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

Applied History Research Group. "The Peopling of Canada: 1891–1921." World Wide Web document1997. Available at http://www.ucalgary.ca/HIST/tutor/canada1891/.

Citizenship and Immigration Canada (2000). "Forging Our Legacy: Canadian Citizenship and Immigration, 1900–1997." http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/about/legacy/.

Dustman, C., and Ian, P. (2000). "Racial and Economic Factors in Attitudes to Immigration." Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). http://www.iza.org.

Entorf, H. (2000). "Rational Migration Policy Should Tolerate Non-Zero Illegal Migration Flows: Lessons from Modelling the Market for Illegal Immigration." Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). http://www. iza.org.

Fix, M., and Passel, J. S. (1994). Immigration and Immigrants: Setting the Record Straight. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute.

German Marshall Fund of the United States (2000). "Migration Dialogue: Report of Seminar on Immigration and Integration; Focus on Lyons, France, May 6–8, 1999." http://migration.ucdavis.edu/ols/lyon.html.

Heckmann, F. (1998). "Managing Migration in the 21st Century." http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mm21/Heckmann2.html.

International Organization for Migration. Official web site: http://www.iom.int./ion/Mandate_and_Structure.

Martin, P. (1998). "Managing Migration in the 21st Century." http://migration.ucdavis.edu/cmpr/Oct1998_ciip.html.

Migration News (2000). http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/nov_2000–08.html.

—— Canada. http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/nov_ 2000–05.html.

Simon, J. L. (1989). The Economic Consequences of Immigration. London: Basil Blackwell, Ltd.

Sowell, T. (1996). Migrations and Cultures: A World View. New York: Basic Books.

Turnoch, B. J. (1997). Public Health: What It Is and How It Works. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers.

United Nations Economic and Social Council (1997). "Report of the Secretary-General." http://srchO.un.org/plweb-cgi/Fastweb?state_id=974906104&view=unsd1&docrank=3&number.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Official web site information, 2001: http://www. unhcr.ch/.

University of Calgary (2001). "The Peopling of Canada: 1861–1921." http://www.uccalgary.ca/HIST/tutor/canada1891/.

U.S. Census Bureau. "Annual Projections of the Total Resident Population as of July 1: Middle, Lowest, Highest, and Zero International Migration Series, 1999 to 2100." World Wide Web document, 2000. http://www.census.gov./population/projections/nation/summary/np-ti.txt.

—— "Foreign Born Resident Population Estimates of the United States by Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin: April 1, 1990 to July 1, 1999." World Wide Web document, 2000. http://www.census.gov/population/estimates/nation/nativity/ftab003.txt.

—— "Projections of the Resident Population by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Nativity: Middle Series, 2000 to 2005." World Wide Web document, 2000: http://www.census.gov/population/projections/nation/summary/np-t5.txt.

—— "Projections of the Resident Population by Race, Hispanic Origin, and Nativity: Middle Series, 2025 to 2045." World Wide Web document, 2000: http://www.census.gov/population/projections/nation/summary/np-t5.txt.

—— "Resident Population of the United States by Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin." World Wide Web document, 2000. http://www.census.gov/population/estimates/nation/intfiles3-l.txt.

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (1999). "Fact Sheet on Public Charge." World Wide Web document: http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/publicaffairs/factsheets/public_cfs.htm.

—— (2000). "Statistics: State of Residence Tables." http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/aboutins/statistics/310.htm.

—— (2000). "Statistics: Country of Origin Tables." http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/aboutins/statistics/299.htm.

Wipf, J., and Wipf, P. (2000). "Immigration Issues; Immigration Europe: Crisis or Denial?" http://www.immigration.about.com/newsissues/library/weekly/aaD71700a/htm.

— 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.

Thus, what is commonly called the Chinese Exclusion Act—its proper title is "To Execute Certain Treaty Stipulations Relating to Chinese"—became law. The typical textbook treatment is a sentence or two, sometimes relating it to other discriminatory treatment. Its real significance goes much deeper than that. Viewed from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, the Exclusion Act is clearly a pivot on which subsequent American immigration policy turned, the hinge on which the poet Emma Lazarus's "Golden Door" began to swing toward a closed position. It initiated what can be called an era of steadily increasing restrictions on immigration of all kinds that would last for sixty-one years. It was also the first time that immigration policy per se became a focal point of a bilateral diplomatic relationship between the United States and another nation.

During the exclusion era—1882–1943—the problematic enforcement of changing immigration statutes and regulations for Chinese created future diplomatic problems, brought the principle of family reunification into American immigration policy, shaped the culture of immigration enforcement in the United States, and established a precedent for negotiations about American immigration policies. Various changes, generally of a more restrictive character, were added to the Chinese exclusion laws and regulations between 1882 and 1902, when a modified law extended them "until otherwise provided by law." These changes exacerbated relations and triggered repeated negotiations between the two nations.

The most significant of these negotiations occurred in the aftermath of the Geary Act of 1892, which not only extended exclusion for ten years but also required that all Chinese in the United States get a residence certificate (a kind of internal passport) within a year or be deported. The statute also reversed the usual presumption of innocence and provided that "any Chinese person or person of Chinese descent" was deemed to be in the country illegally unless he or she could demonstrate otherwise. This set off a mass civil disobedience campaign orchestrated by Chinese-American community organizations. They urged Chinese Americans not to register and hired a trio of leading constitutional lawyers to challenge the statute. Their suit, Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), was expedited to the Supreme Court, which quickly ruled, five to three, against Fong and two other litigants. Justice Horace Gray, writing for the majority, held that Chinese, like other resident aliens, were entitled "to the safeguards of the Constitution, and to the protection of the laws, in regard to their rights of persons and of property, and to their civil and criminal responsibility," but insisted that the Constitution could not shield them if Congress decided that "their removal is necessary or expedient for the public interest."

At the time of the Court's ruling only some 13,000 Chinese had registered; perhaps 90,000 had not and were presumably liable to immediate deportation. But both cabinet officers responsible for enforcement—Treasury Secretary John G. Carlisle and Attorney General Richard Olney—instructed their subordinates not to enforce the law. Carlisle estimated that mass deportations would cost at least $7.3 million and noted that his annual enforcement budget was $25,000. Secretary of State Walter Q. Gresham confidentially informed the Chinese minister, Yung Yu, that Congress would soon amend the law so that Chinese could register even though the deadline had passed. In November 1893, Congress extended the deadline by six months, and in that time about 93,000 additional Chinese registered and received the disputed certificates.

While relations between China and the United States were complicated by actions of the federal government toward immigrants, those between Italy and the United States deteriorated because of discrimination by lesser governmental bodies. There was widespread violence directed against Italian Americans, but one outbreak in particular had the most serious international consequences. On 15 October 1890 the police superintendent in New Orleans was murdered by a group of men using sawed-off shotguns; before he died he whispered that the Italians had done it. He had been investigating so-called Mafia influence among the city's large Italian-American population. New Orleans authorities quickly arrested almost 250 local Italian Americans and eventually indicted nineteen of them, including one fourteen-year-old boy, for the murder. Nine were brought to trial. On 13 March 1891 the jury found six not guilty and could not agree on three others. All nine were returned to jail for trial on another charge. The day after the verdict, a notice signed by sixty-one prominent local residents was placed in the morning newspaper inviting "all good citizens" to a 10 A.M. mass meeting "to remedy the failure of justice." A mob of perhaps 5,000 persons assembled, and, led by three members of the local bar, went first to the arsenal where many were issued firearms and then to the parish prison, where they shot and killed eight incarcerated Italians and removed three others and lynched them. Three or four of the victims were Italian citizens and the others were naturalized American citizens. None of the mob was ever punished.

Local public opinion hailed the result, as did much of the nation's press. The New York Times wrote that the victims were "sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins" but insisted in the same editorial that the lynching "was not incited by any prejudice against Italians." The Italian government protested, demanding punishment for the lynchers, protection for the Italian Americans of New Orleans, and an indemnity. President Benjamin Harrison himself, acting during an illness of Secretary of State James G. Blaine, directed the American minister in Rome to explain "the embarrassing gap in federalism—that in such cases the state alone has jurisdiction," while rejecting all the demands. There was nothing new about this. Similar responses had been made by the federal government in a number of previous instances, most notably in 1851 when Spaniards had been killed in New Orleans; in 1885 after the Rock Springs, Wyoming, massacre of twenty-eight Chinese miners; and in a whole host of other outrages, mostly against Chinese in the Far West. In all of these cases the president eventually called upon Congress to make an ex gratia payment. Congress, after debate, did so, and the matters were ended. For the Rock Springs affair, for example, the payment was nearly $150,000.

The lynching of Italians in New Orleans took a somewhat different course to the same essential result. Exasperated by the initial stonewalling, the Italian government recalled its minister in Washington but did not break relations. There was foolish talk of war in the press—all agreed that the Italian navy was superior to the American—and naval preparedness advocates used the speculation to their advantage. Eventually good relations were restored, but Harrison settled the matter without the traditional reference to Congress. In his December 1892 message to Congress Harrison reported the payment of $24,330.90 (125,000 francs) to the Italian government, a little over $6,000 per person. The money was taken from the general appropriation for diplomatic expenses. Congress was furious—or pretended to be—because of executive usurpation of its prerogatives and reduced the fund for diplomatic contingencies by $20,000.

A more complex and potentially more serious situation developed from the mistreatment of Japanese in the United States—more serious because of the growing hostility between the United States and Japan over conflicting plans for Pacific expansion and more complex because both local and national discrimination was involved and because major tensions about Japanese immigrants continued for more than two decades. Long before diplomatic tensions over Japanese immigration to western states and the Territory of Hawaii surfaced, Tokyo had shown concern about possible mistreatment of its immigrants in America. As early as the 1890s internal Japanese diplomatic correspondence shows that there were fears in Tokyo that emigrant Japanese workers in the United States, who in many places were filling niches once occupied by Chinese workers, would eventually evoke the same kinds of official treatment—exclusion—that Chinese workers had experienced. This, Japanese officials were convinced, would negatively affect Japan's ambitions to achieve great-power status. The greatest fear—Tokyo's worst nightmare about this subject—was that someday there would be a "Japanese Exclusion Act." This fear—and eventually resentment at the result, which was in effect exclusion—so pervaded Japanese culture that for decades Japanese texts continued to refer to the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 as the "Japanese Exclusion Act."

Anti-Japanese activity had flared in race-sensitive California as early as 1892, when there were fewer than 5,000 Japanese persons in the entire country. In 1905 the state's leading newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, began what can be called an anti-Japanese immigrant crusade—a crusade that the rival publisher William Randolph Hearst soon made his own. In the same year San Francisco labor leaders organized the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, the California legislature passed a resolution calling on Congress to "limit and diminish Japanese immigration," and two California congressmen introduced the first bills calling for exclusion of Japanese into Congress.

Although these events all took place beneath the radar of national press consciousness, they did not escape the notice of the man in the White House. In May 1905, Theodore Roosevelt fumed in a (private) letter about the "foolish offensiveness" of the [mostly Republican] "idiots" of the California legislature, while indicating sympathy for the notion of exclusion of Japanese and muttering about their being "a serious problem in Hawaii." Two months later he instructed the U.S. Minister to Japan, Lloyd C. Griscom, to inform Tokyo that "the American Government and … people" had no sympathy with the agitation and that while "I am President" Japanese would be treated like "other civilized peoples." In his prolix annual message of December 1905, Roosevelt insisted that there should be no discrimination "against any man" who wished to immigrate and be a good citizen, and he specifically included Japanese in a short list of examples of acceptable ethnic groups. In the next paragraph, Roosevelt, who had signed the 1902 extension of Chinese exclusion without hesitation, made it clear that Chinese laborers, "skilled and unskilled," were not acceptable.

Almost a year later, on 11 October 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education ordered all Japanese and Korean pupils to attend the long established "Oriental" school in Chinatown. The announcement attracted little attention in the San Francisco press and seems to have been ignored outside California until nine days later, when garbled reports of what had happened were printed in Tokyo newspapers claiming that all Japanese pupils had been excluded from the public schools. Roosevelt reacted quickly. He wrote his high-ranking Harvard classmate Baron Kentaro Kaneko that he would take action; he also met with and gave similar assurances to the Japanese minister, Viscount Siuzo Aoki, and dispatched a cabinet member and former California congressman, Secretary of Commerce and Labor Victor H. Metcalf, to San Francisco to investigate the matter. In his December 1906 annual message the president formally recommended legislation "providing for the naturalization of Japanese who come here intending to become American citizens." Roosevelt made no serious effort to get such legislation introduced, let alone passed, and just two months later Secretary of State Elihu Root, in reacting to a Japanese proposal that acceptance of exclusion be traded for naturalization, informed American negotiators that "no statute could be passed or treaty ratified" that granted naturalization.

Secretary Metcalf's report was made public on 18 December 1906 and showed that rather than the hundreds or thousands of Japanese pupils discussed in the press there were only ninety-five Japanese students in the entire San Francisco school system, twenty-five of them native-born American citizens. He did find that twenty-seven of the aliens were teenagers enrolled in inappropriate grades because of language problems; the most extreme example was two nineteen-year-olds in the fourth grade. Metcalf's report recommended that age-grade limits be enforced, something that was acceptable to the Japanese community. Otherwise Metcalf found the segregation order unjust and against the public interest. But since the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) had affirmed the legality of racial segregation in the United States, the federal government had no power over a state's right to practice it. California politicians of all parties, undoubtedly representing the will of their constituents, adamantly refused to mitigate their discrimination in any way, and, in the session of the legislature that began in January 1907, proposed enacting more anti-Japanese legislation. Roosevelt and Root set to work to ameliorate the situation, and, in something over a year, worked out a solution that is known as the Gentlemen's Agreement, the substance of which is contained in six notes exchanged between the two governments in late 1907 and early 1908. It is instructive to note that Root actually instituted an action in the northern federal district court of California to prohibit segregation of alien Japanese school-children, who enjoyed most-favored-nation rights under the existing commercial treaty with Japan, but could do nothing for the pupils who were American citizens.

In the event, no suit was necessary. Roosevelt summoned members of the school board to Washington, jawboned them in the White House, and got them to rescind their order in February 1907. (The only Japanese pupils actually segregated in California were in a few rural districts around Sacramento. Although that segregation continued, no fuss was made about it, so the Japanese government, which was concerned with "face" rather than principle, never complained.) Then Congress passed an amendment, drafted in the State Department, to a pending immigration bill, which enabled the president to bar by executive order persons with passports issued for any country other than the United States from entering the country. Japan, in turn, agreed to mark any passports issued to laborers, skilled or unskilled, who had not previously established American residence, as not valid for the United States. But the eventual agreement allowed Japan to issue passports valid for the United States to "laborers who have already been in America and to the parents, wives and children of laborers already resident there." Thus the principle of family reunification, which would become a hallmark of American immigration policy, was first introduced as a part of the process of restricting Asian immigration.

The Gentlemen's Agreement is an excellent example of the "unintended consequences" that have characterized much of the legal side of American immigration history. The diplomats and politicians involved assumed that with labor immigration at an end the Japanese American population would decline and the problems that its presence created in a white-dominated racist society would gradually fade away. They did not realize that through the family reunification provisions of the agreement tens of thousands of Japanese men would bring wives to California. Many if not most of these were "picture brides," women married by proxy in Japan to men who in most instances they would not see until they came to America. Most of these newly married couples soon had children who were American citizens by virtue of being born on American soil, which meant that the American Japanese population grew steadily. Eventually the anti-Japanese forces in the United States campaigned without success for a constitutional amendment that would repeal the "birthright citizenship" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and make the children of "aliens ineligible to citizenship" similarly ineligible. (In the 1970s nativist forces in the United States revived such demands but with a different target: they proposed making the American-born children of illegal immigrants ineligible for automatic citizenship.) When the Gentlemen's Agreement went into effect there were probably some 60,000 Japanese persons in the continental United States, the vast majority of them aliens. By 1940 there were more than 125,000, more than two-thirds of them native-born American citizens. Many white Californians and other concerned westerners who had been assured that the Gentlemen's Agreement was tantamount to exclusion came to believe that they had been betrayed by the uncaring politicians back east.

But even before the demographic consequences of the Gentlemen's Agreement became clear, a second crisis arose over Japanese immigrants. This one erupted in 1913 and focused on land rather than on people. Although most Japanese immigrants had come to California as laborers, many soon were able to become agricultural proprietors. As early as 1909 bills had been introduced into the California legislature barring the sale of agricultural land to Japanese, but Republican governors then and in 1911—the California legislature met only every other year—cooperated with Republican presidents in Washington and "sat upon the lid," as Governor Hiram W. Johnson put it. But in 1913, with Johnson still governor and Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the White House, the lid was off. Although Washington was again taken unawares by the crisis, Tokyo had been expecting it. Its consul general in San Francisco had warned in November 1912 that "the fear-laden anti-Japanese emotion of the people [of California] is a sleeping lion." By the time Wilson took office on 4 March 1913, bills restricting Japanese and other alien landholding had made considerable progress in the California legislature. The Japanese ambassador, Sutemi Chinda, called on the president during Wilson's second day in office: his dispatch to Tokyo quoted Wilson as saying "that the constitution did not allow the federal government to intervene in matters relating to the rights of the individual states." After much debate and publicity, in mid-April the California legislature passed legislation forbidding the ownership of agricultural land by "aliens ineligible to citizenship." This, of course, pointed the bill at Japanese, although it also affected other Asians. Californians argued that the discrimination—if such it was—was caused by federal rather than state law.

Even before Governor Johnson signed the bill, angry anti-American demonstrations erupted in Tokyo: the California legislature had again helped to create an international crisis. The Wilson administration, while trying to adhere to traditional states' rights doctrines, nevertheless felt that it had to at least seem to be taking action. Wilson sent Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan on a cross-country train trip to Sacramento to meet with Governor Johnson and the legislature and urged that the bill not be enacted before Bryan arrived. In the event, Bryan's trip was anti-climactic. Unlike Roosevelt and Root, Wilson and Bryan had nothing to offer the Californians in return for moderation. Bryan returned to Washington, and Johnson signed the Alien Land Act into law: eventually ten other western states passed similar measures.

The California law, which was strengthened in 1920, was relatively ineffective. Japanese farmers and the white entrepreneurs with whom they dealt evaded the law in a number of ways, most of which had been foreseen by Johnson and his advisers. The two major methods were placing land in the name of citizen children or leasing rather than purchasing the land. For a few relatively large-scale operators adoption of a corporate form was also effective. When the California legislature passed an amendment to the land act barring "aliens ineligible to citizenship" from exercising guardianship over their citizen children, the federal courts ruled that such a statute violated the constitutional rights of those children to have their natural parents as guardians.

These disputes, of course, helped to poison relations between Japan and the United States, which were already problematic on other grounds. During the Versailles treaty negotiations and in early sessions of the League of Nations, Japan tried to get questions of immigration and racial equality discussed but the imperialist powers successfully stifled every attempt. (Of course Japan did not have clean hands in such matters, but that is another story.) The final and most traumatic act in the conflicts between the Pacific powers over immigration came in 1924 and involved federal rather than state discrimination.

By the 1920s the American people and the Congress were ready for a general and massive curtailment of immigration. Prior to that time statutory immigration restriction based on race or national origin had been directed only at Asians. The Immigration Act of 1917—best known for imposing a literacy test on some immigrants—had created a "barred zone" expressed in degrees of latitude and longitude, which halted the immigration of most Asians not previously excluded or limited. The first statute to limit most immigration, the Quota Act of 1921, placed numerical limits on European immigration while leaving immigration from the Western Hemisphere largely alone; it did not directly impact Japanese immigration, which was still governed by the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907–1908. Under the 1921 act Japan got a small quota, and Tokyo could not and did not complain that the law was discriminatory. Had Japan been treated as European nations were in the 1924 statute, it would have received the minimum quota of 100, but the version of the more generally restrictive 1924 law that passed the House contained overt discrimination against Japanese by forbidding the immigration of "aliens ineligible to citizenship." In an ill-starred attempt to preserve the Gentlemen's Agreement, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes suggested verbally that Japanese Ambassador Masanao Hanihara write him a letter explaining the Gentlemen's Agreement, whereupon the American would transmit the letter to the Senate in an attempt to get the offending phrase removed. The note, which was not in itself either threatening or blustering, did contain the phrase "grave consequences" in referring to what might happen if the law were enacted with the offending phrase. Henry Cabot Lodge and other senators insisted that the phrase was a "veiled threat" against the United States and stampeded the Senate into accepting the House language. In The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge (1998), the historian Robert H. Ferrell presented evidence suggesting that Hughes and others in the State Department either drafted or helped to draft the original note, something that all those concerned categorically denied at the time and later.

How grave were the actual consequences? No one can say. Japan and the United States might well have engaged in what became a "war without mercy" even if no Japanese immigrant had ever come to America. But some authorities, such as George F. Kennan, have argued that the "long and unhappy story" of U.S.–Japanese relations were negatively affected by the fact that "we would repeatedly irritate and offend the sensitive Japanese by our immigration policies and the treatment of people of Japanese lineage."

The 1924 act, which established a pattern of immigration restriction that prevailed until 1965, also established a "consular control system" by providing that aliens subject to immigration control could not be admitted to the United States without a valid visa issued by an American consular officer abroad. Visas were first required as a wartime measure in a 1918 act and were continued in peacetime by a 1921 act, but they were primarily an identification device. The 1924 act for the first time made the visa a major factor in immigration control. Although the State Department often claimed that Congress had tied the government's hands, the fact of the matter is that since 1924 much actual restriction of immigration has been based on the judgment of the individual federal officials administering it. That responsibility has been shared between the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), then in the Department of Labor but switched to the Department of Justice in 1940. The diplomatic control is exercised by granting or failing to grant visas; the INS control is exercised largely at the borders, although since 1925 some INS personnel have been attached to some American embassies abroad as technical advisers. (The number of foreign countries with INS personnel has fluctuated. At the outset of the twenty-first century they were operating in thirty-eight countries. In Canada and a few other places, mostly in the Western Hemisphere, it has become possible to clear U.S. immigration and customs while still on foreign soil.)

The American foreign service—which was white, Christian (overwhelmingly Protestant), and elitist—had long exercised a largely negative influence on American immigration policy. Consular reports had provided much ammunition for the immigration restriction movement since the late nineteenth century. The tenure of Wilbur J. Carr as, in effect, head of the consular service from 1909 to 1937, placed a determined and convinced anti-Semitic nativist in a position to shape the formulation of both immigration and refugee policy. We now know that Carr, a skilled and manipulative bureaucrat, regularly fed anti-immigrant excerpts from unpublished consular reports to restrictionists such as Representative Albert Johnson, chief author of the 1924 immigration act. One Carr memo to him described Polish and Russian Jews as "filthy, Un-American and often dangerous in their habits." Many American consuls shared these views. Richard C. Beer, for example, a career officer serving in Budapest in 1922–1923, complained that the law forced him to give visas to Hungarians, Gypsies, and Jews who were all barbarians and gave his office an odor that "no zoo in the world can equal." Other consular officials, who might not have held such views, took their cues from their chief and the whole tone of the foreign service. During what was left of the "prosperity decade" after 1924 the INS and the State Department were pretty much on the same nativist page, although some INS officials resented their loss of control.

Although there were no statutory limits on immigration from independent nations of the Western Hemisphere until 1965, President Herbert Hoover administratively limited Mexican and other Latin American immigration by use of the highly subjective "likely to become a public charge" clause that had been on the statute books since 1882. The clause had originally been designed to keep out persons who for reasons of physical or mental disability were patently unable to support themselves. From the Hoover administration on, the clause has been interpreted at times to bar persons who were able-bodied but poor. The prospective immigrant could be stopped at the border or at an immigrant receiving station by INS personnel or could have a visa denied by someone in the diplomatic service in the country of origin.

The onset of the Great Depression temporarily reduced immigration pressures—during two years in the early 1930s more immigrants left the United States than entered it—but an entirely different situation developed after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. The unprecedented situation of large numbers of refugees and would-be refugees stemming from a western European power had not been foreseen by the drafters of American immigration legislation. The United States had an immigration policy but not a refugee policy. Congress had previously been favorable to political and religious refugees. Restrictive immigration acts dating from the nineteenth century barred persons with criminal records but always specifically excluded those convicted of political offenses. As late as 1917, in the part of a statute imposing a not very strenuous literacy test as a criterion for admission, Congress specifically exempted any person seeking admission "to avoid religious persecution."

By 1933, however, under the stresses of the Great Depression and after going through what John Higham has aptly termed the "tribal twenties," Congress was in no mood to ease immigration restrictions. And although some of the later apologists for the lack of an effective American refugee policy before the onset of the Holocaust put all or most of the onus on Congress, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt must share that blame. There was nothing even resembling a new deal for immigration policy. To be sure, New Dealers at the top of Frances Perkins's Department of Labor, which continued to administer the INS until 1940, were much more sympathetic to immigrant concerns than the labor movement bureaucrats who had previously run the department. But the anti-immigrant culture of the INS continued. Moreover, the State Department's personnel and policies about immigration and many other matters were little affected by the New Deal. The administrative regulation of immigration was tightened during the early years of the Depression by both sets of government agents: the consular officials abroad and the INS at the borders.

Jews and others seeking visas in the 1930s quickly learned that some American consuls were better than others. George S. Messersmith, consul general in Berlin in the early 1930s and minister to Austria before the Anschluss, at a time when the German quota was undersubscribed, gained a positive rating from Jewish individuals and organizations. Even more proactive for refugees was Messersmith's successor in Berlin, Raymond Geist, who on occasion actually went to concentration camps to arrange the release of Jews with American visas. Although there is no thorough study of the work of American consular officials in Europe during the period between 1933 and Pearl Harbor, it is clear that men like Messersmith and Geist were exceptions and that the majority of consuls were indifferent if not hostile to Jews desiring American visas. The signals consuls received from Carr and other officials in the State Department certainly encouraged them to interpret the law as narrowly as possible.

For example, when Herbert Lehman, Franklin Roosevelt's successor as governor of New York, wrote the president on two occasions in 1935 and 1936 about the difficulties German Jews were having in getting visas from American consulates, Roosevelt assured him, in responses drafted by the State Department, that consular officials were carrying out their duties "in a considerate and humane manner." Irrefutable evidence exists in a number of places to demonstrate that, to the contrary, many officials of the Department of State at home and abroad consistently made it difficult and in many cases impossible for fully eligible refugees to obtain visas. One example will have to stand as surrogate for hundreds of demonstrable cases of consular misfeasance and malfeasance. Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, the oldest Jewish seminary in America, had a Refugee Scholars Project that between 1935 and 1942 brought eleven such scholars to its campus. The 1924 immigration act specifically exempted from quota restriction professors and ministers of any religion as well as their wives and minor children. There should have been no difficulties on the American end in bringing the chosen scholars to Cincinnati. But in almost every case the State Department and especially Avra M. Warren, head of the visa division, raised difficulties, some of which seem to have been invented. In some instances the college, often helped by the intervention of influential individuals, managed to overcome them. In two instances, however, the college was unsuccessful.

The men involved were Arthur Spanier and Albert Lewkowitz. Spanier had been the Hebraica librarian at the Prussian State Library, and after the Nazis dismissed him, a teacher at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Spanier was sent to a concentration camp. The guaranteed offer of an appointment was enough to get him released from the camp but not enough to get him an American visa. The president of Hebrew Union College had to go to Washington even to discover why this was the case. Warren explained that the rejection was because Spanier's principal occupation was as a librarian and because after 1934 the Nazis had demoted the Hochschule (a general term for a place of higher education) to a Lehranstalt (educational institute), and an administrative regulation of the State Department not found in the statute held that a nonquota visa could not be given to a scholar coming to a high status institute in the United States from one of lower status abroad. Lewkowitz, a teacher of philosophy at the Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary, did get an American visa in Germany. Both men were able to get to the Netherlands and were there when the Germans invaded. The German bombing of Rotterdam destroyed Lewkowitz's papers, and American consular officials there insisted that he get new documents from Germany, an obviously impossible requirement. Visaless, both men were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Lewkowitz was one of the few concentration camp inmates exchanged, and he reached Palestine in 1944. Spanier was murdered in Bergen-Belsen. If highly qualified scholars with impressive institutional sponsorship had difficulties, one can imagine what it was like for less well-placed individuals.

Apart from creating difficulties for refugees seeking visas, the State Department consistently downplayed international attempts to solve or ameliorate the refugee situation. For example, in 1936 brain trusters Felix Frankfurter and Raymond Moley urged Roosevelt to send a delegation that included such prominent persons as Rabbi Stephen S. Wise to a 1936 League of Nations conference on refugees. The president instead took the advice of the State Department and sent only a minor diplomatic functionary as an observer. It was then politic for him to accept the State Department's insistence that "the status of all aliens is covered by law and there is no latitude left to the Executive to discuss questions concerning the legal status of aliens." When Roosevelt wanted to do something to he could almost always find a way. Immediately after the Anschluss, he directed that the Austrian quota numbers be used to expand the German quota, and shortly after Kristallnacht, he quietly directed the INS that any political or religious refugees in the United States on six-month visitor's visas could have such visas extended or rolled over every six months. Perhaps 15,000 persons were thus enabled to stay in the United States. On more public occasions however, such as the infamous early 1939 voyage of the German liner Saint Louis, loaded with nearly a thousand refugees whose Cuban visas had been canceled, he again took State Department advice and turned a deaf ear to appeals for American visas while the vessel hove to just off Miami Beach. The Saint Louis returned its passengers to Europe, where many of them perished in the Holocaust.

After the Nazis overran France, Roosevelt showed what a determined president could do. In the summer of 1940 he instructed his Advisory Committee on Refugees to make lists of eminent refugees and told the State Department to issue visas for them. An agent named Varian Fry, operating out of Marseilles and with the cooperation of American vice consuls, managed to get more than a thousand eminent refugees into Spain and on to the United States. Those rescued by these means included Heinrich Mann, Marc Chagall, and Wanda Landowska. But at the same time, Roosevelt appointed his friend Breckinridge Long as assistant secretary of state. A confirmed nativist and anti-Semite, Long was in charge of the visa section and thus oversaw refugee policy. The president eventually became aware of the biases in the State Department, and when he decided in mid-1944 to bring in a "token shipment" of nearly a thousand refugees from American-run camps in Europe, he put Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes in charge. Vice President Walter Mondale's acute 1979 observation that before and during the war the nations of the West "failed the test of civilization" is a sound assessment of American policy.

Two other wartime developments should be noted. First, the State Department became involved in American agricultural policy in connection with the wartime Bracero program, which brought temporary Mexican workers to the United States for work in agriculture and on railroads. The Mexican government was, with good reason, apprehensive about the treatment they might receive, so the State Department was in part responsible for the United States living up to its agreement. Second, the State Department was responsible for the wartime exchanges of diplomats and other enemy nationals with the Axis powers. It was also concerned with the treatment of American civilians in enemy hands, particularly Japan, and because of that justified concern persistently argued for humane treatment for both the few thousand interned Japanese nationals in INS custody and the 120,000 Japanese Americans, both citizen and alien, who were in the custody of the War Relocation Authority.

The war years also witnessed a historic if seemingly minor reversal of American immigration policy with the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Few episodes show the connection between immigration and foreign policy so explicitly. President Roosevelt sent a special message to Congress urging the action. Speaking as commander in chief, he regarded the legislation "as important in the cause of winning the war and of establishing a secure peace." Since China was a U.S. ally and its resistance depended in part on "the spirit of her people and her faith in her allies," the president argued for a show of support:

We owe it to the Chinese to strengthen that faith. One step in this direction is to wipe from the statute books those anachronisms in our laws which forbid the immigration of Chinese people into this country and which bar Chinese residents from American citizenship. Nations, like individuals, make mistakes. We must be big enough to acknowledge our mistakes of the past and correct them.

In addition, Roosevelt argued that repeal would silence Japanese propaganda and that the small number of Chinese who would enter would cause neither unemployment nor job competition. The president admitted that "While the law would give the Chinese a preferred status over certain other Oriental people, their great contribution to the cause of decency and freedom entitles them to such preference…. Passage will be an earnest of our purpose to apply the policy of the good neighbor to our relations with other peoples."

The repeal of Chinese exclusion was thus sold as a kind of good-behavior prize not for Chinese Americans, thousands of whom were then serving in the U.S. armed forces, but for the Chinese people. Nevertheless, Roosevelt's hint about future policy was right on the mark. Within three years Congress would pass similar special legislation granting naturalization rights and quotas to Filipinos and "natives of India," and in 1952 it would enact legislation ending racial discrimination in naturalization policy. By that time the emphasis was on winning "hearts and minds" in the Cold War.

The Cold War and Beyond

Even before the Cold War came to dominate almost every facet of American policies toward the rest of the world, attitudes about immigration and immigration policies were beginning to change, as were the policies themselves. The increasing prevalence of an internationalist ideology, membership in the United Nations, and a growing guilt about and horror at the Holocaust all combined to impel the United States to do something about the European refugee crisis symbolized by the millions of displaced persons there. After some crucial months of inaction, Harry Truman issued a presidential directive just before Christmas 1945 that got some refugees into the United States. One important and often over-looked aspect of this directive enabled voluntary agencies, largely religious, to sponsor refugees, which virtually negated the application of the "likely to become a public charge" clause in such cases. Previously, sponsorship of most refugees without significant assets had to be assumed by American relatives. But it was only after passage and implementation of the Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950 that the United States could be said to have a refugee policy, one that the increasingly more diverse personnel of the State Department helped to carry out. That legislation brought more than 400,000 European refugees into the United States and expanded the use of voluntary agencies—later called VOLAGS (Voluntary Agencies Responsible for Refugees)—such as the Catholic and Lutheran welfare organizations and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Association. In addition, U.S. sponsorship of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and membership in its successors, the International Refugee Organization and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, contributed to changed attitudes about and policies toward refugees even though general immigration policy remained tied to the quota principle introduced in 1921–1924, which lasted until 1965.

Even the notorious McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952—a quintessential piece of Cold War legislation that passed over Truman's veto and seemed merely to continue the restrictive policies begun in 1921 and 1924—contained liberalizing provisions that were more significant than most of its advocates and opponents realized. Chief of these was the total elimination of a color bar in naturalization. While some of the impetus for this came from liberals on racial issues, the push from those impelled by Cold War imperatives was probably more important. State Department representatives and others testified how difficult it was to become the leader of what they liked to term the "free world" when American immigration and naturalization policies blatantly discriminated against the majority of the world's peoples. In addition, a growing understanding that an important diplomatic objective was to win the hearts and minds of peoples and not just the consent of governments made diplomats more aware of the significance of immigrants and immigration. For example, when Dalip Singh Saund, the first Asian-born member of Congress, was elected in 1956, the State Department and the United States Information Agency sponsored him and his wife on a tour of his native India.

Although the word "refugee" does not appear in the 1952 immigration act, an obscure section of it gave the attorney general discretionary parole power to admit aliens "for emergency reasons or for reasons in the public interest." This was the method that Roosevelt had used in 1944, without congressional authorization, to bring in nearly a thousand refugees. This allowed the executive branch to respond quickly to emergency situations such as the Hungarian revolt of 1956 and the Cuban revolution of 1959. Between the displaced persons acts of the Truman administration and the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1981 about 2.25 million refugees were admitted, with about 750,000 Cubans and 400,000 refugees from America's misbegotten wars in Southeast Asia the largest increments. Since during that period some 10.4 million legal immigrants entered the United States, refugees accounted for some 20 percent of the total.

Although most textbook accounts trace the transformation of post–World War II immigration and immigration policy to the act signed by Lyndon Johnson in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty in 1965, that is a gross exaggeration. The reality can be better glimpsed by considering the numerical incidence of immigration to colonial America and the United States over time. No official enumeration of immigration took place before 1819, but most authorities agree that perhaps a million European and African immigrants came before then. Between 1819 and the enactment of the 1924 immigration act some 36 million immigrants arrived. Between 1925 and 1945—with immigration inhibited first by the new restrictive law and then much more effectively by the Great Depression and World War II—nearly 2.5 million came, an average of fewer than 125,000 annually. In the decade before World War I more than a million came each year. Well into the post–World War II era, many authorities felt that as a major factor in American history immigration was a thing of the past, but as

the table indicates, based on INS data, this was a serious misperception.

With the self deconstruction of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, domestic policy began to reassume paramount importance in American policy, including immigration policy. Input from the Department of State assumed less significance in immigration matters than during the Cold War era, although the increased volume of immigration greatly taxed and often overtaxed American embassies and consulates. For example, the State Department was given the responsibility of administering the lottery provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 and its successors. The department announced on 10 May 2001 that for the 2002 lottery its Consular Center in Williamsburg, Kentucky, had managed to sift 10 million qualified entries while rejecting an additional 3 million applicants for not following directions and notified 90,000 potential winners chosen at random what they had to do to gain admission to the United States as resident aliens. Each overseas applicant would have to pass an interview examination for eligibility at an American consulate; those applying from within the United States would apply through the INS. Only a maximum of 50,000 of the 90,000 could actually win and gain admittance to the United States along with certain of their qualified dependents. All paper work would have to be completed by 30 September 2002. Anyone who did not have a visa by then lost the presumed advantage of winning. Applications for the 2003 lottery were scheduled to take place during the following month, October 2002.

The major functions of IRCA were the socalled "amnesty," which legalized some 2.7 million immigrants illegally in the United States, the majority of whom were from Mexico, and the promise of effective control measures to "gain control of our borders" by more effective interdiction of illegal border crosses and intensified deportation of remaining resident illegals. This created great fears in many nations of the circum-Caribbean, particularly the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, whose economies were greatly dependent on immigrant remittances, that large numbers of their citizens would be excluded and their remittances ended. These fears were chimerical; borders remained porous. But, in the meantime, to cite just one example, President José Napoléon Duarte wrote President Reagan in early 1987 requesting that Salvadorans in the United States illegally be given "extended voluntary departure" (EVD) status, an aspect of the attorney general's parole power enabling illegal immigrants to remain. While EVD was usually granted on humanitarian grounds, Duarte stressed the economic loss if immigrant remittances ceased. Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, who had opposed EVD on humanitarian grounds, now supported it, but the negative views of the Department of Justice and the congressional leadership prevailed. Forms of EVD or its equivalent were put into place during the Clinton presidency for Salvadorans and Nicaraguans by both the administration and Congress.

The State Department also had to deal with increasing complaints from foreign countries about the execution of its citizens by the criminal justice systems of American states, most of which had been practicing capital punishment with increased enthusiasm at a time when many nations had abolished it. Since it is a legal action, the United States cannot even consider paying compensation of any kind.

The more than 25 million post-1950 immigrants, as is well known, have changed the face of America. As late as the 1950s, immigrants from Europe, who had contributed the lion's share of nineteenth-and early-twentieth century immigrants, still were a bare majority of all immigrants. By the 1980s, thanks largely to the liberal 1965 immigration act and the Refugee Act of 1980, the European share was down to about 10 percent, and immigrants from Latin America and Asia predominated. Although anti-immigrant attitudes again came to the fore in 1980s—sparked in part by Ronald Reagan's warnings about being overrun by "feet people"—and some scholars saw "a turn against immigration" and predicted effective legislative restriction of immigration, those feelings were not turned into an effective legislative consensus. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, immigration continued at a very high rate, and screening and facilitating that influx continued to be an important aspect of the work of American diplomacy.

Bibliography

Breitman, Richard, and Alan M. Kraut. American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945. Bloomington, Ind., 1987. A good account of nativist sentiment and activity in the State Department.

Corbett, P. Scott. Quiet Passages: The Exchange of Civilians Between the United States and Japan During the Second World War. Kent, Ohio, 1987. Tells the story of the State Department's Special Division.

Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York, 1990. Surveys immigration and naturalization policy.

——. The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion. 2d ed. Berkeley, Calif., 1991.

Dinnerstein, Leonard. America and the Survivors of the Holocaust. New York, 1982. Fundamental to an understanding of the postwar shift in American policy toward refugees.

Fry, Varian. Surrender on Demand. New York, 1945. Fry, whose papers are at Columbia University, tells his story.

Gillion, Steven M. "That's Not What We Meant to Do": Reform and Its Unintended Consequences in Twentieth-Century America. New York, 2000. A series of case studies, including one on the 1965 immigration act.

Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New Brunswick, N.J., 1955. The classic work on American nativism.

Karlin, J. Alexander. "The Indemnification of Aliens Injured by Mob Violence." Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 25 (1945): 235–246. Treats indemnification for victims of violence.

Loewenstein, Sharon. Token Refuge: The Story of the Jewish Refugee Shelter at Oswego, 1944–1946. Bloomington, Ind., 1986. Describes the first mass shipment of refugees.

Meyer, Michael A. "The Refugee Scholars Project of the Hebrew Union College." In Bertram Wallace Korn, ed. A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus. New York, 1976. Most instructive about difficulties to refugee admission created by the State Department.

Mitchell, Christopher, ed. Western Hemisphere Immigration and U.S. Foreign Policy. University Park, Pa., 1992. A collection of essays largely by political scientists.

Peffer, George Anthony. If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion. Urbana, Ill., 1999.

Reimers, David M. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America. 2d ed. New York, 1992.

——. Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn Against Immigration. New York, 1998. Along with Still the Golden Door, this book is part of the cutting edge of late-twentieth-century immigration history.

Sandmeyer, Elmer Clarence. The Anti-Chinese Movement in California. 2d ed. Urbana, Ill., 1991.

Schulzinger, Robert D. The Making of the Diplomatic Mind: The Training, Outlook, and Style of United States Foreign Service Officers, 1908–1931. Middletown, Conn., 1975. Although many works on the foreign service ignore its immigration functions, this work is a happy exception.

Schwartz, Donald. "Breckinridge Long." In John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds. American National Biography. New York, 2000. This sketch makes the subject's prejudices explicit.

Smith, David A. "From the Mississippi to the Mediterranean: The 1891 New Orleans Lynching and Its Effects on United States Diplomacy and the American Navy." Southern Historian 19 (1998): 60–85.

Wilson, Theodore A. "Wilbur J. Carr." In John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds. American National Biography. New York, 2000. This laudatory sketch of Wilbur J. Carr ignores Carr's prejudices and his role in immigration policy.

— Roger Daniels

The entrance into a country of foreigners for purposes of permanent residence. The correlative term emigration denotes the act of such persons in leaving their former country.

See: aliens.

Quotes:

"Without comprehension, the immigrant would forever remain shut -- a stranger in America. Until America can release the heart as well as train the hand of the immigrant, he would forever remain driven back upon himself, corroded by the very richness of the unused gifts within his soul." - Anzia Yezierska

"Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country." - Theodore Roosevelt

"The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples." - Walter Lippmann

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp! cries she with silent lips. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me; I lift my lamp beside the golden door." - Emma Lazarus

"It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it." - Eric Hoffer

"The proposition that Muslims are welcome in Britain if, and only if, they stop behaving like Muslims is a doctrine which is incompatible with the principles that guide a free society." - Roy Hattersley

See more famous quotes about Immigration

"Immigrants" redirects here. For other uses, see Immigrants (disambiguation).

For the cellular automaton, see Immigration (CA).

Net migration rates for 2008: positive (blue), negative (orange), stable (green), and no data (grey).

Immigration is the arrival of new individuals into a habitat or population. It is a biological concept and is important in population ecology, differentiated from emigration and migration.

Contents 1 Definition 2 Statistics 3 Understanding of immigration 3.1 General theories behind immigration 3.2 Region-specific factors for immigration 4 Economic Migrant 5 Ethics 6 By country 6.1 Europe 6.1.1 Norway 6.1.2 Italy 6.1.3 United Kingdom 6.1.4 Spain 6.1.5 Portugal 6.2 Canada 6.3 Israel/Palestine 6.4 Japan 6.5 Australia 6.6 New Zealand 6.7 United States of America 7 See also 8 Notes 9 Further reading 10 External links

Definition

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2009)

The term "immigration" is usually used to mean international immigration. International migration has been split into two types by most governments, based on the UN: long and short term.^[1] The United Nations considers a long term international migrant to be

A person who moves to a country other than that of his or her usual residence for a period of at least a year (12 months), so that the country of destination effectively becomes his or her new country of usual residence. From the perspective ... of the country of arrival the person will be a long-term immigrant.

—United Nations^[1]

It also considers a short term migrant to be

A person who moves to a country other than that of his or her usual residence for a period of at least 3 months

—United Nations^[1]

This specifically excludes "temporary travel abroad for purposes of recreation, holiday, visits to friends and relatives, business, medical treatment or religious pilgrimage".^[1] The UN has also directly linked international immigration into one country with emigration from another.

The modern concept of immigration is related to the development of nation-states and nationality law and/or citizenship law. Citizenship in a nation-state confers an inalienable right of residence in that state, but residency of non-citizens is subject to conditions set by immigration law. The emergence of modern nation-states made immigration a political issue: by imagining its populations, in violation of multi-ethnic, multi-'racial', multi-cultural realities 'on the ground', as homogenous blocks, constituting a nation defined by shared, single ethnicity, 'race' and/or culture. Legal and political restrictions on the presence of foreigners is a highly controversial political theme because such restrictions are introduced and maintained by states whose citizens have had a major, sustained and deeply consequential presence in states other than their own (see: colonialism).^{[citation needed]}

Legal immigrants are people who obtain legal status marked, at a minimum, by some form of residence permit that regulates the terms of their employment (see also expatriates). Some, but by no means all, foreign workers and expatriates seek and reach citizenship in the state where they work. Legal immigrants are different from the undocumented labor force in that the latter does not have legal status in the country in which he or she works. Not all undocumented workers are, strictly speaking, illegal, because of the complex history of global migrations.^{[citation needed]}

Statistics

The International Organization for Migration said there are more than 200 million migrants around the world today. Europe hosted the largest number of immigrants, with 70.6 million people in 2005, the latest year for which figures are available. North America, with over 45.1 million immigrants, is second, followed by Asia, which hosts nearly 25.3 million. Most of today's migrant workers come from Asia.^[2]

The United Nations found that, in 2005, there were nearly 191 million international migrants worldwide, 3 percent of the world population. This represented a rise of 26 million since 1990. Sixty percent of these immigrants were now in developed countries, an increase on 1990. Those in less devloped countries stagnated, mainly because of a fall in refugees.^[3] Contrast that to the average rate of globalization (the proportion of cross-border trade in all trade), which exceeds 20 percent. The numbers of people living outside their country of birth is expected to rise in the future.^[4]

The Middle East, some parts of Europe, small areas of South East Asia, and a few spots in the West Indies have the highest percentages of immigrant population recorded by the UN Census 2005. The reliability of immigrant censuses is, however, lamentably low due to the concealed character of undocumented labor migration. The International Organization for Migration has estimated the number of foreign migrants to be over 200 million worldwide today.^[5]

Recent surveys by Gallup found roughly 700 million adults would like to migrate to another country permanently if they had the chance. The United States is the top desired destination country.^[6]

Understanding of immigration

General theories behind immigration

One theory of immigration distinguishes between push factors and pull factors.^[7] Push factors refer primarily to the motive for emigration from the country of origin. In the case of economic migration (usually labour migration), differentials in wage rates are prominent. If the value of wages in the new country surpasses the value of wages in one’s native country, he or she may choose to migrate as long as the travel costs are not too high. Particularly in the 19th century, economic expansion of the U.S. increased migrant flow, and in effect, nearly 20% of the population was foreign born versus today’s value of 10%, making up a significant amount of the labor force. Poor individuals from less developed countries can have far higher standards of living in developed countries than in their originating countries. The cost of emigration, which includes both the explicit costs, the ticket price, and the implicit cost, lost work time and loss of community ties, also play a major role in the pull of emigrants away from their native country. As transportation technology improved, travel time and costs decreased dramatically between the 18th and early 20th century. Travel across the Atlantic used to take up to 5 weeks in the 1700s, but around the time of the 1900s it took a mere 8 days.^[8] When the opportunity cost is lower, the immigration rates tend to be higher.^[8] Escape from poverty (personal or for relatives staying behind) is a traditional push factor, the availability of jobs is the related pull factor. Natural disasters and can amplify poverty-driven migration flows. This kind of migration may be illegal immigration in the destination country (emigration is also illegal in some countries, such as North Korea, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and Somalia).

The main problem with push-and-pull theories is three-fold: first, they state the obvious (i.e., people from poorer places will seek to go to richer ones); second, they are unable to explain the emergence of migrant flows (if push and pull were the only things in existence, people from the poorest countries would migrate to the richest ones, when in reality such flows are well-nigh non-existent); third, they are unable to explain the stability of the emerging patterns of migration (i.e., once a flow from country A to country B is established, it will stay on for a relatively long time, even if the initial conditions that had given the push and pull to the migration are not there any more (as the case of the German case of the Gastarbeiter, or guest worker program shows.^{[citation needed]}

Emigration and immigration are sometimes mandatory in a contract of employment: religious missionaries, and employees of transnational corporations, international non-governmental organisations and the diplomatic service expect, by definition, to work 'overseas'. They are often referred to as 'expatriates', and their conditions of employment are typically equal to or better than those applying in the host country (for similar work).

For some migrants, education is the primary pull factor (although most international students are not classified as immigrants). Retirement migration from rich countries to lower-cost countries with better climate, is a new type of international migration. Examples include immigration of retired British citizens to Spain or Italy and of retired Canadian citizens to the U.S. (mainly to the U.S. states of Florida and Texas).

Non-economic push factors include persecution (religious and otherwise), frequent abuse, bullying, oppression, ethnic cleansing and even genocide, and risks to civilians during war. Political motives traditionally motivate refugee flows—to escape dictatorship for instance.

Some migration is for personal reasons, based on a relationship (e.g. to be with family or a partner), such as in family reunification or transnational marriage. In a few cases, an individual may wish to emigrate to a new country in a form of transferred patriotism. Evasion of criminal justice (e.g. avoiding arrest) is a personal motivation. This type of emigration and immigration is not normally legal, if a crime is internationally recognized, although criminals may disguise their identities or find other loopholes to evade detection. There have been cases, for example, of those who might be guilty of war crimes disguising themselves as victims of war or conflict and then pursuing asylum in a different country.

Barriers to immigration come not only in legal form; natural and social barriers to immigration can also be very powerful. Immigrants when leaving their country also leave everything familiar: their family, friends, support network, and culture. They also need to liquidate their assets often at a large loss, and incur the expense of moving. When they arrive in a new country this is often with many uncertainties including finding work, where to live, new laws, new cultural norms, language or accent issues, possible racism and other exclusionary behaviour towards them and their family. These barriers act to limit international migration (scenarios where populations move en masse to other continents, creating huge population surges, and their associated strain on infrastructure and services, ignore these inherent limits on migration.)

The politics of immigration have become increasingly associated with other issues, such as national security, terrorism, and in western Europe especially, with the presence of Islam as a new major religion. Those with security concerns cite the 2005 civil unrest in France that point to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy as an example of the value conflicts arising from immigration of Muslims in Western Europe while failing to recognize the fact that most participants of the 2005 civil unrest were citizens of France, not immigrants themselves, and the essence of their protest was denial of equal rights, and blatant racism, on the part of the state. Because of all these associations, immigration has become an emotional political issue in many European nations.^{[citation needed]}

Region-specific factors for immigration

Some states, such as Japan, have opted for technological changes to increase profitability (for example, greater automation), and designed immigration laws specifically to prevent immigrants from coming to, and remaining within, the country. However, globalization, as well as low birth rates and an aging work force, has forced even Japan to reconsider its immigration policy.^[9] Japan's colonial past has also created considerable pockets of non-Japanese in Japan. Most of these groups, e.g., Koreans, have faced extreme levels of discrimination in Japan.^[10]

As a principle, citizens of one member nation of the European Union are allowed to work in other member nations with little to no restriction on movement.^[11] For non-EU-citizen permanent residents in the EU, movement between EU-member states is considerably more difficult. After new waves of accession to the European Union, earlier members have often introduced measures to restrict participation in "their" labour markets by citizens of the new EU-member states. For instance, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal and Spain each restricted their labour market for up to seven years both in the 2004 and 2007 round of accession.^[12]

Due to the European Union's—in principle—single internal labour market policy, societies that have seen relatively low levels of labour immigration until recently—which have sent a significant portion of their population overseas in the past—such as Italy and the Republic of Ireland are seeing an influx of immigrants from EU countries with lower per capita annual earning rates, triggering nationwide immigration debates.^[13][14]

Spain, meanwhile, is seeing growing illegal immigration from Africa. As Spain is the closest EU member nation to Africa—Spain even has two autonomous cities (Ceuta and Melilla) on the African continent, as well as an autonomous community (the Canary Islands) west of North Africa, in the Atlantic—it is physically easiest for African emigrants to reach. This has led to debate both within Spain and between Spain and other EU members. Spain has asked for border control assistance from other EU states; the latter have responded that Spain has brought the wave of African illegals on itself by granting amnesty to hundreds of thousands of immigrants.^[15]

The United Kingdom, France and Germany have seen major immigration since the end of World War II and have been debating the issue for decades. Foreign workers were brought in to those countries to help rebuild after the war, and many stayed. Political debates about immigration typically focus on statistics, the immigration law and policy, and the implementation of existing restrictions.^[16][17] In some European countries the debate in the 1990s was focused on asylum seekers, but restrictive policies within the European Union, as well as a reduction in armed conflict in Europe and neighboring regions, have sharply reduced asylum seekers.^[18]

In the United States political debate on immigration has flared repeatedly since the US became independent.^{[citation needed]} Some on the far-left of the political spectrum attribute anti-immigration rhetoric to an all-"white", under-educated and parochial minority of the population, ill-educated about the relative advantages of immigration for the US economy and society.^[19] While this mentality shows an obvious bias, it is often hard for civil discussion to occur regarding immigration due to its highly emotional underpinnings.

Economic Migrant

The term economic migrant refers to someone who has emigrated from one country to another country for the purposes of seeking employment or improved financial position. An economic migrant is distinct from someone who is a refugee fleeing persecution. An economic migrant can be someone from the United States immigrating to the UK or vice versa.

Many countries have immigration and visa restrictions that prohibit a person entering the country for the purposes of gaining work without a valid work visa. Persons who are declared an economic migrant can be refused entry into a country.

Ethics

Although freedom of movement is often recognized as a civil right, the freedom only applies to movement within national borders: it may be guaranteed by the constitution or by human rights legislation. Additionally, this freedom is often limited to citizens and excludes others. No state currently allows full freedom of movement across its borders, and international human rights treaties do not confer a general right to enter another state. According to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to leave or enter a country, along with movement within it (internal migration).^[20] Some argue that the freedom of movement both within and between countries is a basic human right, and that the restrictive immigration policies, typical of nation-states, violate this human right of freedom of movement.^[21] Such arguments are common among anti-state ideologies like anarchism and libertarianism. As philosopher and "Open Borders" activist Jacob Appel has written, "Treating human beings differently, simply because they were born on the opposite side of a national boundary, is hard to justify under any mainstream philosophical, religious or ethical theory."^[22]

Where immigration is permitted, it is typically selective. Ethnic selection, such as the White Australia policy, has generally disappeared, but priority is usually given to the educated, skilled, and wealthy—which is in direct contradiction to the needs of the labour market (demanding un-skilled and poor people with low levels of education, willing to do jobs wealthier locals refuse to do). Less privileged individuals, including the mass of poor people in low-income countries, cannot avail of the legal and protected immigration opportunities offered by wealthy states. This inequality has also been criticised as conflicting with the principle of equal opportunities, which apply (at least in theory) within democratic nation-states. The fact that the door is closed for the unskilled, while at the same time many developed countries have a huge demand for unskilled labour, is a major factor in undocumented immigration. The contradictory nature of this policy—which specifically disadvantages the unskilled immigrants while exploiting their labour—has also been criticised on ethical grounds.

Immigration polices which selectively grant freedom of movement to targeted individuals are intended to produce a net economic gain for the host country. They can also mean net loss for a poor donor country through the loss of the educated minority—the brain drain. This can exacerbate the global inequality in standards of living that provided the motivation for the individual to migrate in the first place. An example of the 'competition for skilled labour' is active recruitment of health workers by First World countries, from the Third World.

By country

Europe

According to Eurostat,^[23] Some EU member states are currently receiving large-scale immigration: for instance Spain, where the economy has created more than half of all the new jobs in the EU over the past five years.^[24] The EU, in 2005, had an overall net gain from international migration of +1.8 million people. This accounts for almost 85% of Europe's total population growth in 2005.^[25] In 2004, total 140,033 people immigrated to France. Of them, 90,250 were from Africa and 13,710 from Europe.^[26] In 2005, immigration fell slightly to 135,890.^[27] many problems can form, like in the book The Shifting Heart. British emigration towards Southern Europe is of special relevance. Citizens from the European Union make up a growing proportion of immigrants in Spain. They mainly come from countries like the UK and Germany, but the British case is of special interest due to its magnitude. The British authorities estimate that the British population in Spain at 700,000.^[28]

Norway

In recent years, immigration has accounted for more than half of Norway's population growth. In 2006, Statistics Norway's (SSB) counted a record 45,800 immigrants arriving in Norway—30% higher than 2005.^[29] At the beginning of 2007, there were 415,300 persons in Norway with an immigrant background (i.e. immigrants, or born of immigrant parents), comprising 8.3 per cent of the total population.^[30]

Italy

Italy now has an estimated 4 million to 5 million immigrants — about 7 percent of the population. Since the expansion of the European Union, the most recent wave of migration has been from surrounding European nations, particularly Eastern Europe, and increasingly Asia, replacing North Africa as the major immigration area. Some 900,000 Romanians are officially registered as living in Italy, replacing Albanians and Moroccans as the largest ethnic minority group, but independet estimates put the actual number of Romanians at double that figure or perhaps even more.[37] As of 2009, the foreign born population origin of Italy was subdivided as follows: Europe (53.5%), Africa (22.3%), Asia (15.8%), the Americas (8.1%) and Oceania (0.06%). The disribution of foreign born population is largely uneven in Italy: 87.3% of immigrants live in the northern and central parts of the country (the most economically developed areas), while only 12.8% live in the southern half of the peninsula.

United Kingdom

Main article: Immigration to the United Kingdom since 1922

In 2007, net immigration to the UK was 237,000, a rise of 46,000 on 2006.^[31] In 2004 the number of people who became British citizens rose to a record 140,795—a rise of 12% on the previous year. This number had risen dramatically since 2000. The overwhelming majority of new citizens come from Asia (40%) and Africa (32%), the largest three groups being people from Pakistan, India and Somalia.^[32] In 2005, an estimated 565,000 migrants arrived to live in the UK for at least a year, most of the migrants were people from Asia (particularly the Indian subcontinent) and Africa,^[33] while 380,000 people emigrated from the UK for a year or more, with Australia, Spain and France most popular destinations.^[34] Following Poland's entry into the EU in May 2004 it is estimated that by the start of 2007, 375,000 Poles have registered to work in the UK, although the total Polish population in the UK is believed to be 500,000. Many Poles work in seasonal occupations and a large number are likely to move back and forth including between Ireland and other EU Western nations.^[35] The current UK Immigration Minister is Phil Woolas.^[36]

Spain

Spain is the most favoured European destination for Britons leaving the UK.^[37] Since 2000, Spain has absorbed more than three million immigrants, growing its population by almost 10%. Immigrant population now tops over 4.5 million. According to residence permit data for 2005, about 500,000 were Moroccan, another 500,000 were Ecuadorian,^[38] more than 200,000 were Romanian, and 260,000 were Colombian.^[39][40] In 2005 alone, a regularisation programme increased the legal immigrant population by 700,000 people.^[41]

Portugal

Portugal, long a country of emigration,^[42] has now become a country of net immigration, and not just from the former colonies; by the end of 2003, legal refugees immigrants represented about 4% of the population, and the largest communities were from Cape Verde, Brazil, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, UK, Spain and Ukraine.^[43]

Canada

Canada has the highest per capita net immigration rate in the world,^[44] driven by economic policy and family reunification. In 2001, 250,640 people immigrated to Canada. Newcomers settle mostly in the major urban areas of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. Since the 1990s, the majority of Canada's immigrants have come from Asia.^[45] Accusing a person of racism in Canada is usually considered a serious slur.^[46] All political parties are now cautious about criticising of the high level of immigration, because, as noted by the Globe and Mail, "in the early 1990s, the old Reform Party was branded 'racist' for suggesting that immigration levels be lowered from 250,000 to 150,000."^[47]

Israel/Palestine

Jewish immigration to Palestine during the 19th century was promoted by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century following the publication of "Der Judenstaat".^[48] His Zionist movement sought to encourage Jewish migration, or immigration, to Palestine. Its proponents regard its aim as self-determination for the Jewish people.^[49] The percentage of world Jewry living in the former Palestinian Mandate has steadily grown from 25,000 since the movement came into existence. Today about 40% of the world's Jews live in Israel, more than in any other country.^[50] The Israeli Law of Return, passed in 1950, gives those born Jews (having a Jewish mother or grandmother), those with Jewish ancestry (having a Jewish father or grandfather) and converts to Judaism (Orthodox, Reform, or Conservative denominations—not secular—though Reform and Conservative conversions must take place outside the state, similar to civil marriages) the right to immigrate to Israel. A 1970 amendment, extended immigration rights to "a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew".

Japan

Japan has a steady flow of about 15,000 immigrants per year.^[51] In the early 1990s, Japan relaxed his relatively tight immigration laws to allow special entry permits for foreigners of Japanese ancestry in South America to make up for a labor shortage.^[52] According to Japanese immigration centre ^[53], the number of foreign resdents in Japan has been steadily increased, and the number of foreign residents (including permanent residents, but excluding illegal immigrants and short-term visitors such as tourists) were more than 2 million people in 2005.^[53] Also, according to Japanese Association for Refugees, (or JAR for short),^[54] the number of refugees who applied to live in Japan rapidly increased since 2006, and there were more than a thousand applications from all over the world, who seek refugee status to live in Japan in the year of 2008.^[54] However, the refugee policy of Japanese government has been criticized both domestically and internationally, because the number of refugees in Japan is still small compared to the countries like Canada in North America or France in Western Europe. For example, according to the UNHCR, in 1999 Japan accepted 16 refugees for resettlement, while the United States took in 85,010, and New Zealand, which is smaller than Japan, accepted 1,140. Between 1981, when Japan ratified the U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and 2002, Japan recognized only 305 persons as refugees.^[55][56]

Australia

The overall level of immigration to Australia has grown substantially during the last decade. Net overseas migration increased from 30,000 in 1993^[57] to 118,000 in 2003-04.^[58] The largest components of immigration are the skilled migration and family re-union programs. In recent years the mandatory detention of unauthorised arrivals by boat has generated great levels of controversy. During the 2004-05, total 123,424 people immigrated to Australia. Of them, 17,736 were from Africa, 54,804 from Asia, 21,131 from Oceania, 18,220 from United Kingdom, 1,506 from South America, and 2,369 from Eastern Europe.^[45] 131,000 people migrated to Australia in 2005-06^[59] and migration target for 2006-07 was 144,000.^[60]

New Zealand

New Zealand has relatively open immigration policies. 23% of the population was born overseas, mainly in Asia, Oceania, and UK, one of the highest rates in the world. In 2009-2010, a target of 45,000±5000 immigrants was set by the Immigration New Zealand.^{[citation needed]}

United States of America

Main article: Immigration to the United States

From 1850 to 1930, the foreign born population of the United States increased from 2.2 million to 14.2 million. The highest percentage of foreign born people in the United States were found in this period, with the peak in 1890 at 14.7%. During this time, the lower costs of Atlantic Ocean travel in time and fare made it more advantageous for immigrants to move to the U.S. than in years prior. Following this time period immigration fell because in 1924 Congress The Immigration Act of 1924 favored immigrant source countries that already had many immigrants in the U.S. by 1890.^[61] Immigration continued to fall throughout the 1940s and 1950s, but it increased again afterwards. but was still low by historical standards.^[62]

The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 (the Hart-Cellar Act) removed quotas on large segments of the immigration flow and legal immigration to the U.S. surged. In 2006, the number of immigrants totaled record 37.5 million.^[63] After 2000, immigration to the United States numbered approximately 1,000,000 per year. In 2006, 1.27 million immigrants were granted legal residence. Mexico has been the leading source of new U.S. residents for over two decades; and since 1998, China, India and the Philippines have been in the top four sending countries every year.^[64] The U.S. has often been called the "melting pot"(derived from Carl N. Degler, a historian, author of Out of Our Past), a name derived from United States' rich tradition of immigrants coming to the US looking for something better and having their cultures melded and incorporated into the fabric of the country. Emma Lazarus, in a poem entitled "The New Colossus," which is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty tells of the invitation extended to those wanting to make the US their home.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

– Emma Lazarus, Statue of Liberty

Since September 11, 2001, the politics of immigration has become an extremely hot issue. It was a central topic of the 2008 election cycle.^[65] The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg is noted for having a pro-immigration stand.^[66]

Since World War II, more refugees have found homes in the U.S. than any other nation and more than two million refugees have arrived in the U.S. since 1980 (representing less than 1% of the entire United States population). Of the top ten countries accepting resettled refugees in 2006, the United States accepted more than twice as much as the next nine countries combined.^[67] Some smaller countries, however, accept more refugees per capita.

See also

• Old immigration
• Childhood and migration
• Feminization of migration

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b c d} United Nations (1998). [http://unstats.un.org/unsd/publication/SeriesM/SeriesM_58rev1E.pdf Recommendations on Statistics of International Migration]. New York. p. Box 1. ISBN 92-1-161408-2. http://unstats.un.org/unsd/publication/SeriesM/SeriesM_58rev1E.pdf. Retrieved 30 October 2009. 
2. ^ Rich world needs more foreign workers: report, FOXNews.com, December 02, 2008
3. ^ International Migration Report 2006.PDF United Nations. Key Findings. Retrieved on 30 October 2009.
4. ^ "International Migration Report 2006". United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. 2006. http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/2006_MigrationRep/report.htm. Retrieved 30 October 2009. 
5. ^ Global Estimates and Trends. International Organization for Migration. 2008. Retrieved on 30 October 2009.
6. ^ "700 Million Worldwide Desire to Migrate Permanently". Gallup.com.
7. ^ See the NIDI/Eurostat push and pull study for details and examples: [1]
8. ^ ^{a b} Boustan, Leah. "Fertility and Immigration." UCLA. 15 Jan. 2009.
9. ^ "Japanese Immigration Policy: Responding to Conflicting Pressures". Migration Information Source. http://www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?ID=487. Retrieved 2008-03-23. 
10. ^ "Koreans in Japan". Han.org. http://www.han.org/a/fukuoka96a.html. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
11. ^ "Eures - Free Movement". European Union. http://ec.europa.eu/eures/main.jsp?&countryId=&accessing=0&content=1&restrictions=0&step=0&acro=free&lang=en. Retrieved 2008-03-23. 
12. ^ See, e.g., EU Enlargement in 2007: No Warm Welcome for Labor Migrants, by Catherine Drew and Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Institute for Public Policy Research
13. ^ "Independent: "Realism is not racism in the immigration debate"". independent.ie. http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/realism-is-not-racism-in-the-immigration-debate-1198337.html. Retrieved 2008-03-23. 
14. ^ ""Italy's Recent Change From An Emigration Country to An Immigration Country and Its Impact on Italy's Refugee and Migration Policy" by Andrea Bertozzi". Cicero Foundation. http://www.cicerofoundation.org/lectures/bertozzi_nov02.html. Retrieved 2008-03-23. 
15. ^ "BBC: EU nations clash over immigration". http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5369986.stm. Retrieved 2008-03-23. 
16. ^ "Deutsche Welle: Germans Consider U.S. Experience in Immigration Debate". http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,1050110,00.html. Retrieved 2008-03-23. 
17. ^ "BBC: Short History of Immigration". http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/uk/2002/race/short_history_of_immigration.stm. Retrieved 2008-03-23. 
18. ^ "BBC: Analysis: Europe's asylum trends". http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/europe/4308839.stm. Retrieved 2008-03-23. 
19. ^ see, e.g., http://cmd.princeton.edu/papers/POM_0408.pdf or http://cmd.princeton.edu/files/POM_june2007.pdf
20. ^ "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights". United Nations. 1948 (original work). http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/. Retrieved 30 October 2009. 
21. ^ Theresa Hayter, Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, London: Pluto Press, 2000.
22. ^ The Ethical Case for an Open Immigration Policy
23. ^ Eurostat News Release on Immigration in EU
24. ^ "Article on Spanish Immigration". Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/spain/article/0,,1830838,00.html. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
25. ^ "Europe: Population and Migration in 2005". Migrationinformation.org. http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=402. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
26. ^ "Inflow of third-country nationals by country of nationality". Migrationinformation.org. http://www.migrationinformation.org/datahub/countrydata/data.cfm. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
27. ^ Immigration and the 2007 French Presidential Elections
28. ^ "British Immigrants Swamping Spanish Villages?". Bye Bye Blighty article. 2007-01-16. http://www.byebyeblighty.com/1/british-immigrants-swamping-spanish-villages/. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
29. ^ "Immigration to Norway increasing". Workpermit.com. 2007-05-08. http://www.workpermit.com/news/2007-05-08/norway/record-immigration-statistics-2006.htm. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
30. ^ "Immigrant population". Ssb.no. http://www.ssb.no/english/subjects/02/01/10/innvbef_en/. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
31. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7737134.stm
32. ^ "BBC Thousands in UK citizenship queue". BBC News. 2006-02-12. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4706862.stm. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
33. ^ 1,500 immigrants arrive in Britain daily, report says^{[dead link]}
34. ^ Indians largest group among new immigrants to UK^{[dead link]}
35. ^ 750,000 and rising: how Polish workers have built a home in Britain.
36. ^ http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/organisation/ministers1/phil-woolas/
37. ^ "BBC article: Btits Abroad Country by Country". BBC News. 2006-12-11. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6161705.stm. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
38. ^ Marrero, Pilar (2004-12-09). "Immigration Shift: Many Latin Americans Choosing Spain Over U.S.". Imdiversity.com. http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/hispanic/world_international/pns_immigration_shift_1204.asp. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
39. ^ "Spain: Immigrants Welcome". Businessweek.com. 2007-05-21. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_21/b4035066.htm. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
40. ^ Instituto Nacional de Estadística: Avance del Padrón Municipal a 1 de enero de 2006. Datos provisionales
41. ^ "Spain grants amnesty to 700,000 migrants". Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/may/09/spain.gilestremlett. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
42. ^ "Portugal - Emigration". Countrystudies.us. http://countrystudies.us/portugal/48.htm. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
43. ^ Charis Dunn-Chan ,Portugal sees integration progress, BBC
44. ^ Benjamin Dolin and Margaret Young, Law and Government Division (2004-10-31). "Canada's Immigration Program". Library of Parliament. http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/library/PRBpubs/bp190-e.htm. Retrieved 2006-11-29. 
45. ^ ^{a b} "Inflow of foreign-born population by country of birth, by year". Migrationinformation.org. http://www.migrationinformation.org/datahub/countrydata/country.cfm. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
46. ^ Fontaine, Phil (April 24, 1998). "Modern Racism in Canada by Phil Fontaine" (^{[dead link]}). http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/asp/gateway.asp?hr=/en/lp/lo/lswe/we/special_projects/RacismFreeInitiative/speeches/Fontaine.shtml&hs=. ^{[dead link]}
47. ^ Is the current model of immigration the best one for Canada?, Globe and Mail, 12 December 2005. Retrieved 16 August 2006.
48. ^ Walter Laqueur (2003) The History of Zionism Tauris Parke Paperbacks, ISBN 1860649327 p 40
49. ^ A national liberation movement: Rockaway, Robert. Zionism: The National Liberation Movement of The Jewish People, World Zionist Organization, January 21, 1975, accessed August 17, 2006). Shlomo Avineri:(Zionism as a Movement of National Liberation, Hagshama department of the World Zionist Organization, December 12, 2003, accessed August 17, 2006). Neuberger, Binyamin. Zionism - an Introduction, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, August 20, 2001, accessed August 17, 2006).
50. ^ http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/jewpop.html accessed Feb 2009
51. ^ http://www.moj.go.jp/TOUKEI/t_minj03.html
52. ^ "Japan paying jobless foreigners to go home". Msnbc.com. April 1, 2009.
53. ^ ^{a b} 平成１７年末現在における外国人登録者統計について(Number of Foreign residents in Japan)
54. ^ ^{a b} 2008年9月19日－日本での難民申請数　初の1000人突破に関するリリース (People seeking refugee status to stay in Japan are more than 1000 this year (September 19, 2008 article)
55. ^ "Japan's refugee policy"
56. ^ "Questioning Japan's 'Closed Country' Policy on Refugees". Isozaki Yumi, Journalist, Mainichi Shimbun.
57. ^ Australian Bureau of Statistics, International migration
58. ^ Australian Bureau of Statistics, 3101.0 Australian Demographic Statistics
59. ^ Settler numbers on the rise^{[dead link]}
60. ^ "Australian Immigration Fact Sheet 20. Migration Program Planning Levels". Immi.gov.au. http://www.immi.gov.au/media/fact-sheets/20planning.htm. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
61. ^ "Immigration Act of 1924". State.gov. 2007-07-06. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/id/87718.htm. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
62. ^ [2] Jenson, Campbell, and Emily Lennon. "Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign born population."
63. ^ Stephen Ohlemacher, Number of Immigrants Hits Record 37.5M, Washington Post
64. ^ "United States: Top Ten Sending Countries, By Country of Birth, 1986 to 2006 (table available by menu selection)". Migration Policy Institute. 2007. http://www.migrationinformation.org/datahub/countrydata/data.cfm. Retrieved 2007-07-05. 
65. ^ "BBC: Q&A: US immigration debate". http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4850634.stm. Retrieved 2008-03-23. 
66. ^ "Mayor Bloomberg: Right on Neighborhoods, Right on Immigration". Manhattan-institute.org. 2008-01-28. http://www.manhattan-institute.org/email/crd_newsletter01-08.html. Retrieved 2009-04-22. 
67. ^ "Refugee Resettlement in Metropolitan America". Migration Information Source. March 2007. http://www.migrationinformation.org/Usfocus/display.cfm?ID=585. Retrieved 30 October 2009. 

Further reading

• Appel, Jacob. The Ethical Case for an Open Immigration Policy May 4, 2009.
• Balin, Bryan. State Immigration Legislation and Immigrant Flows: An Analysis Johns Hopkins University, 2008.
• Bauder, Harald. Labor Movement: How Migration Regulates Labor Markets, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Center for Immigration Studies Refer to "Publications" for research on illegal immigration, demographic trends, terrorism concerns, environmental impact, and other subjects.
• De La Torre, Miguel A., Trails of Hope and Terror: Testimonies on Immigration. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 2009.
• Esbenshade, Jill. Division and Dislocation: Regulating Immigration through Local Housing Ordinances. Immigration Policy Center, American Immigration Law Foundation, Summer 2007.
• Ewing, Walter A. Border Insecurity: U.S. Border-Enforcement Policies and National Security, Immigration Policy Center, American Immigration Law Foundation, Spring 2006.
• Freeman, Joe. Living and Working in the European Union for Non-EU Nationals. Lulu.com, 2007. ISBN 0-9786254-0-4
• Immigration Policy Center. Economic Growth & Immigration: Bridging the Demographic Divide. Immigration Policy Center, American Immigration Law Foundation, November 2005.
• Kolb, Eva. The Evolution of New York City's Multiculturalism: Melting Pot or Salad Bowl. Immigrants in New York from the 19th Century until the End of the Gilded Age. BOD, 2009. ISBN 3837093034
• Legrain, Philippe. Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. Little Brown, 2007. ISBN 0316732486
• Massey, Douglas S. Beyond the Border Buildup: Towards a New Approach to Mexico-U.S. Migration. Immigration Policy Center, American Immigration Law Foundation, September 2005.
• Massey, Douglas S., Joaquín Arango, Hugo Graeme, Ali Kouaouci, Adela , Pellegrino, and J. Edward Taylor.Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-928276-5
• Meilander, Peter C. Towards a Theory of Immigration. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. ISBN 978-0312240349
• Molina, Natalia. Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940. University of California Press, 2006.
• Myers, Dowell. Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America. Russell Sage Foundation, 2007. ISBN 978-0-87154-636-4
• Passel, Jeffrey S. Estimates of the Size and Characteristics of the Undocumented Population. Pew Hispanic Center, March 2005.
• Passel, Jeffrey S. Growing Share of Immigrants Choosing Naturalization. Pew Hispanic Center, March 2007.
• Passel, Jeffrey S. and Roberto Suro. Rise, Peak and Decline: Trends in U.S. Immigration. Pew Hispanic Center, September 2005.
• Pearce, Susan C. Immigrant Women in the United States: A Demographic Portrait. Immigration Policy Center, American Immigration Law Foundation, Summer 2006.
• Portes, Alejandro and József Böröcz, "Contemporary Immigration: Theoretical Perspectives on Its Determinants and Modes of Incorporation" International Migration Review, 23,3, Silver Anniversary Issue, International Migration: an Assessment for the 90's. (Autumn, 1989), pp. 606–630.
• Rumbaut, Ruben and Walter Ewing. "The Myth of Immigrant Criminality and the Paradox of Assimilation: Incarceration Rates among Native and Foreign-Born Men." The Immigration Policy Center, Spring 2007.
• Sirkeci, Ibrahim The Environment of Insecurity in Turkey and the Emigration of Turkish Kurds to Germany, ISBN 978-0-7734-5739 New York, Edwin Mellen Press, 2006.
• Valle, Isabel. Fields of Toil: A Migrant Family's Journey. ISBN 978-0-87422-101-5
• West, Lorane A. Color: Latino Voices in the Pacific Northwest. ISBN 978-0-87422-274-6
• Zolberg, Aristide. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Harvard University Press, 2006. ISBN 0674022181

External links

Look up immigration in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Immigration

• Immigration and Migration from UCB Libraries GovPubs
• International Migration from the United Nations
• Stalker's Guide to International Migration—Comprehensive interactive website on migration
• The Center for U.S. - Mexico Immigration Analysis
• Migration Information Source
• December 18 International advocacy and resource centre on the human rights of migrants.
• International Organisation for Migration
• Migration Letters journal
• UNESCO Programme on International Migration and Multicultural Policies
• OECD Migration Data
• BBC News Factfile: Global migration
• Immigration Newspaper Archive A collection of more than 50,000 searchable newspaper articles on Immigration.
• Migration on the Diplomacy Monitor
• A world map with territory sizes adjusted to the number of immigrants living in those countries
• Empowerment & Migration : Events and materials on migration
• Golden Venture A documentary film on the Golden Venture incident of 1993, a crucial turning point in US immigration policy.
• Princeton Center for Migration and Development—a leading research center on migration to the USA
• Casahistoria - European emigration since 1800—links to 19th & 20th century global European emigration
• Eurasylum Documents on immigration, asylum and refugee policy, and human trafficking/smuggling internationally
• Do Foreigners Have Rights? François Crépeau, Professor of International Law, University of Montreal
• Immigrants from Africa Haraga, photo essay about immigrants
• Immigration at the Open Directory Project

v • d • e Immigration to Africa Sovereign states Algeria · Angola · Benin · Botswana · Burkina Faso · Burundi · Cameroon · Cape Verde · Central African Republic · Chad · Comoros · Democratic Republic of the Congo · Republic of the Congo · Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) · Djibouti · Egypt1 · Equatorial Guinea · Eritrea · Ethiopia · Gabon · The Gambia · Ghana · Guinea · Guinea-Bissau · Kenya · Lesotho · Liberia · Libya · Madagascar · Malawi · Mali · Mauritania · Mauritius · Morocco · Mozambique · Namibia · Niger · Nigeria · Rwanda · São Tomé and Príncipe · Senegal · Seychelles · Sierra Leone · Somalia · South Africa · Sudan · Swaziland · Tanzania · Togo · Tunisia · Uganda · Zambia · Zimbabwe Dependencies, autonomies, other territories Canary Islands / Ceuta / Melilla (Spain) · Madeira (Portugal) · Mayotte / Réunion (France) · Puntland · St. Helena (UK) · Socotra (Yemen) · Somaliland · Southern Sudan · Western Sahara · Zanzibar (Tanzania) Italics indicate an unrecognised or partially recognised country. 1 Transcontinental country.

v • d • e Immigration to South America Sovereign states Argentina · Bolivia · Brazil · Chile · Colombia · Ecuador · Guyana · Panama1 · Paraguay · Peru · Suriname · Trinidad and Tobago1 · Uruguay · Venezuela Dependencies Aruba1 / Netherlands Antilles1 (Netherlands) · Falkland Islands / South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (UK) 2 · French Guiana (France) 1 Territories also in or commonly considered to be part of North America and/or Central America.  2 Territories also in or commonly considered to be part of Antarctica.

v • d • e Immigration to North America Sovereign states Antigua and Barbuda · Bahamas · Barbados · Belize · Canada · Costa Rica · Cuba · Dominica · Dominican Republic · El Salvador · Grenada · Guatemala · Haiti · Honduras · Jamaica · Mexico · Nicaragua · Panama1 · Saint Kitts and Nevis · Saint Lucia · Saint Vincent and the Grenadines · Trinidad and Tobago1 · United States Dependencies and other territories Anguilla · Aruba1 · Bermuda · British Virgin Islands · Cayman Islands · Greenland · Guadeloupe · Martinique · Montserrat · Netherlands Antilles1 · Puerto Rico · Saint Barthélemy · Saint Martin · Saint Pierre and Miquelon · Turks and Caicos Islands · United States Virgin Islands 1 Territories also in or commonly considered to be part of South America.

v • d • e Immigration to Asia Sovereign states Afghanistan · Armenia1 · Azerbaijan1 · Bahrain · Bangladesh · Bhutan · Brunei · Burma2 · Cambodia · People's Republic of China · Cyprus1 · East Timor3 · Egypt4 · Georgia4 · India · Indonesia · Iran · Iraq · Israel · Japan · Jordan · Kazakhstan4 · North Korea · South Korea · Kuwait · Kyrgyzstan · Laos · Lebanon · Malaysia · Maldives · Mongolia · Nepal · Oman · Pakistan · Philippines · Qatar · Russia4 · Saudi Arabia · Singapore · Sri Lanka · Syria · Tajikistan · Republic of China5 · Thailand · Turkey4 · Turkmenistan · United Arab Emirates · Uzbekistan · Vietnam · Yemen Dependencies, autonomies, other territories Aceh · Adjara1 · Abkhazia1 · Akrotiri and Dhekelia · Altai · British Indian Ocean Territory · Buryatia · Christmas Island · Cocos (Keeling) Islands · Guangxi · Hong Kong · Inner Mongolia · Iraqi Kurdistan · Jakarta · Khakassia · Macau · Nagorno-Karabakh · Nakhchivan · Ningxia · Northern Cyprus · Palestine (Gaza Strip · West Bank) · Papua · Sakha · South Ossetia1 · Tibet · Tuva · West Papua · Xinjiang · Yogyakarta Italics indicates an unrecognised or partially recognised country.  1 Sometimes included in Europe, depending on the border definitions.  2 Officially known as Myanmar.  3 Sometimes included in Oceania, and also known as Timor-Leste.  4 Transcontinental country.  5 Commonly known as Taiwan.

v • d • e Immigration to Oceania Sovereign states Australia · East Timor1 · Fiji · Indonesia1 · Kiribati · Papua New Guinea · Marshall Islands · Federated States of Micronesia · Nauru · New Zealand · Palau · Samoa · Solomon Islands · Tonga · Tuvalu · Vanuatu Dependencies and other territories American Samoa · Christmas Island · Cocos (Keeling) Islands · Cook Islands · French Polynesia · Guam · Hawaii · New Caledonia · Niue · Norfolk Island · Northern Mariana Islands · Pitcairn Islands · Rotuma · Tokelau · Wallis and Futuna 1 Transcontinental country.

v • d • e Immigration to Europe Sovereign states Albania · Andorra · Armenia1 · Austria · Azerbaijan2 · Belarus · Belgium · Bosnia and Herzegovina · Bulgaria · Croatia · Cyprus1 · Czech Republic · Denmark · Estonia · Finland · France · Georgia2 · Germany · Greece · Hungary · Iceland · Ireland · Italy · Kazakhstan3 · Latvia · Liechtenstein · Lithuania · Luxembourg · Macedonia · Malta · Moldova · Monaco · Montenegro · Netherlands · Norway · Poland · Portugal · Romania · Russia3 · San Marino · Serbia · Slovakia · Slovenia · Spain · Sweden · Switzerland · Turkey3 · Ukraine · United Kingdom (England • Northern Ireland • Scotland • Wales) States with limited recognition Abkhazia 2 · Kosovo · Nagorno-Karabakh1 · Northern Cyprus1 · South Ossetia 2 · Transnistria Other entities  · Dependencies, autonomies, other territories Adjara1 · Adygea · Akrotiri and Dhekelia · Åland · Azores · Bashkortostan · Chechnya · Chuvashia · Crimea · Dagestan · Faroe Islands · Gagauzia · Gibraltar · Guernsey · Ingushetia · Jan Mayen · Jersey · Kabardino-Balkaria · Kalmykia · Karachay-Cherkessia · Republic of Karelia · Komi Republic · Madeira · Isle of Man · Mari El · Mordovia · Nakhchivan1 · North Ossetia-Alania · Svalbard · Tatarstan · Udmurtia · Vojvodina 1 Geographically entirely in Asia, but nonetheless often considered European.  2 Partially or entirely in Asia, depending on the border definitions.  3 Transcontinental country.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Common misspelling(s) of immigration

• imigration

Dansk (Danish)
n. - indvandring, immigration

idioms:

• immigration authorities    indvandringsmyndigheder, immigrationsmyndigheder
• immigration control    kontrol med indvandrere, kontrol med immigranter

Nederlands (Dutch)
immigratie, vreemdelingendienst, douane

Français (French)
n. - immigration

idioms:

• immigration authorities    service de l'immigration
• immigration control    contrôle de l'immigration, services de l'immigration

Deutsch (German)
n. - Einwanderung, Immigration

idioms:

• immigration authorities    Einwanderungsbehörde
• immigration control    Einwanderungskontrolle

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - μετανάστευση, ξενιτεμός, μισεμός

idioms:

• immigration authorities    αρχές μετανάστευσης
• immigration control    έλεγχος εισόδου μεταναστών

Italiano (Italian)
ufficio per l'immigrazione, immigrazione

idioms:

• immigration authorities    ufficio per l'immigrazione
• immigration control    controllo passaporti

Português (Portuguese)
n. - imigração (f)

idioms:

• immigration authorities    autoridades (f pl) de imigração
• immigration control    controle (m) de imigração

Русский (Russian)
иммиграция

idioms:

• immigration authorities    иммиграционные власти
• immigration control    иммиграционный контроль

Español (Spanish)
n. - inmigración

idioms:

• immigration authorities    autoridades de inmigración, servicio de extranjería
• immigration control    control de inmigración

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - immigration, invandring

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
外来的移民, 移居入境

idioms:

• immigration authorities    移民局
• immigration control    出入境管理

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 外來的移民, 移居入境

idioms:

• immigration authorities    移民局
• immigration control    出入境管理

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 이주, 입국관리, 이민자

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 移住, 入植, 移民, 入植者

idioms:

• immigration authorities    移民局
• immigration control    出入国管理

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) هجرة‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮הגירה, עלייה‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.

To select your translation preferences click here.