{"id":2905,"date":"2006-11-12T00:18:43","date_gmt":"2006-11-12T07:18:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/11\/12\/a-very-brief-primer-on-immigration-history-part-1\/"},"modified":"2006-11-12T00:18:43","modified_gmt":"2006-11-12T07:18:43","slug":"a-very-brief-primer-on-immigration-history-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2905","title":{"rendered":"A Very Brief Primer on Immigration History, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the hot topics in the recent US election was immigration. Pundits, like Lou Dobbs, are on a mission to “fix our broken borders” by cracking down on illegal immigration. They argue that immigrants are taking jobs from American citizens, refusing to assimilate, changing American cultural values, and engaging in criminal activities. As I listen to these arguments, I am always reminded of my class lecture on European American immigration patters. The rhetoric of contemporary nativist activists like Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan is nothing new. In fact, it follows almost exactly the same rhetoric of earlier anti-immigrant backlashes<\/a>. While Latinos are the primary targets of contemporary nativists, in the early years it was the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the Jews, and the Chinese, and the “problems” were the same.<\/p>\n

Before we can understand the significance of anti-immigration backlashes, it is also important to explore the variation waves of immigration and how they are shaped by policy and economic conditions. The earliest European immigrants were primarily English, and since the English became the dominant group, they were also able to set policies and social norms for other immigrants. ((Of course, I haven’t forgotten about the indigenous people of North America or the involuntary African immigrants, but the focus here will be on voluntary migrants.)) One of the primary social norms that British set was the norm of Anglo-conformity, which was proposed by Milton Gordon ((Gordon, Milton. 1964. Assimilation in American Life. <\/em>New York: Oxford University Press.)) Under the system of Anglo-conformity immigrants were expected to model the English American customs and language to the point that they became indistinguishable.<\/p>\n

During the earliest years, the US had a fairly open immigration policy. European immigrants were welcomed and encouraged to come to the US, and there were few laws or policies that limited immigration. Most immigrants in the earliest years came from England, Germany, and Ireland<\/a> (along with a small contingent of Scandinavian immigrants). The German and Irish immigrants were very much vilified, as this quote from a recent Washington Post article highlights:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Still, European immigrants found plenty of backlash. Nativist sentiments ran strong, and white Protestant reformers championed English-language instruction and temperance, the latter reflecting the Establishment’s disdain for hard-drinking immigrants. The Germans set up 121 breweries in Brooklyn and Manhattan alone.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

From the 1700s to the late 1800s immigration was open for these immigrants. Very few immigrants were turned away and there were few laws limiting immigration. As the Washington Post article states:<\/p>\n

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Until 1918, the United States did not require passports; the term “illegal immigrant” had no meaning. New arrivals were required only to prove their identity and find a relative or friend who could vouch for them.<\/p>\n

Customs agents kept an eye out for lunatics and the infirm (and after 1905, for anarchists). Ninety-eight percent of the immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island were admitted to the United States, and 78 percent spent less than eight hours on the island. (The Mexico-United States border then was unguarded and freely crossed in either direction.) “Shipping companies did the health inspections in Europe because they didn’t want to be stuck taking someone back,” said Nancy Foner, a sociology professor at Hunter College and author of “From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration.” “Eventually they introduced a literacy test,” she added, “but it was in the immigrant’s own language, not English.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the later half of the 1800s the first major restrictions against immigrants were imposed. The Chinese were primary the targets of these laws, and the Naturalization Act of 1870 made Chinese ineligible for citizenship. This act also targeted the wives of Chinese laborers, and all people born in African or of African descent were made eligible for citizenship. Then in 1882 Chinese were banned entirely from entering the country. ((This ban on Chinese laborers was not lifted until the 1940s.)) The backlash against Chinese often stemmed from fear that they were taking away jobs.<\/p>\n

During the late 1800s and early 1900s immigration from southern and eastern Europe skyrocketed, and there was also a backlash against these immigrants, which lead to much greater restrictions. In 1917, the restrictions against expanded to include an “Asiatic Barred Zone,” which extend over Asian and the Pacific Rim; moreover, immigrants were required to take literacy tests, and “anarchists” and other radical were also barred. This was one of several laws that lead to the National Origins Act of 1924<\/a>. According to History Matters<\/a>,<\/p>\n

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In response to growing public opinion against the flow of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the years following World War I, Congress passed first the Quota Act of 1921 then the even more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act). Initially, the 1924 law imposed a total quota on immigration of 165,000\u2014less than 20 percent of the pre-World War I average. It based ceilings on the number of immigrants from any particular nation on the percentage of each nationality recorded in the 1890 census\u2014a blatant effort to limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, which mostly occurred after that date. In the first decade of the 20th century, an average of 200,000 Italians had entered the United States each year. With the 1924 Act, the annual quota for Italians was set at less than 4,000.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This act radically changed immigration by setting quotas that gave preferences to groups that were already represented in the US. While there were other immigration restrictions imposed during this period, this law had the greatest impact. From the 1920s until 1965, the number of immigrants entering the US dropped dramatically and at it’s low point in the 1970s the percentage of the population that was foreign born was only 4.7%<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So the first major wave of immigration, which ended in the late 1800s, included immigrants mostly from western Europe, and these immigrants faced very few restrictions. The restrictions in this era were based on race and mental health, but complex immigration processing or laws did not exist at this time. It was until the second wave of immigration from the late 1800s-1924 that much greater restrictions were put on immigration. These restrictions were explicitly racialized and directed at Chinese and Eastern European immigrants. Over both of these waves of immigration similar concerns were expressed about the fitness of immigrants. Nativist believed that immigrants threatened the American way of life, and the arguments used are remarkably similar to those of the contemporary nativists like Lou Dobbs or Pat Buchanan.<\/p>\n

Next in this series I’ll discuss the Immigration Act of 1965 and it’s effects on our current population.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the hot topics in the recent US election was immigration. Pundits, like Lou Dobbs, are on a mission to “fix our broken borders” by cracking down on illegal immigration. They argue that immigrants are taking jobs from American … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108,54,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-immigration-migrant-rights-etc","category-media-criticism","category-race-racism-and-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}