immigration

(ecology) The one-way inward movement of individuals or their disseminules into a population or population area.
(genetics) Gene flow from one population into another by interbreeding between members of the populations.

noun

Departure from one's native land to settle in another: emigration, exodus, migration, transmigration. See approach/retreat.

Immigration is a major historical, yet current influence and integral part of how nations continue to grow and change in population and diversity. M. Fix and J. S. Passel (1994) list the principal goals of U.S. immigration policy as: social, economic, cultural, moral, and national and economic security (includes protection from infectious and animal-borne diseases, environmental hazards, food safety, terrorists, and various criminal acts). Canadian and European policies encompass similar goals, but with greater emphasis on the economic impact of immigration. In 1999 over 16 million legal immigrants in Western Europe earned more than $460 billion. However, despite the projection indicating that European countries face a dramatic population decline over the next 50 years, many European countries want to restrict immigration on the basis of economic reasons, including the fear of exacerbating the already significant problem of unemployment. Immigration policies are the responsibility of national governments, while the policies regarding how countries deal with immigrants are shared by the various levels of government—national, state, and local.

At the federal level in the United States, for example, several agencies play key roles in developing and implementing national immigration and immigrant policies. The principal immigration agencies are: the United States Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which is responsible for enforcing the laws regulating the admission of foreign-born persons(i.e., aliens) to the United States and for administering various immigration benefits, including naturalization and resettlement of refugees; and the Department of Treasury U.S. Customs Service, which is the primary enforcement agency protecting the nation's borders. Other federal agencies deal more directly with the public health dimension of immigration and immigrants. Although many countries have organizations dealing with immigrants and immigration issues, there are international agencies that act as important brokers regarding migration among countries. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is an intergovernmental body that is committed to the principle that humane and orderly migration benefits migrants and society. Since 1951, the IOM has acted with member countries (currently 79) to assist in meeting operational challenges of migration, to advance understanding of migration issues, to encourage social and economic development through migration, and to uphold human dignity and well being of migrants.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is another international agency which, since 1951, has played a significant role in responding to the world's growing refugee predicament. As one of the world's principal humanitarian organizations, the UNHCR provides international protection to refugees and seeks durable solutions to their plight. For the year 2000, there were about 22.5 million refugees and other persons of concern to the UNHCR.

History and Demographics

Immigration policies have directly influenced the demographic composition of the immigrating populations over the lives of the nations. The first immigration office in the United States and Canadian federal governments were created in the nineteenth century by laws intended mainly to encourage immigration. Later, the U.S. Immigration Act of 1891 provided for deportation of aliens living unlawfully in the country. About this same time, in 1882, the U.S. Congress asserted the first broad federal regulatory power regarding immigration by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years. In Canada, although there was no law passed to exclude any particular group of immigrants, careful procedures were developed to ensure most applications submitted by black people were rejected. From the late nineteenth century to the year 2000, most North American, European, and Australian immigration policies have shifted from a focus on qualities of individuals(e.g., excluding illiterates, criminals, those with illnesses) to a focus on countries of origin with a more inclusionary focus using preference categories, to a sharpened humanitarian approach in admitting those in need (such as refugees) through permanent and systematic assessments. In European countries, various approaches for integrating immigrants are at work. Germany has developed special institutions and programs for foreigners, while France tends to stress general rather than foreigners-only programs. The European Union recognizes that immigrants are needed for demographic and economic reasons.

Census data indicate that the percent of foreign-born persons in the total U.S. population has waxed and waned from a high of 14.8 percent in 1910 to a low of 4.7 percent in 1970. In July 1999, the foreign-born resident population estimates totalled about 25.8 million, or about 9.5 percent of the total U.S. population. Likewise, Canada's peak year for immigration (1913) saw the arrival of about 400,000 people. Its 1996 census showed a continued growth in immigration with 17.4 percent of Canadian residents being first-generation immigrants. From 1990 to 1999, the United States foreign-born population increased. Hispanics increased from 8 to 11 million persons, and the Asian and Pacific Islander groups increased from4.5 to 6.3 million. More than 60 percent of the Asian and Pacific Islander populations in the United States and about 35 percent of Hispanics are foreign-born.

These statistics reveal how changes in immigration policies, especially within the past fifty years, have influenced the makeup of the foreignborn populations in the United States. For France, there have been several immigration priority shifts over the years. Initially priority was given to members of France's colonies, subsequently, to Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and, more recently, to North African guest workers. A shift of immigration priorities also occurred in Canada when, after its 1976 Immigration Act was passed, immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America were welcomed.

The late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century provided a different country-of-origin profile for immigration to the United States. Since 1820, Germany has been the greatest source of immigrants to the United States, with Mexico ranking second, Italy third, and the United Kingdom and Ireland a close fourth and fifth, respectively. Changes were evident in 1996 when the country-of-origin profile for immigration showed that of the top ten nations, four were Asian nations, three Latin American nations, two from the former Soviet Union, and one from the Caribbean. The United States Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 provided an amnesty for undocumented persons living in the United States under certain conditions, which resulted in about2.8 million persons attaining legal status—the majority of whom were Hispanic. The 1996 count used by the INS for "illegal alien populations" or undocumented persons is about 5 million, with about 2.7 million estimated to be from Mexico. Other countries in Europe indicate that 300,000 to 1,000,000 "unauthorized immigrants" reside within their borders.

Immigrant populations in the United States from the Asian and European countries have more years of education than immigrants from Latin American countries. Further 1999 estimates of the average age of foreign-born racial and ethnic groups range from seven to eleven years older than the U.S. total population estimates for the respective groups. The occupations of immigrants depend on their education and their proficiency in speaking English. It was estimated that in 1990 about 40 percent of immigrants were either operators/laborers/fabricators or service workers. Immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy not only in terms of labor force participation rates but also in terms of taxes paid and earnings spent for goods and service on their local economies. On the other hand, in 1997, the unemployment rates for immigrants were much higher in France than for French nationals. The French nationals' rate was 12 percent compared with 31 percent for immigrants from non-European Union countries and 50 percent among North Africans.

Geographic distribution of the foreign-born within the United States from the 1990 census indicates that most live in the West and are from Mexico. Immigrants settle and reside mainly in metropolitan areas such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami; this is also consistent with the living patterns of Hispanic and Asian populations in the United States. Projections of the immigrant populations by the Census Bureau at the low, middle, and highest series indicate that the largest growth will be in the Asian and Pacific Islander populations over the next fifty years. Using the 1990 base for population projections, the Census estimates that by the year 2045, foreign-born populations will grow to about 13.5 percent of the total population, compared to 9.5 percent in 1999. The distribution of immigrant ethnic groups in Canada shows people from the British Isles as the majority throughout Canada with the exception of Quebec where the French dominate. The West and prairie provinces include about 15 percent German and significant numbers (9 to 11 percent) of Ukrainians.

Implications for Public Health

Although immigration policies are complex, much of the work of responsible public health professionals and organizations is to consider how best to serve the immigrant populations who arrive. As noted above, there are several public health agencies in the United States responsible for the health of the entering populations. Other nations and international organizations also help with caring for the education, social, and health needs of immigrants. For refugees, in particular, the resettlement process in the United States includes the federal agency working with local providers to ensure health services are provided. Other than refugees and asylees, immigrants must ensure that they do not become a "public charge," that is, dependent on the government for subsistence. Based on determinations of INS in consultation with the Department of Health and Human Services, United States federal health services programs can be provided to immigrants without being considered "public charges." There are other restrictions to public benefits that are part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which restricts access by some legal immigrants to certain programs and denies access by undocumented/unauthorized immigrants to many government funded programs. Federal and state programs affected under this law include Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Security Income, and food stamps.

For public health purposes, the state's restriction of certain public benefit programs must not inhibit the public health system in serving immigrant populations with interventions and services that target at-risk populations. Knowing the populations within the community is a fundamental requirement in public health. Assessments of immigrant populations must take into account the country of origin and its socio-political context, language use and level of language proficiency, age and educational profile, cultural nuances including specific gender practices and protocols, time in the country and familial ties, particular health practices and beliefs that may be common to the population, social and religious beliefs and practices, and the economic conditions of employment. Such assessments then include not only a quantitative epidemiological approach, but also a qualitative ethnographic inquiry as complementary data.

Policies developed for public health systems are critical in addressing the particular characteristics and needs of immigrant populations. Being consistent in serving the populations establishes a trusting environment for newly arrived and foreign-born populations who may have emigrated from countries where governments were not trustworthy. In keeping with the United States Healthy People 2010 report's second goal of eliminating health disparities, policies will also need to be flexible and allow for interpretation in the field.

Providing the proper interventions and services through culturally competent systems becomes a major challenge for the public health community, not just the public health government agencies. Generally, immigrants are not familiar with the variety of places (both private and public) from which services and promotion of healthy practices are derived. Getting to know the different sources of services is much more complex than immigrant populations may have experienced in the past. (Moreover, it is not unlikely that in some countries the systems are such that even the native-born populations are still unfamiliar with how their public health systems work.) Such coordination requires collaborative trust among providers and their respective organizations, and will help to build more confidence in the use of the system by the immigrant populations.

As a final point for the public health community in refining experiences with immigrant populations, there is the need to keep up with what potential public health issues are occurring globally, nationally, statewide, and, of course, locally. Experience has shown that refugees and other immigrants can quickly be placed in a community due to some type of international disturbance. Keeping informed of immigrant populations as part of the community allows for better decisions on what health improvements may be needed, and what actions should be taken when more immigrants arrive.

(SEE ALSO: Acculturation; Cross-Cultural Communication, Competence; Ethnicity and Health)

Bibliography

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— J. HENRY MONTES

The largest international transfer of population in modern history to the United States has introduced fifty million newcomers since the early nineteenth century. The Supreme Court has assumed an important role in defining the proper relationship of the federal government to immigration. Its decisions established the legal basis of the modern system for regulating immigration.

In the antebellum era, the federal government did little to supervise immigration. Coastal states with large ports, such as Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, established mechanisms to monitor and process the accelerating influx of immigrants. New York, for example, passed laws requiring ships' masters to report the name, occupation, birthplace, age, and condition of passengers and to pay a small head tax on each of them. Coastal states established immigration boards, staffed by amateur volunteers, to execute these new laws. State lawmakers hoped that these measures would reduce the admission of potential indigents, diseased and insane people, and other custodial cases.

The New York laws were challenged in New York v. Miln (1837). The defendant, a ship's master, argued that the New York laws obstructed interstate and foreign commerce. The Supreme Court, however, sustained the laws as a legitimate exercise of the state's police power. Justice Philip P. Barbour stated that it was as competent and necessary for a State to provide precautionary measures against the moral pestilence of paupers, vagabonds, and possibly convicts, as it is to guard against the physical pestilence which may arise from unsound or infectious articles imported, or from a ship, the crew of which may be laboring under an infectious disease (pp. 142–143).

This conclusion affirmed the right of state governments to set criteria for the admission of immigrants and to reject those who did not fit those standards (see State Sovereignty and States' Rights). The problem of controlling immigrants was complicated by the intrusive problem of southern insistence on plenary state powers to control the ingress of free or enslaved blacks, abolitionists, and antislavery propaganda (see Slavery).

The Supreme Court reversed its position more than a decade later in the decision known as the Passenger Cases (1849). The Court found that state laws imposing taxes on immigrants infringed on the power of Congress “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations” granted by Article I, section 8 of the Constitution (see Commerce Power; State Taxation). This decision placed the immigration of free persons under the sole purview of Congress, with the exception of health and safety questions within the domain of state competence.

The Supreme Court went beyond this decision in 1875. In Henderson v. Mayor of New York, the Court held that all immigration laws of the seaboard states were unconstitutional because they usurped the exclusive power vested in Congress to regulate foreign commerce. In response to Henderson, states abolished their immigration commissions and port authorities. The entire burden of orienting foreigners and turning away the incapacitated fell to private, philanthrophic organizations. Overwhelmed by the strain that immigration put on their resources, charity workers petitioned Congress to have the federal government assume the duties of regulating the influx. (By the 1880s, more than half a million immigrants a year were disembarking in American ports).

In the 1880s. Congress began to bring immigration under direct federal control for the first time. It could no longer rely on volunteerism or informal processes to manage this powerful social force. In 1891 Congress established the first federal administrative agency for the regulation of immigration in the Treasury Department. Congress later refined and strengthened the control of immigration. Statutes that restricted immigration according to increasingly stringent standards of admissibility—terminating the period of free and unlimited immigration by the early twentieth century—were made possible by the Supreme Court's position that the exclusive constitutional power to regulate immigration resided in Congress.

— Reed Ueda

The movement of a person as a permanent resident into another area, usually into a foreign country. In 2001 net inward migration to the UK was 180 000, comprising, by continent of origin:

Except for some 2.5 million Native Americans and Alaska natives, the 281 million persons recorded in the 2000 census are immigrants and their descendants. Some 70 million immigrants have come to what is now the United States, beginning with the Spanish settlers in Florida and New Mexico in the late sixteenth century. The United States only began counting immigrants in 1819, so the numbers before that time are problematic.

Table 1

Table 1 shows a reasonable estimate of total immigration, legal and illegal, by centuries; as it shows, more than twothirds of all the immigrants who have come arrived in the twentieth century.

For a long time it seemed appropriate to many historians of immigration to focus on the so-called "century of immigration" that ran from 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars, to 1924, the date of the most restrictive immigration law in U.S. history. However, the large movements that occurred after World War II make such an emphasis inappropriate.

Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

Approximately 24 million immigrants—36 percent of all who have ever come—had arrived since 1960, leading many to fear that immigrants were swamping the nation. In fact, even in the immigrant-rich decade after 1990, the rate of immigration—computed by dividing the yearly number of immigrants by the total population—was well below peak level. In both the decade after 1850 and the one after 1900, the rate was over 10; for the first eight years after 1990, the rate was only 3.6. Such baseless fears about immigration—called "nativism" since the mid-nineteenth century—have often been present in America.

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Most of the million immigrants who arrived in the nearly two and a half centuries between the Spanish founding of St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565 and 1800 came during the years of peace between the 1680s and the 1770s. Between the outbreak of the American Revolution and Napoleon's final defeat in 1815 there was little nonmilitary immigration, although perhaps eighty thousand American Loyalists emigrated during and after the Revolution, mostly to Canada and Britain.

Since the largest single component of colonial immigration was English, and since Great Britain was the final European winner in the imperial wars of the era, the English language, English law, and English religious practices became norms to which later immigrants would be expected to conform. To be sure, the New World environment as well as distance and time worked cultural transformations, as did the influence of both aboriginal peoples and non-English immigrants. But the English were what John Higham has called the "charter group" and set norms for others to meet. About 48 percent of the total nonaboriginal population at the first census in 1790 has been estimated to be of English origin.

English: Virginia and the South. Permanent English settlement began at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and, although there were non-English in most settlements, English immigrants predominated in every seventeenth-century colony except New York. The Virginia colony was for two decades a demographic disaster in which more than half of the immigrants died within a year or so. The immigrant population there and in other southern colonies was heavily male, so natural increase—the excess of births over deaths—did not begin much before the beginning of the eighteenth century, if then.

Why then did English immigrants continue to come? Most were probably ignorant of the true conditions and for many there was no choice. A majority of those English who migrated to the American South in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were indentured servants. The dependence on tobacco growing in Virginia created almost insatiable demands for labor, which were eventually filled by enslaved African immigrants, but for decades, most indentured laborers were English and other Britons. Later in the eighteenth century about fifty thousand persons, overwhelmingly male, were "transported" from English prisons to British colonies.

But others came voluntarily, attracted by the availability of land and the possibility of wealth—what students of migration call a "pull factor," and/or repelled by wretched economic conditions and poor future prospects in England—a so-called push factor.

Maryland, where settlement conditions were less harsh than in Virginia, was founded as a refuge for English Catholics. Much of the gentry was Catholic, but they were soon outnumbered by Protestant lower orders. South Carolina had settlement patterns similar to those in Virginia, but, because of Charleston, the one city of any size in a southern colony, it had more non-British immigrants, including French Huguenots and a few Jews, among its elite population.

English: Massachusetts and New England. Most of the early migration to Massachusetts, beginning with the Pilgrims in 1620, was family migration, much of it religiously motivated. Most of the leading figures and a considerable number of the lesser lights were Protestant dissenters from the Church of England. For significant numbers of the "lesser sort," economic motives predominated. The largest increment of immigrants to New England, perhaps twenty-five thousand persons, came during the "great migration" of the two decades before 1641. Unlike the colonies on the Chesapeake, which were immigrant colonies until the beginning of the eighteenth century, persons born in the New World were a majority of the New England settlers within a few decades of settlement.

New England was less affected by non-British immigration than any other section.

Africans. Africans and their descendents have never been more statistically prominent in American society than in the colonial period. The best estimate is that, at the first federal census in 1790, Africans and their descendents were about 20 percent of the population. The earliest Africans in British North America—brought to Jamestown in 1619—were first treated as indentured servants. By about 1700 in all parts of the American colonies, most Africans were enslaved. Philip Curtin's conservative 1969 estimate judged that almost 430,000 Africans were brought to what is now the United States, about 4.5 percent of all those brought to the New World by the African slave trade. Africans made up more than a third of all immigrants to the United States before 1810. Perhaps fifty thousand more were brought after the United States outlawed further imports of foreign slaves in 1808; those fifty thousand were the first illegal immigrants and the only ones before 1882. Africans and African Americans were found in every colony and state: in 1790 more than 90 percent of the 750,000 Negroes enumerated in the census lived in the South, a percentage that remained fairly constant until well after the World War II era.

Until well into the twentieth century, scholars believed that African immigrants were stripped of their culture and brought nothing but their labor to the United States. It is now clear that African contributions to early American culture were considerable, consisting largely of agricultural and craft techniques.

Other Europeans. The largest groups of non-English Europeans in the new United States were Irish, 7.6 percent; German, 6.9 percent; and Dutch, 2.5 percent; but they were distributed quite differently. The Irish, almost all of whom were Protestants, were dispersed widely throughout the colonies and had little impact as a group although a number of individuals were quite influential. The Germans, whose immigration in significant numbers began only in 1683, were heavily concentrated in Pennsylvania, where they constituted a third of the population. Many came as indentured servants, often called "redemptioners" because other relatives who had either come as free immigrants or had gained their freedom, would frequently purchase their remaining time. Their presence—and their politics—inspired some of the earliest American nativism. In 1751 Benjamin Franklin complained, "Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs. …"

Franklin's fears, of course, were groundless. Although the English and Germans each constituted about a third of Pennsylvania's population, most of the rest were Britons—Irish, Scots, and Welsh. The only ethnic political power exercised by a non-English group was in New York, where the Dutch had been in charge until the bloodless English conquest of 1660. Even though they were less than a sixth of the state's 1790 population, the Dutch, because of their status and wealth, continued to exercise significant political power. Although all of the American port cities, even Boston, contained considerable ethnic diversity in the colonial period, only New York was truly polyglot. Swedes had settled on the Delaware while a number of French Huguenots settled throughout the colonies: other French, the Acadians, were expelled by the British in 1755 from Nova Scotia and scattered throughout the colonies. Many wound up in Louisiana, which became an American territory after 1803.

The Nineteenth Century

The 19 million immigrants who came during the nineteenth century arrived at a generally accelerating pace, as table 2 indicates.

The Civil War in the first half of the 1860s and the economic slump during much of the 1890s account for the two decades in which the numbers decreased. But mere numbers do not properly indicate the impact of immigration: it is important to understand the rate or incidence of immigration. For example, in 1854 some 425,000 immigrants came, making it by far the heaviest single antebellum year for the arrival of immigrants. As there were about 26 million persons in the United States that year, the new immigrants amounted to, as such numbers are usually cited, 16 per 1,000 of the nation's people. Table 3 shows the rate of immigration per thousand averaged for each decade from the 1820s to the 1890s. Thus, the increase in actual numbers of immigrants from the 1860s to the 1870s was, in terms of incidence, a slight decrease. Beginning in 1850 each decennial census has recorded place of birth for every person enumerated, making it possible to calculate the percentage of foreign born in the population as indicated in table 4. The amazing consistency of the percentage of foreign-born persons shows clearly that, despite the fluctuations in other data, foreigners had a stable incidence in American life for a seventy-year period.

Table2 Table3 Table4 From the 1830s through the 1860s a majority of immigrants were from just two ethnic groups—Irish and German. There were some 2.3 million of each, and in the 1850s and 1860s they were more than 70 percent of all immigrants. Their profiles, however, were quite different.

Table 2

Table 3

Table 4

Irish. For the Irish, one terrible event, the potato famine of the second half of the 1840s, has dominated the memory of emigration, but there was substantial Irish immigration both before and after the famine. The root causes of Irish migration were mass poverty, underdevelopment, and a burgeoning population. Irish population almost doubled in the half-century after 1791 so that on the eve of the famine there were 8.1 million persons in Ireland. In the 1830s over 200,000 Irish had immigrated to the United States, and large numbers went to Canada and across the Irish Sea to England. Those Irish and their predecessors came largely as single men, and Irish labor was vital to much of the American "internal improvements" of the era. Some three thousand Irishmen had done most of the digging for the Erie Canal before 1820 and several thousand dug the New Canal in New Orleans in the 1830s.

The great famine that began in 1845 had as its proximate cause an infestation of the fungus Phytophthora infestans. This blight was well known in Ireland: it had occurred at least twenty times in the previous 125 years and did not cause alarm at first. But in 1846 it struck more completely than ever before or since and triggered the last peacetime famine in western European history. Its impact was exacerbated by the disdain and ineptitude of the British government and Irish landlords as well as by the poverty and ignorance of the people. Disease, the constant companion of famine, took its toll. That and massive emigration in the next ten years reduced the population of Ireland by some 2.5 million people—nearly one person in three.

The migration of the famine years and beyond was largely family migration. Relatively few Irish settled in rural America, and the vast majority became residents of east coast cities between Boston and Baltimore, although there were large groups of Irish in such western cities as Cincinnati, Chicago, and San Francisco. They often filled the worst neighborhoods, such as the infamous Five Points in New York City. But they also began to fill the new urban occupations and came, in many cities, to dominate public services, particularly police and fire departments, and such new urban occupations as horse car drivers. And in city after city, they played a larger role in politics than their mere numerical incidence would indicate. Most became traditionally associated with the Democratic Party.

Before the end of the century, young, unmarried women became the majority of Irish emigrants. This reflected, in part, demographic and cultural changes greatly influenced by the famine and endemic poverty. Ireland had the oldest average age at marriage and the greatest percentage of persons who never married of any nation in western Europe. The Irish emigrants of these years were overwhelmingly Catholic and they soon came to dominate the Roman Catholic Church in America. For the Irish, and to a lesser degree for other Catholic immigrants, the immigrant church became what its historian, Jay P. Dolan, termed a fortress helping to protect its faithful from a largely hostile Protestant world.

Anti-Catholic hostility was nowhere stronger than among the Protestant Irish already in America. Most American Protestant Irish began, in the 1830s and 1840s, to call themselves Scotch Irish, a term never used in Ireland or anywhere else. They formed the backbone of the most militant anti-Catholic movements in the United States, including the so-called Know-Nothing movement of the 1840s and 1850s and the American Protective Association of the 1880s and 1890s.

Germans. The major push factor in nineteenth-century German immigration was the modernization of the German economy, which dislocated millions of Germans, a minority of whom chose emigration as a response. The Germans were the most numerous of nineteenth-century immigrants. They settled heavily in eastern cities from New York to Baltimore and in the midwestern area known as the German triangle, whose corners were Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. While most came in at eastern ports, a large number of those who settled in the "triangle" came to southern ports carried by ships in the cotton trade and made their way north by river boat and then railroad. Those in the cities worked largely at artisanal and mechanical pursuits, while one industry—the production of lager beer—was dominated by German producers and, for a time, consumers. Large numbers of German immigrants settled in rural areas, and some German American groups have shown very high levels of persistence in agriculture over several generations.

Although seventeenth-and eighteenth-century German migration was almost all Protestant, and although Protestants have probably been a majority of German immigrants in every decade except the 1930s, very sizable numbers of those since 1800 have been Catholics, and a significant minority of them have been Jewish. Among the German Protestants the majority have always been Lutherans, even during the colonial period, when a considerable number were Mennonites of various persuasions.

One of the most impressive aspects of German immigration was the vast cultural apparatus German Americans created: newspapers, magazines, theaters, musical organizations, and schools proliferated throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Some of these institutions, particularly the German kindergartens, had great influence on the national culture. The Germans were largely Republican in politics. On one of the great cultural issues of the era—Prohibition—most took the wet rather than the dry side.

Scandinavians. Almost 1.5 million Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes came to America in the nineteenth century, and perhaps 750,000 followed in the twentieth. Predominantly agricultural, Scandinavians were driven to migrate by expanding populations and a shortage of arable land. No European country sent a greater proportion of its population to America than Norway. Most Scandinavians settled initially in the upper Midwest and the Great Plains, with a large later migration, some of it second generation, to the Pacific Northwest. They were overwhelmingly Protestant: the major exception was some 25,000 Scandinavian converts to Mormonism whose passage to Utah was aided by a church immigration fund. The Scandinavian groups founded a relatively large number of colleges for the training of ministers of religion, the first ethnic groups to do so in any significant degree since the colonial era. In politics they were even more predominantly Republican than the Germans, with a heavy tilt toward the dry side of the Prohibition issue.

Era of Industrial Expansion, 1870s–1920

Prior to the Civil War, most immigrants settled in rural and small town America, although the incidence of immigrants in cities was higher than that of native-born Americans. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, as the industrial sector of the American economy became more dynamic, the cities, and the jobs that they held, attracted more and more immigrants. At the same time, the spread of railroad networks in Europe and the development of shipping lines for whom immigrants were the major purpose rather than a sideline meant that more, and more ethnically varied, immigrants were able to cross the Atlantic. Although immigrants left from almost every port city in Europe, the lion's share left through Hamburg, Bremen, and Liverpool in the north and Genoa, Naples, and Trieste in the south. Conditions in the steer-age sections in which most immigrants came were frightful, particularly on the vessels from southern ports, but at least in the age of steam the voyages were measured in days rather than weeks.

Contrary to the impression often given, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe did not begin to outnumber those from western Europe until the 1890s. Even in the first two decades of the twentieth century immigrants from western Europe were some two-fifths of all immigrants. Poles, Italians, and eastern European Jews were the dominant European immigrant groups from the 1890s, although every European nationality was represented. These later immigrants are often described as "new immigrants," a euphemism for "undesirable." The United States Immigration Commission, for example, in its 1911 report that was a stimulus for immigration restriction, described such immigrants as having "no intention of permanently changing their residence, their only purpose in coming to America being to temporarily take advantage of the greater wages paid for industrial labor in this country."

The charge of sojourning had been raised first against two non-European groups: the 250,000 Chinese who had begun to immigrate to California and the West Coast about the time of the gold rush of 1849, and the perhaps 500,000 French Canadians who poured into New England mill towns in the post–Civil War decades. While most Chinese immigrants were barred by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, French Canadian immigrants remained unrestricted. The antisojourner argument ignored both the positive economic contributions that each group made and the fact that many Chinese and perhaps most French Canadian immigrants made permanent homes in the United States. The 1920 census identified some 850,000 first-and second-generation French Canadians, and some 60,000 Chinese.

Many of the European immigrants of the industrial era did come as sojourners, and some came more than once. In one early-twentieth-century survey at Ellis Island, every tenth Italian reported having been in the United States before. Like their predecessors they were primarily motivated by economic opportunity; what set them off from most of their predecessors was that most found industrial rather than agricultural employment.

Poles are difficult to enumerate because immigration data reflect nationality rather than ethnicity and most Poles had German, Russian, or Austrian nationality. The best approximation of their number comes from the 1910 census, which showed nearly 950,000 foreign-born persons who said that their mother tongue was Polish. Poles settled largely in the industrial region around the Great Lakes, and were concentrated in cities between Buffalo and Milwaukee. Polish immigrants were chiefly employed in factory work, often in the dirtiest and most difficult jobs.

Between 1890 and 1920 more than four million Italians were recorded as entering the United States. No other group had come to the United States in such numbers in a comparable period of time. Their prime region of settlement was near the eastern seaboard between Boston and Philadelphia, with goodly settlements in Chicago and northern California. Unlike the Poles, Italians were concentrated in outdoor employment in road construction, railroad maintenance, and in the less-skilled aspects of the building trades. A significant number of young, mostly unmarried Italian and Italian American women were employed in the garment trades.

Like the Poles, eastern European Jews are difficult to track in the immigration data. Again in the 1910 census more than a million persons reported Yiddish or Hebrew as a mother tongue. (German Jewish immigrants would have reported German.) More than 850,000 of them were of Russian nationality, many of whom came from what is now Poland and the Baltic states; almost 125,000 came from some part of the Austrian Empire, and some 40,000 from Romania. Most had suffered some degree of persecution in Europe, and of all the immigrant groups in the industrial era, Jews were the least likely to sojourn. Almost all came intending to stay and did so. One scholar has calculated the remigration rate for European immigrants to the United States of various ethnicities in this era and found that fewer than 5 percent of Jews returned, as opposed to about a third of Poles and some 45 percent of Italians. Similarly, although there was a male majority for every European group of immigrants except the Irish, males were only about 55 percent of the Jews, while nearly two-thirds of the Poles and almost three-quarters of the Italians were male. For some of the other ethnic groups in this era both rates were even higher. Serb immigrants, for example, were calculated to have been 90 percent male and remigrated at a rate of almost 88 percent.

Table5 The ten years before the outbreak of World War I saw the highest number of legal immigrants entering the United States than in any ten-year period before or since. These figures added fuel to the raging restrictionist fires. But, as the data in table 5 show, return migration was also heavy; the incidence of foreign born in the population remained remarkably constant, as was shown in table 4.

Table 5

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 transformed American migration patterns, both internal and external. The surge of Allied war orders beginning in the spring of 1915 plus the requirements of American "preparedness" and, after April 1917, war needs, increased the demands for workers in northern factories. The drastic drop in the numbers of European immigrants—from a million a year just before the war to an average of only about 100,000 annually between 30 June 1914 and 30 June 1919—helped to stimulate the so-called "Great Migration" of African Americans from the South to northern cities. This migration involved perhaps 500,000 persons between 1916 and 1918 and probably another million before the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

1920s to 2000

In the 1920s, despite President Warren G. Harding's call for "normalcy," immigration was not allowed to return to the essentially laissez faire pattern that had prevailed for everyone except Asians throughout U.S. history. The Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924 put numerical caps on European immigration while stopping Asian immigration except for Filipinos, who, as American nationals, could not be excluded. (Asia, as defined by Congress, did not include Russian-Soviet Asia, or nations from Persia-Iran east.) The onset of the Great Depression plus administrative regulations designed chiefly to stop otherwise unrestricted Mexican immigration, reduced immigration significantly, and World War II reduced it even further as table 6 demonstrates.

The steady reduction in the number of immigrants and the accompanying decline in foreign born from 13.2 percent in 1920 to 6.9 percent in 1950 mask three important wartime developments that helped to reshape the patterns of American immigration in the second half of the twentieth century. These were the beginning of the refugee crisis, repeal of the Chinese exclusion acts, and the increase of the Mexican presence in the American labor force.

The anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany that began in 1933 precipitated the refugee crisis, which was neither fully understood nor dealt with adequately by the nations of the West. Vice President Walter Mondale's 1979 judgment that the western democracies "failed the test of civilization" is a good capsule summary. Many have blamed this aspect of the Holocaust on the 1924 immigration act. But while many of the supporters of that act had anti-Semitic motives, the quota system it set up, while stacked against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, provided a relatively generous quota for Germany. Between 1933 and 1940, fewer than half of the 211,895 German quota spaces were filled. At the beginning of the Nazi era, few German Jews were ready to leave their native land; however, during much of the 1930s, willful obstruction by many American consular officials frustrated the attempts of German Jews to gain admission to the United States, often with fatal consequences.

The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which innovated in so many areas of American life, was conservative on this issue: there was no New Deal for immigration. Critics have correctly pointed to the undemocratically recruited foreign service as largely culpable in denying asylum to many, but the president himself, out of political caution, on several occasions refused to act. The failure to support legislation to admit Jewish children and the refusal to allow refugee passengers on the ill-fated German liner St. Louis to land even though the ship was in American waters are clear examples of Roosevelt's misfeasance.

On the other hand, once war came the president exercised his vaunted administrative ingenuity to assist refugees. The most significant example of this was his instruction to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins to allow refugees who were in the United States on six-month visitor visas to "roll-over" such visas indefinitely every six months, making them, for all intents and purposes, resident aliens. Later arrangements were made with Canada to allow many such persons to make pro forma exits from the United States and return immediately on immigrant visas. And, in 1944, as awareness of the dimensions of the Holocaust grew, Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board by executive order. Its function was to save Jews and other refugees in Europe, but its mandate did not include bringing them to the United States. In June 1944 Roosevelt invented a way to get refugees into the country: something he called "parole power." He used it only once, in what historians have called a "token shipment" of nearly 1,000 persons, almost all of them Jews who were kept in a camp at Oswego, New York, in the charge of the War Relocation Authority, whose major function was to warehouse Japanese Americans. Although the "parolees" were supposed to go back to Europe after the war, only one did. Roosevelt's successors used parole power to bring in hundreds of thousands of refugees, very few of them Jews, until the Refugee Act of 1980 regularized such admissions. Between 1946 and 2000 more than 3.5 million persons were admitted to the United States as refugees of one kind or another and many persons who were in fact refugees entered in other categories.

Table 6

The repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, which also made alien Chinese eligible for naturalization, presaged a retreat from the blatant racism that had characterized American immigration policies. Similar legislation was passed regarding "natives of India" and Filipinos in 1946, and in 1952 the otherwise reactionary McCarran-Walter Act ended all ethnic bars to immigration and made naturalization color blind. Between 1943 and 2000, perhaps 8 million Asians, most of them from the formerly "barred zone," legally immigrated to the United States.

A third wartime initiative with long-term consequences for immigration was the so-called bracero program, which brought some 200,000 "temporary" Mexican workers to the United States, about half of whom worked in California. The program was restarted in 1951 during the Korean War and continued until 1964. In 1959 alone, 450,000 braceros were brought to the United States. None of these were counted as immigrants; many stayed or returned, contributing to the illegal immigrant phenomenon that loomed large in later immigration and even larger in rhetoric about it. The cumulative effect of the bracero program plus legal and illegal immigration was to make Mexico the largest single national contributor, by far, to immigration to the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Since 1940 some 5 million Mexicans have either legally immigrated to the United States or been legalized later.

Tables 7 and 8 summarize the 26 million legal or legalized immigrants who entered the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. As table 8 demonstrates, not only did the total number of immigrants increase with each decade, but European immigration, which had always dominated American immigration, accounted for only one immigrant in five during the second half of the century.

Table 7

Table 8

Prior to the 1930s, almost all of the immigrants had come in at or near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, and this remained true for a majority of immigrants during the rest of the twentieth century. But, beginning with some of the distinguished refugees who fled from Hitler's Europe, a growing minority of immigrants came with educational credentials that surpassed those of most American natives. The so-called brain drain intensified during the latter decades of the century, as engineers and computer scientists were attracted to the various Silicon Valleys of America. At the other end of the spectrum, even larger numbers of immigrants came not to build America but to serve it. The service sector and agriculture, not the shrinking manufacturing sector, were the major employers of immigrant labor, legal and illegal. California farms, Arkansas chicken processors, fast foodshops, and hotels and motels everywhere were among the largest employers.

Immigration policy since World War II. The shifts in American immigration policy that made the renewal of large-scale immigration possible are often attributed solely to the Immigration Act of 1965. As the foregoing suggests, this is a serious error. Between the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act and century's end, twenty-eight new substantive public laws revamped immigration and naturalization. Only a handful of the most significant can be noted here. Beginning with the hotly contested Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950—which brought some 400,000 European refugees, mostly gentiles, to the United States—a series of acts made taking refugees a part of the American consensus. By the end of the Eisenhower administration, the Fair Share Refugee Act symbolized the changed perception of American responsibility. Particularly noteworthy was the Carter administration's Refugee Act of 1980, which for the first time put the right to claim asylum into American law.

Two general statutes, the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act and the 1965 Immigration Act, transformed American immigration policy. While the most obvious innovation of the 1952 act was the ending of statutory racism in naturalization and immigration, it also eliminated overt gender bias in immigration. It seemed to continue the quota system much as it was enacted in 1924 but, because of other changes in the law, quota immigrants were only a minor fraction of legal immigration. Although the Japanese quota between 1953 and 1960 was only 185 a year—one-sixth of one percent of the Japanese population in the continental United States in 1920—a total of 46,250 Japanese legally immigrated in those seven years, almost all of them nonquota immigrants who were family members of U.S. citizens. European refugees, most of whom came from nations—or former nations—with tiny quotas were accounted for by "mortgaging quotas," mortgages that were never paid. When the quota system was abolished in 1965 the Latvian annual quota of 286, to give an extreme example, had been mortgaged to the year 2274.

The 1965 act ended national quotas and substituted putative hemispheric caps that seemed to limit immigration to less than half a million a year. At the same time, it so expanded family-based immigration and other non-quota immigration that the gross number of immigrants continued to rise steadily. By the late 1970s there was increasing concern in the media and in Congress about illegal immigration. After years of acrimonious debate, Congress passed a compromise measure, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). "Immigration Reform" had become a code phrase for reducing immigration. IRCA was widely hailed as a way to "fix" what was commonly called a "broken" immigration system, but the proposed fix exacerbated many of the problems that it was supposed to cure. The centerpiece of the bill was an "amnesty" supposed to legalize perhaps 3.1 million persons who had been illegally present in the United States since 1982. But congress set aside 350,000 "amnesty places" for "special agricultural workers" who need only have done 90 days of agricultural labor and lived in the United States since 1 May 1985. Subsequent Congresses increased the share for these agricultural workers significantly. Of the 2.68 million persons actually legalized under IRCA by the end of 1998 almost 1.25 million, some 47 percent, were "special agricultural workers" of one kind or another.

In the final analysis the amnesty provisions of IRCA not only increased significantly the number of legal immigrants in the United States, but also created a well-publicized precedent for future liberalizations, which would be impossible for Congress to resist. The legalization did not contribute to the number of immigrants present, but each person legalized could become, in time, a naturalized American citizen, some of whose relatives would be eligible for privileged admission status. A growing awareness of the failure of IRCA to achieve its goals—plus the conservative mood epitomized by the so-called Gingrich revolution resulting from the Republican sweep of the 1994 congressional elections—produced a spate of measures passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton. These measures "got tough" with legal immigrants by denying them all kinds of benefits—usually described as "welfare." Also, a number of statutes were designed to bolster the border patrol and, as the phrase went, "regain control of our borders." These measures had only transitory effects on stemming immigration, whether legal or illegal, but did, many authorities believe, discourage many persons illegally working in the United States from going back to Mexico, for fear of being unable to return.

At the same time, California voters overwhelmingly adopted the patently unconstitutional Proposition 187, which made illegal aliens ineligible for public social services including public school education, and required all state officials to report anyone suspected of being an illegal alien to the INS. Not surprisingly, the passage of Proposition 187—whose enforcement was immediately blocked by the courts—and a growing perception that much of the national legislation was unfair, produced some unintended consequences. Hispanic citizens mobilized to register and vote in increasing numbers, both the Republican Congress and the Democratic Clinton administration modified some of the anti-immigrant legislation and after California Democrats swept the 1998 elections the anti-immigrant consensus, which had seemed so strong just four years previously, disappeared. The 2000 presidential campaign saw both parties actively courting Hispanic voters. The early months of the administration of George W. Bush continued the positive attitude toward immigration that he had evinced as governor of Texas between 1995 and 2000—his White House Web site was available in Spanish—and a second, major amnesty program seemed all but inevitable. However, the terrorist destruction of New York City's World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 and the economic recession that had begun six months earlier put at least a temporary damper on such plans. Most students of American immigration expected that the same forces that had created the post–Great Depression boom in immigration—an expanding economy and an aging population—would, in the long run, create conditions in which large-scale immigration would continue.

Bibliography

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. An account of the varieties of the slave experience.

Bukowczyk, John J. And My Children Did Not Know Me. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. A brief history of Polish immigration.

Butler, Jon. Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. A striking analysis of the acculturation process.

Curtin, Philip D. The African Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. A pioneering survey.

Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. 2d ed. New York: Harper Collins, 2002. An analytic narrative text.

Daniels, Roger, and Otis Graham. Debating American Immigration, 1882–Present. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Dual approaches to twentieth-century immigration.

Diner, Hasia R. Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. A gendered analysis.

Dolan, Jay P. The Immigrant Church: New York's Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. An analysis of the civic functions of the Roman Catholic Church.

Garcia, Maria Cristina. Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. A discriminating account of the Cuban American community.

Goodfriend, Joyce. Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. An analysis of the most polyglot American colony.

Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. 2d ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. The classic account of American Nativism.

Kitano, Harry H. L., and Roger Daniels. Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities. 3d ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001. A survey of most Asian American ethnic groups.

Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. The standard account.

Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Edited by Oscar Handlin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958. An accessible biography of a seventeenth-century immigrant leader.

Reimers, David M. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America. 2d ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. The standard account of the structural change in American immigration in the post–World War II decades.

Sanchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. The formative years of this community.

Wokeck, Marianne S. Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. An account of the transportation of German immigrants before the American Revolution.

Yung, Judy. Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. A gendered analysis.

Preference Systems, 1952 and 1965 Immigration Acts

Immigration and Nationality Act, 1952

1. Highly skilled immigrants whose services are urgently needed in the United States and the spouses and children of such immigrants: 50%.
2. Parents of U.S. citizens over age twenty-one and unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens: 30%.
3. Spouses and unmarried children of permanent resident aliens: 20%.
4. Brothers, sisters, and married children of U.S. citizens and accompanying spouses and children: 50% of numbers not required for 1 through 3.
5. Nonpreference: applicants not entitled to any of the above: 50% of the numbers not required for 1 through 3 plus any not required for 4.

Immigration Act of 1965

Exempt from preference requirements and numerical caps: spouses, unmarried minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens.

1. Unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens: 20%.
2. Spouses and unmarried adult children of permanent resident aliens: 20%.
3. Members of the professions and scientists and artists of exceptional ability: 10% (requires certification from U.S. Department of Labor).
4. Married children of U.S. citizens: 10%.
5. Brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens over age twenty-one: 24%.
6. Skilled and unskilled workers in occupations for which labor is in short supply in the U.S.: 10% (requires certification from U.S. Department of Labor).
7. Refugees from communist or communist dominated countries or from the Middle East: 6%.
8. Nonpreference: applicants not entitled to any of the above. (Since there have been more preference applicants than can be accommodated, this category has never been used. Congress eventually adopted the so-called lottery provision to provide for such persons.)

Immigration and immigration policy have been an integral part of the American polity since the early years of the American Republic. Until late in the nineteenth century it had been the aim of American policy, and thus its diplomacy, to facilitate the entrance of free immigrants. From the 1880s until World War II—an era of immigration restriction of increasing severity—the diplomacy of immigration was chiefly concerned with the consequences of keeping some people out and, after 1924, when Congress made the diplomatic establishment partially responsible for immigration selection and its control, with keeping some prospective immigrants out. Since 1945, after only seemingly minor changes in policy during World War II, and partly due to the shift in American foreign policy from quasi-isolation to a quest for global leadership and hegemony, immigration policy has become less and less restrictive. Cold War imperatives plus a growing tendency toward more egalitarian attitudes about ethnic and racial minorities contributed to a change in immigration policy.

Many foreigners clearly understood that there were certain ironies in these long-term changes. No one was more aware of this than the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. Visiting Washington in 1979 during a time when the United States was urging the Soviet Union to allow more Jews to emigrate, the Chinese leader, according to Jimmy Carter's memoirs, told the American president: "If you want me to release ten million Chinese to come to the United States I'd be glad to do that." Obviously, Deng was "pulling Carter's chain," but it is not clear from the text whether the Georgian realized that. Immigration was part of the raison d'être of the early Republic. One of the complaints in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence was that George III had "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 migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands." The Constitution, while not mentioning immigration directly, did instruct Congress "to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization" (Article 1, Section 8) and provided that naturalized persons might hold any office under the Constitution save only President and Vice President. (Article 2, Section 1). The only other reference to migration referred obliquely to the African slave trade, providing that "the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight" (Article 1, Section 9).

In 1790 Congress passed the first naturalization act, limiting those eligible to "free white persons." This put the new nation on a collision course with Great Britain, which, although it had naturalization statutes of its own, often refused to recognize the switch of allegiance of its subjects. The question of the impressment of seamen was one of the issues that troubled Anglo-American relations from 1787, when the first of many American protests against impressment was made, until the end of the War of 1812. Foreign Secretary George Canning put the British case nicely when he declared that when British seamen "are employed in the private service of foreigners, they enter into engagements inconsistent with the duty of subjects. In such cases, the species of redress which the practice of all times has … sanctioned is that of taking those subjects at sea out of the service of such foreign individuals." Impressment, of course, became one of the issues that led to the War of 1812. After that the British recognized, in practice, the right of naturalization, but one of the ongoing tasks of American diplomatic officials has been trying to ensure that naturalized American citizens are recognized as such when they visit their former native lands. This has been particularly a problem for men of military age during time of war.

While barring the African slave trade at the earliest possible moment in 1808, immigration "policy" in the new nation universally welcomed free immigrants. American leaders understood that immigration was necessary to fill up their largely empty and expanding country and would have endorsed the nineteenth-century Argentine statesman Juan Bautista Alberdi's maxim that "to govern is to populate." Even Millard Fillmore, while running for president on the nativist American Party ticket in 1856, found it necessary to insist that he had "no hostility to foreigners" and "would open wide the gates and invite the oppressed of every land to our happy country, excluding only the pauper and the criminal." Actually the gates were open, and Fillmore's suggestion of restriction on economic grounds would not become law until 1882. As long as American immigration policy welcomed all free immigrants there were no policy issues for American diplomats to negotiate. Immigration first became a special subject for diplomatic negotiation during the long run-up to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

A few Chinese had come to the United States—chiefly to East Coast ports—in the late eighteenth century in connection with the China trade. After American missionaries were established in China, some Chinese, mostly young men, came to the eastern United States for education without raising any stir. But relatively large-scale Chinese immigration, mostly to California beginning with the gold rush of 1849, produced an anti-Chinese movement. Before this movement became a national concern, Secretary of State William H. Seward appointed a former Massachusetts congressman, Anson Burlingame, as minister to China in 1861. He was the first to reside in Beijing. A radical former free-soiler and antislavery orator, Burlingame supported Chinese desires for equal treatment by the Western powers. While still in Beijing, he resigned his post in late 1867 and accepted a commission as China's first official envoy to the West. With an entourage that included two Chinese co-envoys and a large staff, he traveled to Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States seeking modification of China's unequal status. He was successful only in Washington. There he negotiated in 1868 what became known as the Burlingame Treaty—actually articles added to the Treaty of Tientsin (1858). The 1868 agreement, China's first equal treaty, was ratified without controversy and contained the first immigration clause in any American treaty:

The United States and the Emperor of China cordially recognize the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance and also the mutual advantage of free migration and emigration … for the purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents … but nothing contained herein shall be held to confer naturalization upon the citizens of the United States in China, nor upon the subjects of China in the United States.

The United States would never again recognize a universal "right to immigrate," and by 1870 the anti-Chinese movement was becoming national. Spurred by economic distress in California and a few instances of Chinese being used as strikebreakers in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, anti-Chinese forces stemming largely from the labor movement made increasingly powerful demands for an end to Chinese immigration, usually blending their economic arguments with naked racism. That summer Congress was legislating the changes in the existing naturalization statute impelled by the end of slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment. Republican Senator Charles Sumner and a few other radicals wanted to make the new naturalization statute color blind, but the majority did not wish to extend that fundamental right to Chinese. The new statute amended the eligibility from "free white persons" to "white persons and to aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent."

In 1876 Congress created a joint congressional committee to investigate Chinese immigration. It took testimony in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco just before and after that year's presidential election. By that time both national party platforms had anti-Chinese planks. The Republican version was somewhat tentative, declaring it "the immediate duty of Congress to investigate the effects of the immigration and importation of Mongolians." The out-of-power Democrats denounced "the policy which tolerates the revival of the coolie-trade in Mongolian women held for immoral purposes, and Mongolian men to perform servile labor." The majority report of the joint congressional committee claimed that the Pacific Coast had to become "either American or Mongolian," insisting that there was "not sufficient brain capacity in the Chinese race to furnish motive power for self-government" and that "there is no Aryan or European race which is not far superior to the Chinese." The committee report urged the president to get the Burlingame Treaty modified and Congress to legislate against "Asiatic immigration." The report was presented to Congress while it was settling the election of 1876, so no immediate action was taken. After much debate the next Congress passed the so-called Fifteen Passenger bill, which barred any vessel from bringing in more than fifteen Chinese immigrants. The sticking point for many was the existing Burlingame Treaty: some wanted to over-ride it completely while others wanted to wait until the treaty was revised. The bill also instructed the president to notify the Chinese that portions of the treaty were abrogated, which passage of the bill would have accomplished.

Rutherford B. Hayes responded with a reasoned veto message that accepted the desirability of stemming Chinese immigration. He argued that the Chinese manifested "all the traits of race, religion, manners, and customs, habitations, mode of life, segregation here, and the keeping up of the ties of their original home … [which] stamp them as strangers and sojourners, and not as incorporated elements of our national life." But, he insisted, there was no emergency to justify unilateral abrogation of the treaty, which could have disastrous consequences for American merchants and missionaries in China. He promised that there would be a renegotiation of the treaty.

A somewhat protracted diplomatic renegotiation was completed by the end of 1880, and the new treaty was ratified and proclaimed in October 1881. It unilaterally gave the United States the right to "regulate, limit, or suspend" the "coming or residence" of Chinese laborers, but it allowed Chinese subjects "proceeding to the United States as teachers, students, merchants, or from curiosity, together with their body and household servants, and Chinese laborers now in the United States to go and come of their own free will and accord."

In the spring of 1882, Congress passed a bill suspending the immigration of Chinese laborers for twenty years. President Chester A. Arthur vetoed it, arguing that while a permanent bar to Chinese labor might be eventually justified, prudence dictated a shorter initial term. Congress responded by repassing the bill but with a ten-year suspension, and Arthur signed it into law in May 1882. The law prohibited the entry of Chinese laborers—defined as "both skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining"—after 4 August 1882. It also provided that any Chinese who was in the country on 17 November 1880—the effective date of the Sino-American treaty—or had come between that date and 4 August 1882 had the right to leave and return. The law, as opposed to the treaty, did not spell out who was entitled to enter, although it did specify that diplomats and other officials of the Chinese government doing government business, along with their body and household servants, were admissible. Fines for bringing Chinese in illegally could run as high as $1,000 per individual, and vessels landing Chinese illegally were liable to seizure and condemnation