Americans encouraged relatively free and open immigration in the 18th and early 19th centuries and rarely challenged this policy until the late 1800s. After some states passed immigration laws after the Civil War, the Supreme Court declared immigration regulation a federal task in 1875. As the number of immigrants increased in the 1880s and economic conditions deteriorated in some areas, Congress began passing immigration laws. Although the Immigration Act of 1882 shares the principle of restricting immigration with the two laws mentioned above, it is fundamentally different. Unlike China`s Exclusion Act, the Immigration Act of 1882 would not restrict all immigration from any particular country or region. Some European immigrants were considered highly desirable, so restricting by region would also repel desirable immigrants. Instead, limiting immigration based on the exclusion of certain types of people deemed “undesirable” required legislation that could adhere to a more comprehensive and exclusive approach administered by a federal agency with federal policy. Blease`s law criminalized border crossing outside an official port of entry. Designed primarily to restrict Mexican immigration, the law made “illegal entry into the country” a misdemeanor and return after deportation a crime. 1924: Illegal immigration to the United States increases below the numerical limits set by the 1924 law. The U.S. Border Patrol was created to crack down on illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican and Canadian borders into the United States. Many of these early border crossers were Chinese immigrants and other Asian immigrants who had been denied legal entry.

In the early 1900s, the country`s dominant immigration flow shifted from northern and western European countries to southern and eastern Europe. In response, laws were passed in 1921 and 1924 to restore earlier immigration patterns by limiting total annual immigration and introducing numerical quotas based on immigrants` nationality, favoring Northern and Western European countries. The Flores settlement stems from Reno v. Flores, on the treatment of unaccompanied minors in immigration detention. The regulation, which is currently being challenged, sets federal standards for the treatment and release of children in custody. Congress renewed China`s exclusion laws and expanded enforcement mechanisms by requiring Chinese to prove their legal presence in the United States by carrying a residency certificate, a precursor to the green card system, or by being held accountable for detention and deportation. 1815 – After the War of 1812, peace is restored between the United States and Great Britain. Immigration from Western Europe is moving from a net to a torrent, causing a shift in the demographics of the United States. This first great wave of immigration lasted until the civil war.

The Haitian revolution prompted Congress to ban the immigration of free blacks to curb anti-slavery activists. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Alien Contract Labor Acts of 1885 and 1887 prohibited certain workers from immigrating to the United States. The General Immigration Act of 1882 imposed a fifty-cent capitation tax on each immigrant and blocked (or excluded) the entry of idiots, lunatics, convicts, and individuals who might become a public responsibility. 1917: Xenophobia reaches new heights on the eve of American involvement in World War I. The Immigration Act of 1917 established a literacy requirement for immigrants entering the country and stopped immigration from most Asian countries. 1907: American immigration peaks with 1.3 million people entering the country via Ellis Island alone. An international coalition of Chinese traders and students coordinated the boycott of U.S. goods and services in China and some Southeast Asian cities to protest China`s exclusion laws. The literacy test alone was not enough to keep most potential immigrants out, so in the 1920s members of Congress looked for a new way to limit immigration. Vermont immigration expert and Republican Senator William P. Dillingham instituted a measure to create immigration quotas, which he set at three percent of the total foreign-born population of any nationality in the United States, as reported in the 1910 census. This brought the total number of visas available to new immigrants each year to 350,000.

However, it did not set quotas for residents of the Western Hemisphere. President Wilson opposed the restrictive law and favored a more liberal immigration policy, so he used the pocket veto to prevent its passage. In early 1921, newly inaugurated President Warren Harding convened Congress for a special session to pass the bill. In 1922, the law was extended for two years. In 1965, however, a combination of political, social and geopolitical factors led to the passage of the Immigration and Citizenship Act, which created a new system favoring family reunification and skilled immigrants over national quotas. The law also established the first restrictions on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. Previously, Latin Americans were allowed to enter the United States without many restrictions. Since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, immigration has been dominated by people born in Asia and Latin America, rather than in Europe. Although this law is best known for creating a “no-go zone” stretching from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, from which no people were allowed to enter the United States, its main limitation was a literacy test designed to reduce European immigration. On August 3, 1882, the Forty-seventh Congress of the United States passed the Immigration Act of 1882. It is considered by many to be the “first comprehensive immigration law” because it created the exclusion guidelines by creating a “new category of inadmissible foreign nationals.” [3] The Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States through a national origin quota. The quota granted immigrant visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 census.

Immigrants from Asia were completely excluded. 1965: The Immigration and Nationality Act overhauls the U.S. immigration system. The law ended national origin quotas enacted in the 1920s, which favored certain racial and ethnic groups over others. Learn more about U.S. immigration through five short lessons delivered to your inbox every other day. Register now! To complement the racial exclusion of Asians, Congress imposed immigration restrictions on Filipinos by eventually granting independence to the Philippines.