Europeans, Chinese, and South American immigrants, whose
numbers added to the small populations of Native Americans
and
original Spanish and Mexican settlers.
The Chinese provided valued labor in the gold mines, on farms
that
provisioned the miners, and ultimately in the construction of the
railroad line that would connect the West and East coasts. But
in the
1870s, as California settled into a post-boom economy and
confronted a severe economic depression, white workers felt
their
living standards were threatened by the low wages acceptable to
many Chinese. A movement, inspired by a combination of
economic
insecurity, racial hostility, and political opportunism, took form
to
end Chinese immigration and force the Chinese to re-emigrate.
While
anti-Chinese politics had some eastern support, its epicenter
would
long reside in California. Its principal spokesman was Irish-
born
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Denis Kearney, founder of the Workingmen’s Party, under
whose
leadership the party did well in local and state elections. A
powerful
orator, Kearney ended every address with his signature
message:
“And whatever happens, the Chinese must go!”
Political representatives of the white working class, commonly
themselves the product of some recent immigration like
Kearney,
would be prominent in developing arguments against
immigration
82. in the service of defending the welfare of the ordinary
American.
Not all were demagogues, to be sure, for arguments that a
continual
inrush of cheap labor might have a downward effect on wage
scales
were plausible. But when fused with hatred for the Other , the
ugly
3. Alongside Mexicans, Irish, Americans, and others,
Chinese laborers
were a signifi cant part of the workforce that constructed and
maintained the fi rst railroads of the American Far West.
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86. face of class politics was racist. Evidence of such racism lay
most
evidently in the fact that neither Kearney nor the California
labor
unions advocated a class-based movement founded on the
organization of all workers, whatever their nativity or race.
4. The cartoonist seeks to capture the irony of an immigrant,
dressed in
typical Irish peasant garb and speaking with an Irish brogue,
ordering a
Chinese immigrant to leave the United States in the name of two
famous
American statesmen, George Washington and Daniel Webster.
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Throughout California, the anti-Chinese movement often
engaged in
violence and terror. The Chinese were an isolated, relatively
small
population. China lacked a government strong enough for
effective
diplomatic protests against such outrages. It was easy to gang
up on
the Chinese and convenient during election campaigns for
opportunistic politicians to champion the racist white majority.
But
there were limits to Kearney’s infl uence. He was not successful
in
convincing workers outside California that the Chinese were a
real
threat to them. In California itself union leaders eventually
concluded
that Kearney’s agenda was too narrow to benefi t their white
constituents, and they resented his power. But Kearney did
succeed
in impressing Washington politicians with the infl uence he had
attained by fusing race and immigration. The call for banning
the
Chinese gained widespread support, including among other
racial
minorities. African American newspapers, for example,
denounced
Chinese immigration as a threat to the precarious economic
status of
black workers. Congress responded, giving California’s white
91. population what the most vocal and violent within it desired: an
end
to most Chinese immigration; hence, the prospect the Chinese
would
eventually disappear. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese
Exclusion
Act, which was periodically renewed until made permanent in
1904.
The law was not repealed until the Magnuson Act of 1943, when
China and the United States were allies in the struggle against
Japan,
and Chinese exclusion, an effective point in Japanese
propaganda,
had become a national embarrassment.
Chinese exclusion and subsequent efforts began the evolution
of
American immigration law and policy, as the historian Mae
Ngai
observes, into an engine “for massive racial engineering” that
sought to use state power to defi ne the demographic and
cultural
character of the nation. A force accelerating the process was the
particular nature of Chinese exclusion, as Congress crafted it.
The
law did not bar all Chinese immigration, only Chinese
laborers.
Merchants, students, the immediate family of American-born
Chinese citizens, and Chinese American citizens returning from
abroad were not barred.
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The problem for enforcement was sorting out those barred from
those eligible for admission. The effort was often carried out
with
a ham-fi sted brutality or cold formality, especially at the Angel
Island immigration station in San Francisco harbor, where the
large majority of Chinese arrivals was processed. The
presumption
of government immigration agents was that all Chinese seeking
entrance were lying about their status. To their minds, women
arriving at Angel Island were not the wives or daughters of
legal
residents they claimed to be, but prostitutes imported to work in
the brothels catering to whites and the large Chinese bachelor
population. The elaborate documentation and close interrogation
stood in sharp contrast to the perfunctory questioning of most
Europeans seeking entrance.
5. Angel Island interrogations were considerably more
96. formal than
those brief encounters between European immigrants and
inspectors
at Ellis Island. Asian immigrants usually faced one or more
inspectors
and a stenographer. A government interpreter translated.
Questions
and answers were typed out and placed in the fi le of applicants
seeking
admission.
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100. Chinese sought to evade the law by claiming false family
relationships through legally resident sponsors, or they
attempted
to enter the country illegally by crossing its northern or
southern
land-borders at a time when they were largely unpatrolled.
Chinese American citizens occasionally challenged the
operations
of the law in court and won some notable victories. One way or
another, within a decade of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the
government was facing a well-publicized challenge, and it was
often unsuccessful in the contest. The number of Chinese
testing
the law was never signifi cant enough to be a true threat to state
power, as opposed to an annoyance, but sensationalistic press
coverage created panic in the general public, and federal offi
cials
and enforcement offi cers felt their authority was compromised
and reacted aggressively.
The growth of national government activity
and power
Frustrated efforts to enforce Chinese exclusion joined other
sources of immigration-related anxiety: growing racial
consciousness among the white majority based on contemporary
science and popular attitudes; increasing concern, with a
resurgence of mass European immigration, about the need for
more effective regulation of immigration, borders, and
citizenship
processes; imperial conquest; and large numbers of mobile,
U.S.-bound non-white people from Asia, the Pacifi c, and the
Caribbean. Immigration policy moved from openness to
gatekeeping, though the precise application of policies
continued
101. to depend on the origin of the immigrants.
The 1891 Immigration Act was an unambiguous statement of
centralized power. It formally assigned responsibility for the
assessment of people seeking entrance to the national
government. Congress established the offi ce of Superintendent
of
Immigration within the Treasury Department to oversee all
immigration inspection, including new medical and intelligence
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Creating the Immigration Department, 1891
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testing, such as took place at Angel Island and Ellis Island.
A bureaucracy, large for its time, took shape around processing
at entrance ports and, under the jurisdiction of the Customs
Service, enforcing border security along the northern and
southern borders, where energies were devoted principally to
rooting out small numbers of illegal Chinese entrants and the
shadowy criminal enterprises that smuggled them across the
Canadian and Mexican borders.
On the heels of the Chinese precedent, racially inspired
proscriptions increased. Additional discriminatory responses to
Asian immigration led ultimately to the exclusion of half the
world’s population. In 1907, during a decade in which the
Japanese immigrant population tripled in the mainland United
States from 24,000 to 72,000, quotas, rather than a policy of
exclusion, would be applied to Japanese laborers in response to
protests, especially in California. Japanese were considered less
a
threat to wage scales than to the monopoly of white people on
prime agricultural land, for they were successful in acquiring a
foothold in fruit and vegetable farming. But like the Chinese,
they
were deemed inassimilable. Having just won a war against
Russia,
however, Japan was an emerging world power, so rather than
unilateral action, as had been the case with the Chinese, a quota
system was negotiated between President Theodore Roosevelt
and
the Japanese government. Under the terms of the so-called
Gentlemen’s Agreement, Japanese immigration to the American
mainland fell in the next decade by a third. (The recently
106. annexed
U.S. possession of Hawaii, which desperately needed Japanese
sugar plantation labor, was excluded from the agreement.)
Immigrants from Korea, then under Japanese control, were also
limited.
Prompted by the ongoing controversy over Japanese
landholding,
in 1913, California and eight other western states as well as
Florida took action against all landholding by aliens ineligible
for
citizenship. The Supreme Court declared such laws
constitutional.
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The restriction of Japanese
Aliens owning land
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Because many Japanese immigrants had children born in the
United States, they circumvented the law by registering their
property in the names of their children. The frustrated efforts at
piecemeal proscription of Asian immigration and citizenship
ended in 1917, when Congress passed legislation declaring all
of
Asia, exclusive of the Philippines, a U.S. possession after the
Spanish-American War, “the barred Asiatic zone,” from which
immigration must cease completely.
In this racialized climate of opinion and state action,
confrontations about who was white inevitably arose when those
barred from citizenship under the 1795 Naturalization Law
contested their status. In the late nineteenth century, lower
courts
and state legislatures actually were confused about which
groups
fi t into the category of “white persons eligible for citizenship.”
The
111. federal courts sorted the matter out, though hardly on consistent
intellectual grounds. Judges never resolved whether the
recorded
history of the evolution of peoples, or contemporary racial
science,
with its increasingly elaborate categories of classifi cation of
peoples, or popular prejudices would govern the crucial
question
of who was white. They did rule that Japanese, South Asians,
Burmese, Malaysians, Thais, and Koreans were not white, while
Syrians and Armenians, whom the United States Census in 1910
had actually classifi ed as “Asiatics,” were white. The birthright
citizenship of the American-born children of aliens ineligible
for
citizenship was nonetheless affi rmed.
Federal courts also addressed the racial status of Mexicans,
who
originally became part of the American nation after the
annexation of southwestern territory conquered in the Mexican-
American War. Later the numbers of Mexicans tripled between
1910 and 1920 to 652,000 residents, as a consequence of
political
instability and economic modernization in Mexico. After
northern
Mexico was annexed into the United States in the early 1850s,
Mexicans were made citizens, and thus implicitly declared
white
persons. By a consensual fi ction, Mexican lineage was declared
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Courts deciding who is “white”
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European, via Spain, and the Indian ancestry of Mexicans laid
aside. This had served the purpose of securing the citizenship
status, and hence loyalty, of numerous large landowners,
especially in California. Some were Spanish in origin, but many
were Mexican or descendents of Mexican and American
intermarriages. A federal district court in 1897 affi rmed the
citizenship, and hence the whiteness, of Mexicans for purposes
116. of
citizenship.
On the popular level, however, Mexican whiteness was
contested.
The new immigrants were widely seen as uneducated, dirty,
diseased, criminal, and lazy. Political agitation to drop them
from
the citizenship list failed, but in the 1920s the federal
government
worked to impede their entrance by increasing a head tax on
Mexicans entering the country and by denying visas on the
grounds that they were inassimilable and would become
dependent on public assistance. During the Great Depression,
large numbers of Mexicans, citizens and aliens alike, were
encouraged, often to the point of coercion and with the active
cooperation of diplomatic offi cials of the Mexican government
in
western cities, to leave the country. The same program of
massive
deportations and repatriations also befell Filipinos, who worked
extensively in West Coast agriculture and canneries. Another
group subject to strong racist pressures, their entrance into the
country had been secured, in contrast to other Asian groups,
when
their homeland became an American possession. (They too,
however, were barred from citizenship.) During World War II,
the
policy toward Mexicans was reversed, because of the shortage
of
agricultural labor and cannery workers. A bilateral agreement
with Mexico established the Bracero (Spanish: day-laborer or
fi eld
hand) program, which facilitated the recruitment of cheap
agricultural labor through temporary work permits.
117. Legislators, judges, and immigration offi cials increasingly
sorted
out peoples by their presumed suitability to be Americans, as
opposed to their desire to work. In consequence, Congress and
the
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courts were faced with an endless array of challenges in the
name
of consistency. A particularly pressing issue was the
relationships
among citizens and aliens linked by marriage, which introduced
the complexities of gender to those mounting in the name of
race.
Originally, American legislation on naturalization did not limit
eligibility for citizenship by sex, but gradually the courts
determined that a women’s status was to be defi ned by that of
the
males to whom she was related. In 1855 Congress formally
adopted the principle of derivative citizenship, which held that
a
woman’s status was dependent on that of her husband or father.
A
woman who was not a citizen acquired citizenship when
marrying
an American citizen. The reverse of that situation, the status of
a
female citizen who married an alien ineligible for citizenship on
the basis of race, was addressed in 1907, when Congress
decided
that she lost her citizenship when she married. Legally these
women were no longer allowed to re-naturalize unless their
husbands were naturalized fi rst (as by an act of Congress
targeted
at an individual), furthering the link between a woman’s status
and her husband’s. The loss of citizenship to such women led to
much injustice and inconvenience, and caused bitter protests.
After the ratifi cation of the Nineteenth Amendment to the
122. Constitution enfranchising women and, in effect, creating a
political status for them independent of men, the Cable Act of
1922 and a series of amendments to it in the ensuing decade
were
passed to address the situation. Thereafter, marriage by a
woman
who was an American citizen at birth to an alien no longer
carried
with it the loss of citizenship. For women acquiring their
citizenship through marriage or by act of Congress, as was the
case for women in Hawaii, Puerto Rico (an American possession
since the Spanish-American War), and the Philippines, marriage
or remarriage to an alien ineligible for citizenship continued to
carry the penalty of denaturalization.
Such elaborate efforts to expand state power to classify people
by
gender, race and nationality stood in sharp contrast to most
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Americans’ desire for a small, relatively weak central
government.
The situation suggests the seriousness with which the electorate
regarded immigration. However racist, arbitrary, and unjust,
these
efforts nonetheless touched a relatively small number of
voluntary
immigrants and their wives and children.
The massive wave of turn-of-the-century
European immigration
On the East Coast, European immigrants continued to enter the
country in enormous numbers. After the severe economic
depression of the 1890s, the tide of immigrants reached
unprecedented proportions. Between 1871 and 1900, 11.7
million
immigrants arrived; between 1901 and 1920 alone 14.5 million
did. The points of origin were changing dramatically. While in
the
nineteenth century, western and northern Europeans
predominated, now southern, central, and eastern Europeans
did.
The former never stopped arriving, but the latter overwhelmed
their numbers.
This change carried tremendous signifi cance for Americans
127. wary
of unlimited immigration, and demand grew to curb European
immigration. Behind this effort lay the transformation in both
the
popular mind and contemporary science of differences of
culture
and appearance into inheritable racial dispositions that made
assimilation impossible.
The newer European immigrants were different in ways that
alarmed many Americans. Many fewer were Protestants than the
Germans, Scandinavians, British, Irish, and Dutch immigrants
of
the past. The majority were Jews, Orthodox of a variety of
sorts,
and Roman Catholic, whose presence activated long-standing
prejudices and suspicions. The physical appearances of eastern
European Jews, Slavs, and southern Italians and Greeks
suggested
a lack of racial kinship with Anglo-Americans, though these
differences were no doubt accentuated by the ill-fi tting peasant
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131. Growing fear of immigrants
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garb and poverty of most newcomers. The prominent sociologist
Edward A. Ross spelled out these suspicions about racial
difference and inferiority when he noted in 1914 that “the
physiognomy of certain groups unmistakably proclaims
inferiority
of type.” In every face, he noted “something wrong. . . . There
were
so many sugar-loaf heads, moon faces, slit mouths, lantern jaws,
and goose-bill noses that one might imagine a malicious jinn
[genie] had amused himself by creating human beings in a set of
skew-molds discarded by the Creator.”
Another difference was the new immigrants’ greater
132. traditionalism.
Even though they knew enough about the modern world to
develop
effective strategies for leaving their homelands and resettling
thousands of miles away, the eastern, central, and southern
Europeans were more anchored in traditional peasant social
arrangements than their contemporaries within the continuing fl
ow
of western Europeans. It was easy to forget that sixty years
earlier,
the Irish and Germans especially seemed outlandish and had
only
gradually given evidence of being successfully integrated into
American life. The perception of never being likely to
assimilate was
heightened, too, by the fact that many of the newer immigrants,
in
contrast to the more family-based, mid-nineteenth century
immigration, were single males wishing to make as much money
as
possible quickly and return to their homelands.
Racialization of these Europeans never approached the ferocity
seen in the popular response to such peoples as the Japanese or
Chinese. American nativists condemned the backwardness of
these
European peoples as much on the basis of culture as biology. It
was
possible for thoughtful people, on the one hand, to urge a
curtailing
of their entrance as a reform in the name of saving America,
and, on
the other hand, to be sympathetic to the immigrants’ aspirations
and respectful of their work ethic and family orientation.
But there could be no doubt about the consequences of such
133. racialized thinking: sharp quotas on the admission into the
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Restricting immigration - the quota system
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country of a large number of these more recently arrived
European peoples that were enacted into law in 1921 and 1924.
In
expressing preference and disapproval, the intention was to
discriminate. Turn-of-the-century newcomers might have been
offi cially classifi ed as “white,” but as historians have
observed, they
were considered in-between people or provisional white
people ,
and by 1920, in the minds of many long-established Americans,
there were quite enough of them. Unlike the nativists of the
mid-nineteenth century, the new advocates of radical change in
immigration law and policy did not have much faith in
reforming
immigrants, but instead demanded reform of national policy.
The calls for restriction of these Europeans grew after 1890.
Emerging at various levels of society, they had multiple
sources,
three of which stand out. First, the anti-foreignism inspired by
mid-nineteenth century anti-Catholicism enjoyed resurgence in
1887 with the organization of the American Protective
Association
(APA), which gained adherents particularly in the rural and
small
town South and Middle West. The APA called for state control
of
Catholic sectarian schools in the belief they were havens of
subversion. It claimed 2.5 million members in the mid-1890s,
but this number soon declined because of rivalries among its
leaders. By the time of its eclipse in the second decade of the
twentieth century, the Ku Klux Klan, which was originally
established in the South to impede the political and civic
138. equality
of emancipated slaves, was reconfi guring itself as a national,
anti-Catholic, antisemitic, and anti-foreign as well as anti–
African
American organization. It became a major political force
throughout the country in the 1920s.
Second, labor union leaders, such as the longtime head of the
American Federation of Labor (AFL) Samuel Gompers, opposed
unrestricted immigration, refl ecting their members’ anxieties
about wage scales and the availability of work. Especially those
AFL-affi liated craft unions representing skilled workers that
were
the heart of the labor movement in size, employer recognition,
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Anti-Immigrant Groups
Anti-Immigrant labor unions
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and political power held a restrictionist position. Many in such
unions did not believe the newer immigrants could be
organized,
because of cultural differences and the aspirations of many to
return to their homelands. To be sure, most of the immigrants
were not skilled workers, and instead worked as factory hands
and
outdoor laborers in construction or extractive industries such as
coal mining. This was the segment of the working class most
retarded in its progress toward unionization, largely because of
the diffi culties of organizing an easily replaced, mobile work
force
with a large immigrant cohort. The fact that recent immigrants,
often ignorant of the circumstances of their employment, were
occasionally used as strikebreakers highlighted for American
143. workers that the newcomers were poor material for
organizations
based on class solidarity.
Labor’s conclusions at this point in time about limiting
immigration actually broadly paralleled the thinking of
industrial
employers, among whom there was a growing consensus that for
the time being the manufacturing economy had a supply of labor
suffi cient to its needs. In addition, infl uential industrialists
like
automobile manufacturer Henry Ford had become more
concerned with the stability of their workforce and desirous of
encouraging settled habits through Americanization programs
and a variety of incentivized job and wage policies. Hence,
relative
to their past encouragement of high rates of immigration, the
period found them more or less indifferent to the debate about
immigration restriction.
Third, a respectable, intellectual bourgeois face of immigration
control appeared in the Immigration Restriction League (IRL),
which was organized in 1894 by a prestigious coalition of
northeastern academics, national political leaders, and urban
reformers. Alarmed at the growth of social problems and
pervasive political corruption in the rapidly growing industrial
cities, they blamed such conditions on the unchecked expansion
of
recent immigrant populations. Their thinking was also infl
uenced
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by the emerging science of eugenics, which argued that states
should take active steps to protect and improve the human
genetic
stock within their borders. Eugenicists advanced such measures
as
immigration control, sterilization of the disabled, and laws
against
interracial marriage.
148. The IRL did not publicly engage in defamatory xenophobia.
Instead it offered a moderate, patriotic defense of the existing
social order and republican social institutions, both of which its
members believed to be anchored in Anglo-American culture.
The IRL was composed of men of cultural authority and
political
power, such as the patrician Massachusetts Republican senator
Henry Cabot Lodge; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
president Francis Amasa Walker, who had headed the U.S.
Census
in 1870 and 1880; and A. Lawrence Lowell, the longtime
Harvard
University president. The IRL’s program was gradually enacted
into law over the course of the next quarter century: increase in
the head tax on immigrants to pay for expansion of inspection
services; an expanded list of excluded classes; a literacy test;
and
fi nally, the capstone of its goals, numerical limitation.
The quota system
The path to numerical limitation, which was ultimately
embodied
in the 1921 and 1924 quota laws, began in 1907 with
Congressional establishment of the Dillingham Commission.
Charged with undertaking a comprehensive fact-fi nding
investigation, it surveyed the entire fi eld of contemporary
immigration, and included reports on conditions in and
movement from a large number of immigrant homelands in
Europe and Asia. Consisting of thirty-nine volumes, the fi nal
report was issued in 1911. Based partly on the commissioners’
on-site inspection of conditions at emigration ports in Russia,
Germany, and southern Italy, the report dispelled long-held
notions that European nations were emptying their poor houses
and prisons and sending the inhabitants to the United States. It
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contained little explicit criticism of the immigrants, and
praised their capacity for work and many sacrifi ces to achieve
self-improvement.
But in generalizing about them, the report was nonetheless a
peculiar mixture of balanced, objective sociological analysis
and
racialist pseudo-science. It rejected the notion, for example,
that
the immigrants’ children were inherently stupid, in spite of
widely
circulated data about school failure, and it stated instead that
both
educational diffi culties and tendencies toward juvenile
delinquency were rooted in the social environment of city slums
and ghettoes. It acknowledged, too, that immigrants were less
likely to be criminals than were Americans. While it attributed
some responsibility for miserable working conditions in many
industries to immigrant workers’ willingness to put up with
employer abuses out of a desire to make money quickly and
return
home, it put more blame on employers than workers.
Both in biological and cultural terms, race pervaded the
commissioners’ fi ndings, especially but not exclusively in
regard to
Asian immigrants. Asians were also praised for their work ethic,
but exclusion was endorsed on the grounds of ineradicable
differences. It treated European people through racialist
frameworks. For example, the commission accepted the
widespread notion that southern and northern Italians were of
different races, which was said to help to explain the higher
social
and economic development of the north, among those whom
154. Commissioner Henry Cabot Lodge called “Teutonic Italians.”
Nor
did the commission necessarily embrace science when it confl
icted
with popular racialist notions. To study immigrant physiology
and
intellect, it employed the pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas,
who took the opportunity to test the ideas of pseudo-scientifi c
racialists such as the well-known writer and IRL member
Madison Grant. Boas’s skeptical conclusions were not
consistently
employed by the commission in evaluating the possibility of
innate differences.
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The commission’s report endorsed limitations on immigration,
recommending as its primary means to that end a literacy test,
which was approved by Congress in 1917 over the veto of
President
Woodrow Wilson. It also recommended the development of a
method for restriction based on numerical formulae. This
recommendation, combined with the elaborate classifi cation the
commission had done sorting out groups, awaited for a time
when
both the public and political leadership were ready to endorse
more radical solutions. That moment soon presented itself just
after World War I. During the war the national government
engaged in a massive propaganda campaign to inspire
immigrants
to enlist in the armed forces and to buy war bonds. But after the
armistice, a long-standing variety of cultural, social, economic,
and political concerns touching on the consequences of
European
immigration were then heightened by a panic about the loyalty
of
ethnic Americans brought about by the war; fears about
domestic
subversion prompted by the Bolshevik Revolution; a brief but
sharp postwar recession; race riots and anti–African American
pogroms in major cities; and a police labor strike in a major
city,
Boston, which briefl y seemed to invite anarchy.
Not all these concerns could be linked directly to immigration,
159. but
together they led the public and its political representatives to a
deeply apprehensive, conservative mood, and immigration
control
was one of its principal outlets, especially as immigration from
a
destitute, politically unstable postwar Europe recommenced.
Ethnic organizations and the political representatives of heavily
ethnic constituencies, especially in the big cities of the
northeast
and industrial Midwest, argued for continuing the liberal policy
toward Europeans, but proved no match for the pro-limitation
consensus building nationally. The title of the 1921 legislation,
Emergency Quota Act , mirrors contemporary attitudes. The
law
maintained the ban on Asians and imposed for three years a
quota
system that limited European immigration to 3 percent per year
for individual groups based on their presence in the population
revealed in the 1910 federal census. It limited entrances to
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163. 6. Though questions about the loyalties of immigrants were
raised in
many local communities during World War I, the national
government
engaged in a vigorous campaign to enlist their support for the
war
effort.
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350,000 a year, 45 percent from southern and eastern Europe
and 55 percent from northern and western Europe, substituting
unlimited entrance with what Mae Ngai calls a “hierarchy of
desirability” among the Europeans instead of a complete ban.
167. When it was soon found that the law was not having the desired
effect of limiting numbers, the more radical 1924 Johnson-Reed
Act was passed. Beginning in 1927, immigration was to be
limited
to only 150,000 annually from the entire globe, exclusive of the
Western Hemisphere, which was exempted from limitation in
order to maintain good bilateral relations with neighbors and,
via
Canada and the Caribbean, with imperial Great Britain and in
anticipation of the need for Mexican agricultural labor in the
West
and Southwest. Now quotas were to be apportioned on the basis
of the 1890 census, before the vast bulk of the southern and
eastern Europeans had arrived. Each nationality could make a
claim to a proportion of the total based on 2 percent of its
population in the United States in 1890. A commission was
established to determine the exact numbers for the future, and it
mandated a quota system that, while preserving a low absolute
number of entrants, was based on the 1920 census, and thus
more
generous to the newer European groups. The new quotas went
into effect in 1929, just as voluntary international population
movements would begin a sharp decline because of the
worldwide
depression of the 1930s, totalitarian regimes in Europe that
impeded or banned emigration, and eventually World War II.
Between Chinese exclusion in 1882 and 1930, the United States
had evolved from an open immigration regime to a carefully
constructed system that controlled and prioritized potential
entrants, based largely on racialized conceptions of
acceptability.
The trend in this half-century may contradict much that
Americans want to believe about themselves and have others
believe about them, but it hardly made Americans uniquely
illiberal. While the United States was banning the entrance of
168. Japanese in 1907, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and
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172. Canada were doing the same, and the Japanese themselves, fi
rmly
imbued with their own notions of racial superiority, banned
Chinese and Korean immigration. While the United States was
developing and imposing its quota system, other nations were
evolving their own systems of restriction. With the exception of
skilled workers, Canada would drop all immigration except that
originating in France and the United Kingdom, homelands of its
original European population groups. Argentina established a
system of preferences based on Germany and Switzerland, while
Brazil did so based on Italy, Portugal, and Spain. When Brazil
had
diffi culties attracting Europeans, its government resorted to the
recruitment of Japanese, and attempted to reconcile a need for
labor and an embrace of racialist science by classifying them
under a newly created category, “whites of Asia.” Australia
implemented a fi rmly “white Australia” policy, with
preferences
for immigrants from the United States and United Kingdom.
Behind the actions of these countries was the desire for greater
racial homogeneity, which was widely understood to be the key
to
cultural homogeneity and national progress. Through eugenics,
race increasingly became the basis of a program for improving a
population and protecting its gene pool against invasion by
those
deemed inferior, while encouraging the reproduction and
prosperity of those deemed worthy to be in the majority. When
fused to a nationalistic foreign policy by the German fascist and
Japanese imperial regimes, eugenics would become a basis for
ruthless war making and genocide against those peoples and
nations deemed inferior. Yet eugenics presented a powerful
enough vision of the path to the human future that bitter
adversaries, such as Japan and the United States, might
173. nonetheless share at some fundamental level an understanding
of how humanity might progress.
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Very Short Introduction
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Chapter 6
The widening mainstream
In the early twentieth century Henry Ford sponsored
citizenship
and language classes at his Michigan automobile factories,
which
depended heavily on immigrant labor. The climactic moment in
the graduation ceremony was when individual immigrants, with
placards around their necks or small fl ags in their hands that
identifi ed their homelands, mounted the stage and walked into
a
giant wooden kettle labeled “melting pot.” After emerging on
the
other side of the kettle, the placard or fl ag was gone, and each
held a small American fl ag in his hand. They were now
Americans.
Around the same time, the University of Chicago sociologists
William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, who were pioneers
along with their Chicago colleagues in the academic study of
177. immigrants, offered an infl uential explanation for why such a
ceremony was based on simplistic wishful thinking. They found
that immigrants developed their own group life and identities,
and that all efforts, well-meaning or malign, to speed them
rapidly
into an assimilation that effaced their pasts were doomed to fail
because they were conceived outside the immigrants’ own
experiences and needs. They wrote in the midst of a political
climate in which large numbers of native-stock Americans
demanded immigrant political and cultural conformity in the
name of “Americanization.” Americanization might mean the
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Great example of Americanization
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suppression of foreign language newspapers, as many local and
state governments demanded during World War I, or it might
mean the generally benign efforts of employers, school
teachers,
and social workers to teach what they deemed American
citizenship, manners, and beliefs alongside the English
language.
Whatever the form of such cultural instruction, the two
sociologists believed it would probably, at best, have only a
superfi cial infl uence on immigrant identities. At worst, if
insensitively enforced and accompanied by derision for the
immigrants’ cultures, it might create hostility to assimilation
and
animosity toward Americanizers.
Documented in what became a classic study of Polish
immigration
as well as a template for understanding the problems all modern
11. The graduation ceremony at the Ford automobile factory
English
School in which the graduates entered a simulated melting pot,
often
holding fl ags or having placards around their necks that identifi
ed
their native lands, and emerged holding American fl ags.
185. TENNESSEE STATE UNIV
AN: 365577 ; Gerber, David A..; American Immigration: A
Very Short Introduction
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Use this description for all immigrants
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voluntary immigrants faced in resettlement, their assumptions
were based on understandings of how human beings confront
all-encompassing transformations that shake the very
foundations
of their world. In the midst of the social disorganization and
