Essay Number Two: 20th Century Developments in Immigration Policy Jackie Ruiz HIS-290-002: ST: Immigrant America Professor Maher 23 November 2021 Ruiz 1 Immigration policy in the United States is a newborn in terms of legislation. Decisions on the topic of immigration were mostly done on a case-by-case basis, and immigration policy seemed a long-distance away. As a country founded on immigrants, restricting immigration did not come to light until much later after independence. However, the early political party, called the federalists made the first move towards such legislation. The federalists believed in a strong federal government in support of unity. The Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 1700s were the Ferealist contribution to immigrant restriction; which severely imposed on the freedom of speech of immigrants. It was all justified by claimed fear of France, and as time passes ostensible fear becomes the backbone of immigration policy. This suspicious attitude towards immigrants is replicated throughout the years. For example, the monumental Chinese Exclusion act of 1882, reigned in the purported American fear of losing their jobs. The malicious fear within the American population was the collectively strong anti-Chinese sentiment. Therefore, the act was the precedent for discriminatory immigration policy in the 1900s. The exemplar Alien and Sedition Acts and the Chinese Exclusion act were not the end to immigration control in the country. Immigration policy continued to unfold in the next century with further targets like Catholics, Spanish speakers, Jews, communists, and criminals. Major developments in immigration legislation in the 20th century include the interpolated mandates that capacitated family unification, the implementation and removal of quota systems, and the substantial addition of a refugee policy to immigration legislation. During the action of immigrating, families recurrently arrived in the United States in separate waves in the process of chain migration. Unfortunately, families are parted Ruiz 2 through the process, so the United States government emphasized family unification in immigration policy. The concern was first addressed in the Gentlemen’s agreement of 1907. It constituted a compromise between Japan and the United States to impede any subsequential immigration of Japanese laborers into the country. Furthermore, the agreement contained a clause that, “allowed passports to be issued to ‘laborers who have already been in America and to the parents, wives, and children of laborers resident there’”.1 Despite the objective of limiting Japanese immigration, this permitted families to reconvene with ease. A later expansion of the family reunification law appeared in 1952. The McCarran-Walter Act permitted the entrance of foreign husbands of citizen women as non-quota immigrants.2 The act's main triumph was the eradication of the bar between naturalization and specific races, but it included family unification with an emphasis on the family values of the American population. If the Japanese immigrants became citizens, they were not true Americans until they assimilated down to the family values of an American. Family ties inflated the immigrant population for years because once one immigrant entered his whole family followed. The 1965 Immigration Act created caps for most immigrant groups except: “spouses, unmarried minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens”.3 This furthered family unification, as it allowed a manageable Roger Daniels, “9 Minorities From Other Regions,” in Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 2019), pp. 238-264, 255. 1 Roger Daniels, “13 Changing The Rules,” in Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 2019), pp. 332-332, 332. 2 3 Lbid.,342 Ruiz 3 route to citizenship. The nuclear family concept was of value in the conservative American mind, so its facilitation continually loomed into immigration policy for the following century. The ruling component of immigration policy is the quota on the entrance of people into the country. As the sole immigration policy regulating the early 1900s, the quota remained a big topic of controversy. Historian Oscar Handlin critiqued the National Origins System of 1924 as “a quota system setting up a hierarchy of desirable and undesirable peoples is offensive to our allies throughout the world”.4 He added, “limiting the available places for countries like Italy which do, they have reduced the stream to a negligible trickle”.5 In these excerpts, Handlin exposes the ill effects of quotas based on nationality. They lead to an acceptance of inherent racism and xenophobia in the nation, and a significant decrease in the available workforce. Fortunately, an end to this harmful structure of quota came in 1965. During the Johnson presidency, a novel immigration statute was signed into law. The Immigration Act of 1965, which ended the nation origin quotas, was followed by an influx of thousands of immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia6 Oscar Handlin, “The Immigration Fight Has Only”(American Jewish Committee, 1952)Mae M. Ngai and Jon Gjerde, “12 Immigration Reform and Ethnic Politics,” in Major Problems in American Immigration History: Documents and Essays (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013), pp. 460-462, 461. 4 5 Lbid.,460 Arthur J. pais and Etta Sanders, “Transplanting God:Asian Immigrants Are Building Buddhist and Hindu temples Across the U.S”(Far Eastern Economic Review, Dow Jones and Company, Inc.,1994) quoted in Mae M. Ngai and Jon Gjerde, “13 Immigrants In The Post-Industrial Age ,” in Major Problems in American Immigration 6 Ruiz 4 The cap on the number of visas distributed is established based on the immigrants the hemisphere of origin. This is a contradiction to the original quota act that used nationality as a reference. As a result of the updated quota system, the United States endured an increase in immigration into its vicinity. To illustrate, the increase in South Asian immigrants created a place for Buddhism, Hindu, and other minority religions at the time. The suggestion is that America enriched itself in an influx of new cultures because of the new quota. Quotas produced a significant definition to the climate of immigration in America. Quotas remain an enduring and essential aspect of immigration legislation, an aspect with no end in sight. The moment immigration policy defined refugees in legislation as a disparate class of alien, immigration policy reached a new level of maturity. Prior to this innovation in policy, refugee related dilemmas exercised only immigration policy. This propagated a series of American failures to help refugees including the death of the Roger-Wagner bill, that attempted to save 20,000 German children.7 The policies were not fit for such circumstances, and morals proved futile. The first refugee legislation’s debut transpired in 1948. William Stratton’s8 brainchild the Displaced Persons Act of History: Documents and Essays (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013), pp. 488-491, 489. Roger Daniels, “8 Eastern Europeans,” in Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 2019), pp. 212-237, 229. 7 8 Republican Congressman Ruiz 5 1948 allowed “the admission of almost 250,000 DPs9 over two fiscal years”.10 The importance of the act lays in the increased admittance of displaced peoples into the states in a structured manner. Additionally, one must recognize that despite its short-lived presence in the rulebooks, the act set a precedent for future refugee legislation. It murmured fears of possible “overflowing” of refugees and differentiated policies for immigrants who chose to migrate and those who were coerced. Subsequent refugeespecific legislation emerged a few decades later. The Refugee Act of 1980 delineated a refugee as, any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion11 President Carter’s amended refugee definition took influence from the United Nations’ official rendering. This expanded the volume of people who qualified to enter the country as refugees. The objective of the act was to increase the number of refugees authorized into the country and to allow accommodating resettlement into America. Furthermore, the act disclosed a category of refugee known as, asylees. The act reads an “asylee is a 9 DPs stands for displaced persons 10 11 Daniels, Coming to America, 331 Refugee Act of 1980, Public Law No. 106-104 quoted in Mae M. Ngai and Jon Gjerde, “14 Refugees and Asylees,” in Major Problems in American Immigration History: Documents and Essays (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013), pp. 524-565, 525-6. Ruiz 6 person who applies for entry into the United States while already here”.12 Using labels allows understanding of a problem, and consequently, the possibility to solve said problem arrives. In the example of labeling the unique experience of refugees applying for asylum internally, the name asylee allowed the American government to streamline a unique process for their situation. Similarly labeling refugees in contrast to economic immigrants authorized a set of acts that allowed helpful change in the admittance of refugees. The absence of strict, clear, and effective immigration policy developed an environment with a major dependence on public opinion for influence. However, ideologies like nativism and xenophobia reigned in the 1900s among the general American public. The Red Scare succeeding WWII produced a ravaging fear of communist ideologies and domestic suspicion arose against foreigners.13Many feared communist spies would sneak in among refugees or new immigrants. Similar happenings in the political climate caused citizens to grow in distrust of newcomers. As a result, government policies on immigration often catered to the idea of reducing immigration numbers and pleased a restrictionist ideology. Arguably the apex of anti-immigration belief was California’s Proposition 187. In 1995, Governor Pete Wilson, proposed the outright denial of public services to undocumented immigrants14. This included public 12 Daniels, Coming to America, 346 13 Daniels, Coming to America, 329 14 Report on the Americas, vol. 29 (New York, NY: North American Congress on Latin America, 1995), 29-34. quoted in Mae M. Ngai and Jon Gjerde, “Immigration in the Post Industrial Age) in Major Problems in American Immigration History: Ruiz 7 schools, healthcare, government food stamps. The public support was so intense, protests erupted by Chicano students, who spoke for undocumentated immigrants who could not.15 Proposition 187 never matured into law, but it is a representation of the extremes legislation will take amidst public influence. In terms of immigration policy, its largest pressures came from nativist and xenophobic minds. Documents and Essays (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013), pp. 486488, 486. 15 Lbid.
