Rethinking the Last 200 Years of US Immigration Policy
By Aristide Zolberg
The New School University
June 1, 2006
Conventional histories of US immigration policy generally present the starting point as laissezfaire, or open door, an attitude that only shifted to favor increased restriction after the Civil
War. The door began to close with the exclusion of Chinese in the final decades of the 19th
century and the imposition of annual quotas for Europeans in the 1920s.
While this timeline indeed highlights important aspects of US immigration policy, it distorts the
larger reality. As its title suggests, my book A Nation by Design argues instead that from
colonial times onward, Americans actively devised policies and laws that effectively shaped the
country's population and hence its overall makeup. In this perspective, the United States is
distinct from other overseas nations of European origin where immigration remained largely
governed by the imperial governments or, in the case of the precociously independent South
American states, hardly governed at all.
Since before the Revolutionary War, in which the country successfully gained its independence
from England, Americans not only set conditions for membership but decided quite literally
who would inhabit the land. They drove out and ultimately eradicated most of the original
dwellers. They actively recruited those considered most suitable, kept out undesirables,
stimulated new immigration flows from untapped sources, imported labor, and even undertook
the removal of some deemed ineligible for membership.
On the positive side, American policy initially extended well beyond laissez-faire to proactive
acquisition, reflected in multiple initiatives to obtain immigrants from continental Europe by
insisting on their freedom of exit at a time when population was still regarded as a scarce,
valuable resource preciously guarded by territorial rulers.
Such decision-making accounts in large part for the differences characterizing successive
immigration waves and for the recurrent waves of nativism that punctuate US immigration
history. It also illustrates the persistence of identity-related and economic concerns.
From the economic perspective, immigration is viewed essentially as a source of additional
labor, which reduces its price, or at least prevents it from rising; in the case of the highly
skilled, it also externalizes the costs of training. Therefore, business interests have been
generally supportive of immigration. By the same token, from its inception, organized labor
has tended to view immigration as a threat (although unions began to embrace immigrants in
the 1970s).
Most labor migration brings in people who differ culturally from the bulk of the established
population, as signified by language, religion, and ethnicity, often manifested in phenotypical
characteristics. Hence, the tapping of new sources of immigration frequently triggers
confrontations in what are now termed "culture wars" between those intent upon preserving
the nation's established boundaries of identity and those more tolerant of their broadening,
who include the new immigrants themselves and their descendants.
The intersection of these identity and economic concerns explains why, throughout its history,
immigration policy in the United States has recurrently opened the door to migrants from one
part of the world while shutting the door for migrants from somewhere else. "Strange
bedfellow" political dynamics, with alliances straddling the usual "liberal/conservative" divide,
have also resulted from identity and economic concerns.
Policies, labor-recruitment strategies, and popular sentiment from various time periods in US
history reflect the tensions and unexpected political alliances. This article will highlight only
some of those policies and strategies.
Colonial Period to 1860
The colonial settlers were active in the transatlantic slave trade, at least indirectly as the
Puritan family farmers turned into Yankee commercial entrepreneurs. Their success was
founded on the production of provisions for feeding the slaves and their supervisors in the
southern continental and Caribbean colonies. On the mainland itself, the proportion of blacks
rose rapidly from five percent of the population in 1660 to 21 percent in 1700.
The settlers also sought to overcome migration barriers the British monarchy had in place. The
ability of British subjects to emigrate was tightly controlled, and the British sovereign
prohibited the colonies from recruiting foreign settlers.
As formulated in the seventh grievance of the Declaration of Independence: "He has
endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws
for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither,
and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands."
But many American leaders, notably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, were also
concerned about growing immigration from the German empire, as they considered the
German language to be the bearer of a culture incompatible with republican democracy.
The Constitution was also written with migration in mind. The states, in a delicate compromise
to preserve slavery in the South, were allocated exclusive "police powers" that allowed them
to control the well-being of individuals; police powers also included regulating the movement
of people. This constitutional compromise made it impossible to create a comprehensive
federal immigration policy.
Americans from the industrializing Northeast pursued their recruitment policy even more
vigorously after independence in 1776, seeking to lift European barriers to exit that were
commonplace at that time. After independence, the new republic campaigned vigorously in the
name of freedom to bring about an "exit revolution" throughout Europe.
From the 1830s on, railroad and shipping companies actively promoted emigration from
northern Europe, and, in many cases, the multiplying US consulates functioned in effect as
labor-recruiting and land-selling agencies, eventually reaching all the way to remote Norway.
Simultaneously, American entrepreneurs enticed newcomers from across Western Europe by
way of private missions.
By the 1830s, the "exit revolution" had been achieved, thanks also in part to a population
boom in Europe that eliminated government fears of a population shortage. From this
perspective, the onset of a huge immigration wave in the 1830s is not attributable merely to
"push factors," including such frequently cited conditions as European population growth and
the "Irish potato famine." The failure of the potato crop also affected the Low Countries,
northern France, and much of Germany and Scandinavia, all of which experienced
demographic growth following the introduction of the potato a century earlier.
Immigration of Roman Catholics from new origins — Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg, the
German Rhineland, and the southern part of the Netherlands — challenged the established
boundaries of American cultural identity, initially founded on Protestantism. These immigrants
were thought to be subject to manipulation by that time period's "ayatollah of Rome." Indeed,
the Pope then vehemently condemned republicanism and democracy.
Hence, in the 1830s and 1840s, there were renewed attempts to enact national-level
immigration restrictions, which business interests (starting with the shipping companies
themselves) successfully defeated by invoking the constitutional doctrine of police powers,
repeatedly reasserted by the Supreme Court. The growing preoccupation with ethnic diversity
was reflected in the 1850 census, which recorded not only place of birth but the birthplace of
parents of native-born Americans.
Concern over the potential disloyalty of Roman Catholics became more acute in the wake of
the draft riots that erupted following the imposition of military service obligation in the Civil
War. In response, Roman Catholics did Americanize but also elaborated distinct social
institutions ranging from parochial schools to universities and hospitals, as well as fraternal
organizations.
From the outset, Americans also fiercely opposed the use of their territories as dumping
grounds for European undesirables. For example, in a paper read before the Society for
Political Enquiries at the house of Benjamin Franklin in 1787, Tench Coxe reminded his
audience that "[w]ith a most preposterous policy, the former masters of his country were
accustomed to discharge their jails of the vilest part of their subjects, and to transmit ship
loads of wretches, too worthless for the old world, to taint and corrupt the infancy of the new."
No longer able to continue this practice, in 1776 the British government housed those awaiting
transportation in old ships on the Thames and in southern naval ports, for possible use as
labor in public works; however, this proved highly unpopular. Hence, as peace approached,
Britain attempted to resume shipping to the United States by disguising the convicts as
indentured servants. When this proved impossible in the face of effective American resistance,
the authorities settled on remote Botany Bay, Australia, because of its suitability as a naval
base, which might be built by convict labor, and the first deportation fleet sailed out three
years later.
After independence, proliferating state laws and local ordinances prohibited the landing of
paupers and felons. However, these were largely ineffective, as it was quite easy for shippers
to dump them in the state next door (e.g., New Jersey instead of New York) to get around
regulations and avoid fines. New Jersey did not protest as it was eager to attract the shipping
industry and anticipated that the newcomers would move on to New York after landing.
Although the federal government couldn't regulate the movement of people, it had the power
to regulate international and interstate trade, including ships that carried people. The first
major enactment of this sort was the comprehensive Passenger Act of 1819. Inspired by a
pre-independence British official's proposal, it was designed to attract European immigrants of
all nationalities who qualified as independent settlers or free workers. The act succeeded in
minimizing the dangers of the Atlantic crossing while simultaneously deterring the
burdensome poor from embarking by limiting ship capacity, which raised the price of passage.
This federal law, together with state regulations governing ports of entry, created a
rudimentary system of "remote control" that allowed the United States to select immigrants by
projecting its boundaries into immigrant-source countries.
In addition, a complementary market-oriented land policy made land accessible to settlers of
modest means but was simultaneously designed, once again, to keep out the burdensome
poor. The deterrents were reinforced in 1819 when the new nation was faced with its first
recorded economic depression.
Successive Republican administrations also harnessed American diplomacy to create a new
African state (Liberia) that accepted freed slaves — notably from Virginia, the country's key
state at the time — and provided incentives for them to do so because they were deemed
unsuitable for membership in American society.
Civil War to World War I
After the Civil War ended, in 1865, slavery was abolished. The Civil War constitutional
amendments also made it possible to shift immigration regulation from the state to the federal
level. Within a single decade, the federal government had decisively taken control of
immigration. This shift was a major turning point, but one that has been mistakenly
understood as the beginning of US immigration policy.
The 14th amendment, ratified in 1868, defined US citizenship to include all children born on
US soil (with some exceptions). Measures that most states favored, but the Supreme Court
had previously barred because they fell within the sphere of international trade, became
national policy.
Concurrently, in the 1860s, the cost of transatlantic travel underwent a dramatic drop thanks
to technological improvements. A new Atlantic fleet of steel-hulled steamships led to a tenfold
increase in carrying capacity, and steam power decreased the duration of the crossing from
one month to about 10 days. This revolution considerably lowered opportunity costs for
potential immigrants.
American and European industrialists and transporters also availed themselves of the
expansion of the European railroad network eastward and southward to broaden their sphere
of recruitment to include southern and eastern Europeans (many of the latter Jewish).
One consequence of the transportation revolution was the possibility, even for persons of
modest means, to temporarily return to their country of origin when not employed, even
seasonally in the case of construction workers. The development of cheap newsprint, arising
from parallel technological developments, led to a proliferation of newspapers in the
immigrants' mother tongues, providing information from "home" and contributing to the
formation of what became the typical organization of American society along lines of
hyphenated identities.
It is estimated that on the eve of World War I, one-third of European immigrants to the United
States returned to their country of origin at least once during their lifetime, and often retired
there at the end of their active economic life to take advantage of lower cost of living and the
assistance provided by extended families. Polish-Russian Jews were the major exception,
undoubtedly because their movement was not solely economic but also represented escape
from perennial persecution or at least burdensome discrimination.
When the European flow ebbed in the second half of the 1850s because of the Crimean War,
precisely at a moment when the US was experiencing major westward expansion, American
entrepreneurs tapped labor reserves in Europe and Asia. In keeping with this trend, President
Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, pressed Secretary of State William H. Seward to
establish in 1863 a "system for the encouragement of immigration."
Seward, a former senator from New York, secured congressional approval of a partnership
between the private sector and the national government that imported European workers
under conditions that reinstated elements of bondage; these conditions had been eliminated in
the early decades of the century because, under the evolving doctrine of human rights and
citizenship within Europe as well as the United States, they were considered inappropriate for
white people. Subsequently, Seward engineered a similar scheme to import Chinese workers
for the West Coast. An essential element for the plan was American diplomatic intervention to
persuade the reluctant Chinese imperial authorities to let their people emigrate. Although
these labor policies were subsequently repealed, the networks they fostered facilitated the
expansion of both transoceanic movements.
In 1894, in search of an additional source of workers for West Coast development, the United
States persuaded Japan "to let its people go" by way of a treaty providing for mutual free
entry. Some 26,000 Japanese immigrated by the end of the decade and availed themselves of
opportunities in commercial agriculture by buying farmlands. After the US acquired Hawaii at
the turn of the 20th century, Japanese settled in the islands as well.
Despite the fact that it resulted from American initiatives, the expansion of the sphere of
immigration to include "yellow races" on the Pacific side, as well as "not-so-white Europeans"
from the south and east on the Atlantic side, prompted a new round of negative reactions
from those concerned with maintaining the established boundaries of American identity. The
diversity of white immigrants led critics to equate some of the newcomers with the despised
Chinese. Also, return movement and the maintenance of links with the country of origin raised
a great deal of concern regarding the willingness of "new" immigrants to assimilate. Hence,
from the 1880s onward, the vast increase and growing heterogeneity of the immigrants once
again precipitated a "crisis."
With regard to the Chinese, the cultural protectionists triumphed early on, first by effectively
excluding Chinese females in 1895. This was seen as a way to prevent the birth of American
citizens to Chinese parents. Eventually, all immigration from China was successfully banned.
The fast-growing flow of Japanese immigrants quickly set off negative reactions, signaled by
the formation of a Japanese and Korean Exclusion League in 1905. Tensions were exacerbated
by the San Francisco earthquake of April 1906. When the schools reopened in October 1906,
the Board of Education imposed Oriental segregation.
Despite President Theodore Roosevelt's initial attempts at mediation, in March 1907 he availed
himself of an amendment to the Immigration Act to exclude Japanese who entered the United
States through a third country or territory. In what is known as the Gentleman's Agreement of
1907, Roosevelt persuaded San Francisco to end its segregation of Japanese schoolchildren
and Japan promised to withhold passports from workers intending to migrate to the United
States.
However, far from being generated by a popular social movement, restrictionist policies were
largely initiated by members of the political class, who drew their ideas selectively from
intellectuals to whom they were connected via the intimate networks of elite education.
Elites became persuaded that, under conditions of democracy, mass armies, a free-for-all
labor market, social cohesion, and social control required the populace to be socialized into a
well-defined and homogeneous national culture. Since culture was still believed to be largely
rooted in biological inheritance (as expressed by the concept of "atavism"), heterogeneity of
ancestry was perceived as a major political liability. Therefore, immigration came to be viewed
as a necessary but problematic factor of national development, subject to systematic
regulation.
Within this general climate, the course of policy was shaped by the changing structure of
congressional politics, notably the formation of a conservative alliance of Republicans and
Southern Democrats. This coalition sought to maintain the cultural and political hegemony of
northern European, mostly Protestant whites, who, within the ideology of race founded on
"Social Darwinism" prevailing by then on both sides of the Atlantic, considered themselves
"Anglo-Saxons," the most evolved group. The nascent American labor movement — albeit led
mostly by outsiders to this group, including some of eastern European Jewish origin — saw
itself as being undermined by immigration. Consequently, the labor movement entered a de
facto alliance with the cultural restrictionists on socioeconomic grounds.
Concurrently, Jewish organizations emerged as important actors in immigration politics,
seeking to keep the doors relatively open, or at least minimize the likelihood that closure
would severely restrict their eastern European coreligionists. The Catholic Church joined in to
some extent as well. Together, and with the support of industrialists, they fought against
nativist restrictionism.
Escalating restrictive measures did little to reduce the immigration flow from Europe which,
just before World War I, reached a historical high as a proportion of the total US population.
Population growth, the steady expansion of the European railroad system into the less
developed southern and eastern regions of the continent, as well as the lowering costs of sea
travel (fares and time loss from gainful employment) had steadily enlarged the pool of
potential emigrants.
As the supply of Chinese labor dwindled, the development of the West, and especially
California's emerging vocation as a fruit and vegetable exporter, was threatened.
Southwestern entrepreneurs then turned to Mexico, which had experienced rapid population
growth and where it had become more difficult for peasants to live off the land. Entrepreneurs
responded to the concerns of cultural conservatives by arguing that Mexicans were merely
"birds of passage" with no interest in settling in the United States. In the same vein, the
United States stimulated emigration from its new territory, the Philippines, as a substitute for
the Japanese.
In US immigration history, this closing of the door for Chinese has been given considerable
attention, but the consequent recruitment from Mexico has not.
The outbreak of World War I extinguished transatlantic movement precisely when the
increasing demand for industrial products created a labor shortage. American companies in the
industrial Midwest recruited Mexican workers, creating Mexican-American communities in
Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois, among other states. Similarly, industrialists such as Henry Ford
encouraged African-American migration from the South to northern cities such as Detroit and
Chicago. This move from South to North demonstrates how internal and international
migrations can be related.
1920s to 1964
After World War I, the United States, in effect, proclaimed to the world that it would cease
being a nation of immigrants. In one of the most spectacular displays of legislative power in
American history, Congress sought to make European and Asian immigration disappear with
legislation passed in 1921 under the leadership of Senator Charles Dillingham and again in
1924 (usually referred to as the Johnson Act).
Admissions were allocated so as to severely limit the immigration of Southern and Eastern
Europeans by way of national origin quotas. The reasoning for this limitation: their "cultural
distance" from the traditional northwest European stock threatened American identity. The
system was devised by commissioning sympathetic social scientists to trace the origins of the
American populations to its alleged European roots. The researchers then collated annual
entry visas in proportion to the share of each nationality in the current population.
Obviously, the most ancient groups, notably British, German, and other northwest European
(Dutch, Belgian, and Luxemburgers) were assured the largest representation, and the
latecomers, such as Greeks, Italians, and Poles, received the smallest. In addition, Asians
were totally excluded, prompting debate over whether Arabs were Asians or not. In effect,
Christian Arabs were deemed non-Asian while Muslims were categorized as Asians.
Thanks to the regulatory opportunities provided by the technology of transoceanic
transportation, the transformation was radical. Within a decade, the flow of people was
reduced to less than one-fourth of its prewar level, with the reduction from Europe most
evident as Asians had already been largely excluded before the 1924 law.
The new legislation imposed even more draconian restrictions on Asian immigration, especially
from China. Consequently, there were fewer Chinese in the United States in 1940 than in 1900
— one of the few immigrant groups that were, in effect, extinguished. This was also the case
with the much smaller Indian community, who were not allowed to bring over wives and were
denied US citizenship following a 1923 Supreme Court decision (United States v. Bhagat Singh
Thind).
Ironically, Mexican immigration was encouraged in the 1920s. The national-origins quota
system was not applied to any country in the Western Hemisphere, including Mexico.
During the Great Depression, Mexican residents and even US-born citizens of Mexican origin
were massively deported to make room for unemployed non-Latino citizens. Yet temporary
labor migration from Mexico, in the form of the Bracero Program (1942 to 1964), was
promoted once again after the outbreak of World War II. Internal migrations of AfricanAmericans, whites from the rural South, and Puerto Ricans to the industrial regions were
stimulated on economic grounds as well.
Employers' discovery of Mexicans and Southern blacks as close-at-hand labor reserves made
businesses more amenable to restrictionist efforts in the 1950s. The 1952 McCarran-Walter
Act maintained the Western Europe-biased quotas and set aside a sizeable portion of each
country's quota for permanent residents' family members and highly skilled workers whose
services were in short supply among the native labor force, but breached Oriental exclusion by
establishing token quotas for immigrants from Asian countries.
In response to the growing Soviet threat in Europe, the McCarran-Walter Act opened a side
door for displaced persons and other European refugees, defined to include Italian earthquake
victims subject to mobilization by the Italian Communist Party as well as Greeks caught in the
midst of a civil war.
Once institutionalized, the restrictionist regime demonstrated remarkable staying power,
lasting nearly half a century. It was overthrown only in the 1960s, when the descendants of
groups targeted for restriction gained unusual political power in key constituencies and
succeeded in shifting the boundaries of American identity so as to include them.
After 1965
Although President John F. Kennedy led initial efforts to reform immigration law, the
Immigration and Nationality of Act passed after his assassination, thanks to the astute political
maneuvering of his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.
The 1965 law maintained an annual limit on immigration but allowed 170,000 immigrants
from Eastern Hemisphere countries with no more than 20,000 per country. It even imposed,
for the first time, an annual limit on immigration from countries in the Western Hemisphere.
Preference was decisively given to the close relatives of US citizens, including married brothers
and sisters (critics called it "the brothers and sisters act") with a share of annual entries from
outside the Western Hemisphere reserved for persons qualifying as refugees under the new
international definition and another set aside for persons with skills certified as being in
shortage.
Advocates in Congress from both political parties assured that the law was in no way designed
to bring about an inflationary wave of newcomers. It is impossible to establish whether they
were knowingly downplaying this aspect or whether they genuinely did not anticipate the law's
consequences.
After a slow start, the law's preference for relatives catalyzed a chaining effect, which, within
two decades, raised the number of annual legal newcomers back to levels not seen since
before World War I. However, given the much larger US population, these numbers
constituted a smaller proportion of the total population. Thanks to the elimination of Asian
exclusion and the national-origins system, as well as decolonization in Africa and Asia, the new
wave — which includes the first flow of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa since slavery —
has been more diverse than any of its predecessors.
Conclusion
Although the 1965 law imposed limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, it was
evident from the start that the United States did not possess the police capacity to prevent
undocumented movement across its southern border. In addition, the creation of such a
capacity would have required radical actions, notably the enlistment of private employers
nationwide in immigration law enforcement.
Arguably, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) did require employers to
enforce immigration law by mandating that they hire only workers who could prove their legal
status. This was the price liberals had to pay for securing their primary goal: the legalization
of several million unauthorized residents, most of whom were from Mexico.
The employer verification component was essentially abandoned after IRCA passed, with
unauthorized immigrants able to submit forged documents that employers accepted. Several
attempts were made in the 1990s to devise effective strategies for controlling entry through
the southern border, but none of those enacted to-date have succeeded in stopping
unauthorized immigration; the matter remains on the national agenda.
While the principal political alignment remains that of the vocal cultural conservatives, who
object to the changing character of American identity, against employers eager to insure a
continued supply of cheap unskilled labor, the balance seems to be leaning toward
maintenance of the messy but relatively liberal status quo. This is because, beginning in the
1970s, some unions changed their position on immigration once they realized that immigrants,
legal and unauthorized, provided the most fertile source of replenishment for their depleting
ranks, initially in the garment industry and subsequently in a variety of service occupations.
Moreover, Hispanics — currently the target of most restrictive efforts — are rapidly achieving
significant political power and are therefore being courted in an unprecedented manner by
both parties. Therefore, the "strange bedfellows" are likely to remain at center stage for the
predictable future.
Aristide Zolberg is Walter A. Eberstadt Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Faculty at
the New School University in New York City and Director of its International Center for
Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship. This article is based on his latest book, A Nation By
Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America, published in 2006 by Harvard
University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation.
Copyright @ 2006 Migration Policy Institute. All rights reserved.
MPI · 1400 16th St. NW, Suite 300 · Washington, DC 20036
ph: (001) 202-266-1940 · fax: (001) 202-266-1900
source@migrationinformation.org