Immigration Policy

Immigrants have long provided labor and skills for America’s economic development. For nearly 400 years, the “unpeopled” continent of North America attracted Europeans who sought free land and the opportunity for advancement that came with it. From the time that settlers arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, there was more available land than labor to work it, and even after land became scarce, workers still found employment in America’s factories and mills. The nation’s immigration policy, whether written or not, welcomed immigrants with open arms, then closed the door, and then welcomed them again.

Predominant tendencies allow a loose periodization of American immigration. Between 1776 and 1880, the United States welcomed immigrants. Then began a period of reduction lasting from 1880 to World War I. A period of exclusion was formalized in 1924, and it lasted until 1965, when the United States once again opened its doors to refugees and other foreign immigrants.

Indians, Indentures, and Slaves

Early experiments in using the labor of Indians, a potential workforce numbering in the millions, failed because most of the native peoples disappeared into the countryside. Those who did not frequently died from various European diseases, and war reduced the native population to a small percentage of their precontact 18 million souls. Another attempt at increasing the labor pool by establishing tenants in a transplanted English manorial system proved unsuccessful because nobody wanted to work for someone else unless faced with no other choice. Those who lacked the means to get to the empty land or the tools to break off into the wilderness had to sign work contracts, or indentures, to get their passage and a small grubstake at the end of the term, which varied from four to seven years. But once in America, the indentures (indentured servants) had a disconcerting habit of heading off across the mountains into the wilderness. Or they could blend into the neighborhood of the next colony, with no questions asked. Indentured servitude brought between 100,000 and 300,000 people to America from 1607 to the early eighteenth century. By 1800 cheap transatlantic transportation largely ended the practice.

Slavery, a system that provided another source of labor, flourished in the plantation economy that had arisen after the Jamestown settlers began cultivating tobacco instead of searching for gold. About 500,000 individuals were transported to America by the slave trade between 1619 and 1808. By comparison, the Caribbean had 3 to 4 million, and the total for the four centuries of the trade equaled around 11 million slaves. By 1750 America had some 200,000 slaves; by 1860 the nation, primarily the South, had more than 3 million. States such as Virginia, whose agricultural economy had faded compared to the virgin soils of the frontier South, developed a highly profitable slave-breeding business. Slavery lasted until 1865, fueling the expansion of the cotton and textile industries, establishing the shippers and merchants of New England and the middle states, and providing the bulk of the foreign exchange available to the United States for 80 years. Involuntary immigrants made an immeasurable economic impact, and American policy, if not allowing it, at least tolerated it.

Immigration in the Early National Period

The mass of immigrants in this period came voluntarily in wave after wave with the ups and downs of the European and American economies, and they provided the mudsill grunt labor. They usually rose through the ranks over time or returned home. All of this happened without a great deal of government involvement. The first immigration law, that of 1790, set a standard two-year residency for naturalization; Congress replaced the measure in 1795 with a five-year residency requirement. Between 1790 and 1875, Congress enacted only a dozen more immigration laws. By contrast, twentieth-century Congresses enacted that many immigration laws each decade.

Congress formulated the first American immigration policy for political rather than economic reasons. After the American Revolution, France experienced an extremely chaotic period from the beginning of its own revolution in 1789 through the Napoleonic Wars that ended in 1814. Wild swings in type of government and a great deal of violence against those with different ideas led to an influx of French refugees in America, individuals who used the safety of the United States to agitate for their particular brand of politics. American political leaders were split between pro-French (Jeffersonian) and anti-French (Federalist) policies. When the anti-French were in power, they enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, which eased deportation while increasing barriers to citizenship. America’s first immigration policy sought to repress immigrants who deviated from the official definition of appropriate political ideas for good Americans.

The founding fathers also disagreed on the future structure of the United States. The Jeffersonian, pro-French faction included mostly small-government agrarians. The anti-French Federalists supported manufacturing as a means of attaining self-sufficiency, a need made evident by the economic difficulties arising from the European conflicts between 1789 and 1812. After the War of 1812, Henry Clay introduced his pro-immigrant American System, with its internal improvements that helped attract immigrants to the interior region as farmers. Whether Germans, Scots-Irish, Huguenots, or other, these people dispersed or set themselves apart; they were mostly Protestant and similar to the old-stock Americans. The next wave of immigrants produced more friction than the handful of French who had just arrived.

The First Great Wave, 1830 to 1860

The first great wave of immigrants included over 4.9 million individuals. In 1860 some 13.2 percent of the total population of 31.4 million Americans claimed foreign birth. The 1830s saw the beginnings of a massive influx of Irish Catholics, who would build the railroads and populate the cities. As the population of Ireland exploded beyond the capacity of the land in the early years of the nineteenth century, Irish began to immigrate in large numbers. Ship captains and owners encouraged the immigration of these people as substitutes for the slaves they had transported before the slave trade was outlawed in 1808. Federal Passenger Acts in 1819,1847, and 1855 set standards that made travel more attractive to Northern and Western Europeans. The 1855 act also drew the distinction between permanent and temporary immigrants.

With population pressure already great, the famine in Ireland in the mid-1840s forced a large number of Irish to flee their homeland. By the 1860s the United States had 2.5 million Catholic Irish, most of whom worked as manual laborers or domestic servants. Beginning in the 1850s, Germans, whose livelihoods had fallen prey to industrialization, provided another source of labor. Nearly a million of them went to the United States. And in the old Spanish Southwest, Mexicans arrived to work in agriculture, ranching, and railroad construction. In an unofficial expression of immigration policy, the American Party (more commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party) emerged in opposition to the influx of foreign competition.

Members of the Know-Nothing Party viewed immigrants and Catholics as threats to the Protestant United States. One of their goals focused on the exclusion of unassimilable immigrants. But growth, not nativism, remained their main policy. The Know-Nothings did not desire exclusion except in the case of the Chinese, whose presence generated the first laws indicating that, to some Americans at least, economic growth should not continue if it meant accepting all types of people into American society. Ethnic difference mattered in the 1850s.

After the discovery of gold in California, 200,000 Asians, mainly Chinese, exercised the grand American right of going where the opportunities existed. They built the transcontinental railroads and provided food, laundry, and other services for the forty-niners, who failed to strike it rich but did strike against Asian workers. Although the number of Orientals remained small, a good number of people felt there was something “un-American” about their appearance and about their ability to work for less than European Americans. The big difference involved housing, not wages. The smaller quarters offered to Asian workers saved the employer as much as 10 to 20 percent and made Asians more appealing economically. Initially, local and state governments enacted head taxes on Asians as well as other discriminatory legislation. The anti-Asian movement culminated in federal legislation. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred the entry of any Chinese citizens for ten years. Exclusion became permanent in 1904 and remained in effect until the measure was rescinded in 1943.

The Chinese Exclusion Act became the first immigration restriction act since the Alien Act passed under the administration of John Adams; a later act, the 1906 Gentlemen’s Agreement, extended exclusion to the Japanese. Filipinos, as American colonial subjects, remained exempt from exclusion.

The Great Wave and the New Immigrants, 1880 to 1914

The population of the United States in 1870 totaled 38.5 million, a number that would rise to over 100 million by 1914. Total immigration between 1860 and 1880 equaled 5.1 million; between 1880 and 1920, immigrants reached a peak of 27.5 million. Foreign-born persons comprised from 13 to 15 percent of the total population of the United States.

During the Civil War, the need for labor kept the military recruiters active. The United States even advertised in Irish papers for immigrants to join the war effort to replace dead or wounded soldiers. The economic boom that occurred after the war continued to attract immigrants, who helped build more railroads and farm the plains. During the Gilded Age, industrialization changed the nature of American work, eliminating the craftsmanship that had attracted the older English, Irish, German, and other Northern European immigrants. And those who wanted to farm found their efforts stymied by the disappearance of cheap arable land, made official by the closing of the frontier with the Census of 1890 and the final land runs in Oklahoma in 1889. The “good immigrants” stopped coming because better opportunity existed elsewhere.

Industrial labor proved mind-numbing, unskilled, and attractive only to those who intended to finance a better life in the old country or who had to leave their homelands under duress. These individuals comprised the new immigrants—Slavs, Southern Europeans, and even some Turks and Jews.

Americans had encouraged mostly free and open immigration during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But in the late nineteenth century, that approach slowly changed. Some of the states began to regulate immigration in the years after the Civil War. In 1875 the Supreme Court ruled that regulation of immigration remained the responsibility of the federal government alone. At the same time, the economy, especially in agriculture, began to sour. But still the immigrants continued to come. Congress began passing immigration legislation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and laws on alien contract-labor in 1885 and 1887 prohibited specific categories of immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1882 levied a head tax of $.50 on each immigrant; it also prohibited immigration of “idiots,” “lunatics,” convicts, and persons likely to become public charges. Additional restrictive legislation in 1891, 1903, and 1907 barred entry to other so-called undesirable classes, including prostitutes, polygamists, carriers of infectious diseases, and individuals who espoused unpopular ideas.

As one source of people dwindled, others flourished. But instead of people from Anglo-Saxon stock (and the Irish fell within this category by that time), these immigrants included Jews in flight from the horrors of Russian and other Eastern European persecution. Italians came after their livelihoods failed due to overpopulation, industrialization, and a general need to escape the problems of their homeland and test the land of opportunity. Similarly, economic, political, and social dislocation brought masses of Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and Slavs. Indeed, 13 million of these people arrived between around 1900 and 1913, with their peak year being 1907 when 1.28 million immigrated. Between 1890 and 1914, nearly 4 million Italians migrated to the United States, some to stay and many to return home but all to impact the American economy and society.

In 1891 Congress established an immigration service that operated under the Department of the Treasury. The federal government began the task of processing the millions who migrated to the United States. Ellis Island, which processed 22 million people between 1892 and 1924, became the most important of the immigration stations. Aside from the inspection, detention, and hearing and administrative areas, the facility also housed hospitals, cafeterias, ticket offices, and space for the many immigrant aid societies. Of the 180 immigration service employees in 1893, 119 worked at Ellis Island.

Unlike the earlier immigrants who disappeared into the wide-open spaces and dispersed more broadly into incon-spicuousness, the new immigrants swelled the ranks of the cities. Factories offered new opportunity, but immigrants remained restricted economically to the ghettos. Thus, these new immigrants were highly visible and very different, and their arrival resulted in a renewed nativism, the Red Scare, and the restrictions of the 1920s.

Exclusion, 1914 to 1965

In the aftermath of World War I, the combined effects of na-tivist restrictions, the Great Depression, and a second world war reduced annual immigration to an average of less than 100,000. As overall population rose 50 percent to 150 million in 1950, the percentage of foreign-born individuals declined to 6.9 percent.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States fell under the influence of Social Darwinism, also known as “the white man’s burden”—the distorted version of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. According to Social Darwinism, humanity consisted of various races, with the Nordic race superior and all others ranked in descending order by degree of inferiority. The new immigrants ranked low on the scale.

Between 1907 and 1910, the Dillingham Commission examined the rampant immigration of the previous few decades. Its report reiterated the alleged inferiority of the new immigrants and recommended a slowdown in the number of immigrants the United States would accept. The new immigrants needed time to acculturate, and the United States needed time to Americanize them. Congress attempted to pass restrictive legislation several times up to 1915, but Presidents William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson vetoed each attempt. However, the pressure became too great with the onset of the Americanization movement and the distraction of the Great War. The Immigration Act of 1917 required a literacy test for all immigrants over 16 years of age, expanded coverage of the Gentlemen’s Agreement to almost totally stop immigration from Asia by creating the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” and introduced the concept of guests, who were allowed short visits to the United States but were not allowed to remain in the country.

World War I greatly reduced immigration and heated up the economy. The conflict, along with the Red Scare of 1919, led to the final closure of the open immigration policy. During World War I, the Creel Committee, along with various hy-perpatriotic private organizations, placed intense pressure on those who displayed less than 100 percent loyalty to and zeal for America. Rabid patriots forced Germans to Americanize their names and habits. Congress passed legislation strongly reminiscent of the Alien and Sedition Acts of a century earlier. The antiforeigner fervor went unchecked and unshaken by the sudden end of the war. And fueled by the Russian Revolution and then the Bolshevik betrayal, the anti-immigrant sentiment grew through 1919.

In 1918, with hysteria and Americanism running wild and Wilson’s government failing in leadership, the wartime economy shifted without plan and almost overnight. The helter-skelter demobilization and the too-rapid end of government controls over industry led to massive unemployment and a recession. Organized labor struck; black veterans refused to return to mudsill status. Frustrated patriots reacted with anger against nontraditional groups such as Russian Jews, and socialists and the radical labor organizations that immigrants often dominated. Older, established American labor groups and earlier immigrants frequently found themselves included among these so-called undesirables. During this time, lynching, murder, riots, and suppression through violence and intimidation occurred. Immigrants became victims of government, too: Several hundred were deported with only minimal due process in 1919.

During the isolationist and disillusioned 1920s, Congress acted. Decades of Social Darwinism, general racism, and na-tivism culminated in two major laws that severely restricted immigration and attempted to reestablish the old immigrants at the expense of the new. The 1921 Quota Act (Johnson Act) established the first American immigration quotas. The act limited immigration to a number equal to 3 percent of the total number foreign-born residents of a given nationality in the 1910 census. Immigration from the Western Hemisphere remained unrestricted. The 1924 Immigration Act (Johnson-Reid Act) limited Eastern Hemisphere immigration to 154,227 individuals per year. Within this limit, Congress based the quota for each country on its U.S. population as of the 1920 census. As a result of these laws and easier immigration elsewhere, immigration fell from 800,000 in 1921 to less than 150,000 in 1929. By 1933, with the Great Depression in full force, America attracted only 23,000 immigrants from the entire world. As a result of the laws enacted in the 1920s, individuals from countries that encouraged immigration did not face restrictive quotas and people whose countries had quotas did not desire to emigrate to the United States. The depression finished the work the restrictionists had begun 40 years earlier.

The restrictions of the 1920s had an unfortunate effect before and during World War II. Some refugees fled to the United States—but not as many as might have come from among the millions affected by the racism and barbarism of the fascist regimes and the war. America still had a strong undercurrent of anti-Semitism in this period, and organized fascist and Nazi parties formed. The restrictions set into place in the 1920s meant that no adequate quota for the millions of persecuted Jews, Gypsies, and other dislocates existed. Yet America made room for approximately 100 German and Austrian physicists between 1932 and 1945. Five refugees— Peter Debye, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, James Franck, and Victor F. Hess—had won Nobel Prizes before they arrived in the United States. In addition, Hans A. Bethe, Felix Bloch, Emilio G. Segre, Otto Stern, Eugene P. Wigner, and Maria Mayer earned Nobel Prizes while living in America. These immigrants proved vital to the nation’s atomic weapons program.

As American men and women joined the military in World War II, the jobs they left behind went to women and African Americans previously excluded from the labor force. The Bracero program, which brought Mexican workers into the American Southwest, provided an additional source of labor. Mexican workers had long served as field hands, miners, railroad workers, and in light industry, with 55,000 Mexicans immigrating to the United States between 1850 and 1880. In the ensuing decade, the construction of a railway between the United States and Mexico employed a labor force in which up to 60 percent of the workers were Mexicans. Beginning in 1916, Mexico’s economy declined after the Mexican Revolution. World War I drew unemployed Mexican workers into industry, trades, and service work within the United States, but American business exploited Mexican immigrants, leading Mexico’s president, Venustiano Carranza, to establish terms in 1920 by which Mexican workers could help American farmers and ranchers. Accordingly, immigrants had the right to have their families with them, but they had to have contracts before crossing the border; the contracts defined pay, work schedule, location of the work, and other conditions. In effect, the contracts served as the prototype for the Bracero program.

Meanwhile, in 1924, the United States created the Border Patrol and defined undocumented workers as illegal aliens. When the depression hit, American employers did not want Mexican workers. The United States denied visas to Mexicans without proven employment and deported those they found illegally residing in the United States. But the depression gave way to the war, and the demand for labor rose again. In 1942 the United States and Mexico signed the Bracero Treaty, and between 1942 and 1964, 4 million Mexicans entered the United States as contract ranch and agricultural workers and as industrial laborers. At the conclusion of the war, the demand ended. Employers removed Mexicans, African Americans, and women from the better-paying sectors of the economy. After the war, the mechanization of farming and increased immigration saturated the agricultural labor market. Although made permanent by law in 1951, the Bracero program ended in 1964. The Border Patrol enforced immigration restrictions under a program known as Operation Wetback.

The McCarran-Walter Act, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, became law over the veto of President Harry S Truman. It retained the national origins quotas of the 1920s and the annual ceiling of 154,277 immigrants. It also repealed the anti-Asian laws and allowed 100 visas for each Asian country, and it established a preference within the national quotas for relatives and skilled workers. Latin American and Caribbean immigrants remained exempt from the quotas.

The Recent Immigrants—Refugees, Asylum-Seekers, Legal or Illegal, 1965 to the Present

By 1970 the American population passed 200 million and the percentage of foreign-born residents fell to an all-time low of 4.7 percent. Once immigration was liberalized after 1965, legal and illegal immigration led to a doubling of the percentage of foreign-born residents, to over 10 percent by the end of the century.

The mid-1960s brought concern that the United States would lose the cold war race to attract highly intelligent professionals. The solution called for bringing in people with education and technical skills through the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1965 (IRCA). To liberals and President John F. Kennedy, immigration quotas remained unfair, disadvantaging some groups (such as the Irish who wanted greater access to American visas) while other groups (such as the English) failed to use their allotted number of visas. Meanwhile, the fight over civil rights dominated the public agenda, and that meant agitation for the equal treatment of immigrants as well. Officials favored the immigration of talented and meritorious individuals regardless of country of origin. Reform dictated expanding the 1952 law by increasing the in-migration of relatives and skilled individuals. The humane impulse and the economic impulse both led in the same direction because the reformers assumed that the new immigrants would come from the same places as earlier immigrants had, albeit in different proportions. And the descendents of the old new immigrants thought their native lands would also benefit by Congress overturning the exclusions of the 1920s. They did not see that the United States no longer acted as an economic magnet, as both Northern and Southern Europe prospered in the 1960s. Instead, the 1965 law attracted a set of new immigrants, non-European in origin. The influx of Asian and Central American immigrants renewed the anti-immigrant feeling of the old, settled Americans, even among third-generation new immigrants. In fact, the demand far exceeded the available number of visas, and Congress began passing special refugee legislation periodically. Not until the Refugee Act of 1980 did the United States have a policy on the admission of refugees.

European immigration did not disappear, but the largest numbers of immigrants were now from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As had others throughout American history, they left homelands plagued with economic, social, and political dislocation. And as they could manage it, they brought members of their extended families. During the ten years after the IRCA, European immigration dropped 38 percent while Asian immigration rose by 663 percent. Overall, 60 percent more immigrants entered the United States. Simultaneously, legal Latin American immigration continued to accelerate. In 1976 Congress established quotas for Latin America, and ten years later it began penalizing employers who hired illegal aliens but at the same time amnestied illegal aliens residing in the United States since before 1982. And from 1980 on, Congress persisted in broadening the definition of a refugee, increasing the number who qualified and entered the United States. This policy became a problem because refugees more often than not lacked economic assets or cultural tools.

For instance, Cubans fled Fidel Castro’s regime after the revolution in 1958. In the initial wave, from 1959 to 1962, the Cuban refugees were anti-Castro leaders with education, skills, and resources. Those in the second wave still came from the middle class and arrived between 1965 and 1973. The third wave, made up of the Mariel boatpeople of 1980, appeared to many Americans as the dregs of Cuban society—prisoners and drug abusers, many of whom were black. Because the Marielitos tended to seek residence in the older Cuban communities, especially in Miami, they provoked conflict and hardship. Some Americans questioned the policy of having an open door for refugees from communist regimes.

With Cubans disturbing America’s tranquility, along came the Haitians. Because the Haitian government remained a friend of the United States, immigration officials almost al ways denied Haitians asylum. U.S. policy assumed that refugees from communist countries were fleeing repression, whereas refugees from noncommunist allies were classified as economic immigrants. And economic immigrants were subject to quotas: The rejection rate neared 99 percent. Those who got in, most of whom were black and from lower-class backgrounds, crowded in close proximity to the Marielitos and previously established Haitians. They often placed a drain on the social and economic resources of the places where they settled.

The Vietnamese arrived next. The first wave, composed of those who arrived after the 1973 collapse of Saigon, had resources and a cultural affinity for America. People in the next wave possessed less of both. The final wave included the boat-people. Problems in the U.S. economy, nose-diving from the oil crisis of 1973, created economic friction that affected even those in the second wave. Hard-working and ambitious, these immigrants conflicted with the Louisiana and Texas gulf communities in 1975. Americans suffered from stagflation. Living expenses rose rapidly, wages remained stagnant, and trawlers overfished the Gulf of Mexico. Into this economic malaise came the Vietnamese. They were “different,” they overfished and undercut, and they had government assistance. Some Americans became increasingly upset that their government continued to help their competition, the Vietnamese and the Cubans, who seemed too alien to them in the first place.

The situation continued to worsen. For instance, some Americans felt that the Hmong, who came from Laos in the late 1970s and early 1980s, appeared markedly different and would require a long time to assimilate. These Americans noted that the Hmong had had a written language for only a generation; their illiteracy rate remained high; their culture was nonindustrial and Oriental; and they seemingly did not have the skills to make the transition but were able to get onto welfare. Then they clustered together and practiced their strange customs and their animistic religion (animism). Even their food seemed odd.

Colombians, Salvadorans, and others who sought sanctuary from right-wing political regimes seemed less conspicuous and controversial. Their cultural and economic values tended to be similar to those of the surrounding communities, and they fit in nicely—when they could get in. Others, such as the new Irish, felt fully at home within the industrial West but often ended up in the underground economy, frustrated by the insufficient numbers of visas needed for them to become legal, mainstream, fully employed workers utilizing their education, skills, and talents. And the illegal aliens continued to cross the 2,000-mile-long border between poverty and opportunity. They came from Latin America and Mexico at a rate of 250,000 to 750,000 per year. They located first in California, Texas, and the Southwest, finding work as cheap labor and, some said, placing a burden on social services. Then they moved to the midwestern cities, medium and large. By the early years of the twenty-first century, evidence indicated that Europeans, Asians, and Africans as well as Latin Americans all used the southern route of entry.

Immigration restriction proved a hopeless policy. Demand did not falter, and the process did not improve despite amnesties in 1982, 1986, and the late 1990s. Among his first actions as president, George W. Bush proposed legalizing the 3 million illegal Mexicans already in the United States in 2001. Yet, as some saw it, amnesties did nothing more than legitimate huge numbers of illegal aliens. And the volume of illegal aliens did not seem to decrease. The continuing failure of policy and the accommodation of illegality increasingly outraged those who felt that the United States already had a sufficient number of tired, poor, and huddled masses.

In the 1980s the first major, widespread backlash occurred. Broader than the Texas and Louisiana friction of the 1970s but based again in a time of economic downturn, this effort took several forms. Supporters of the English-only movement wanted to require English as the official language of government and business. The movement failed to achieve the passage of legislation, which caused some people to lose interest until the issue reemerged later.

In California and many other places, the problems of American society were obvious: crime, moral decay, increased income disparities, racial conflict, and a general malaise and cynicism. California set the pace for immigration restrictions and reforms, and the federal government changed the Immigration and Naturalization Service and immigration laws once again. Meanwhile, on one hand, some Californians fought to eliminate bilingual education, welfare for illegal aliens, social services, and what they perceived as the unfair tax burden they had to assume to support illegal residents who seemed to steal their jobs. Pro-immigrationists, on the other hand, managed to forestall the most drastic changes that would have adversely affected immigrants, arguing that the immigrants filled the low-end jobs and moved quickly out of social services to self-sufficiency: In fact, they rapidly brought more resources to California. Although reformers demanded change and supporters of change argued the economic benefits of either leaving the issue of reform alone or opening it up, Congress passed, on an average, one new reform law each year through the 1990s.

Illegal or legal, the immigrants still had a role in the American economy. They no longer built the railroads, but they replicated the patterns of the late nineteenth century. They moved into neighborhoods that were badly decayed. In New York City they helped to revitalize burned out neighborhoods in the south Bronx and east Brooklyn. Minority-owned businesses in New York grew between 1987 and 1992, with black businesses rising from 17,400 to almost 36,000; Hispanic from 10,000 to over 34,000; and Asian from 27,000 to 46,000. Ninety percent of those businesses belonged to immigrants. They did not open manufacturing businesses already in a long decline. Rather, the emphasis remained on service businesses—delivery services, phone parlors, remittance shops, and import/export firms. Immigrants worked as day laborers and contractors—the dirty, low-profit, low-end counterparts to the stoop labor of the migrants who harvested the Southwest and the Midwest. Koreans ran grocery stores. Russians, then Haitians, then Pakistanis, and then Ethiopians, Dominicans, and Nigerians drove taxis. They even filled the niches, running jitneys after hours or in neighborhoods where the licensed cabs would not run. The multiplier of these tiny businesses came in the multishift operation, the gasoline and tires, and the ability of the stranded and unemployed to get out of the neighborhoods and move to where the jobs were. Entrepreneurial immigrants are also consumers of housing, transportation, and services.

Concern grew that illegal aliens would become an increasing problem because American immigration policy did not match the economic needs of the country; this concern produced a strong restrictionist movement late in the twentieth century. Although supporters of the movement were vocal, they failed to move policy, which remained an inconsistent hodgepodge of enforcement, amnesty, and other flip-flop measures.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), established in 1979, was the first of the restrictionist organizations; in the late 1990s, it had approximately 70,000 members. Restrictionists also founded the Carrying Capacity Network, Californians for Population Stabilization, Population-Environment Balance, and American Immigration Control Foundation. Groups of this sort did not espouse nativism. Their concerns were social and environmental. They pointed to problems of assimilation and the shortage of land or jobs. And they cited pollution as a consequence of overcrowding. As did all, they noted how poorly the Immigration and Naturalization Service operated and how porous America’s borders were, giving easy access to criminals and terrorists. FAIR cited an estimated cost for post-1969 immigrants of $65 billion in 1996 and noted that other estimates reached upward of $80 billion. The group projected enforcement costs beyond $100 billion by 2006. The ten-year total equaled $866 billion. Limited restrictionist success came in the 1990s, as in 1996 when Congress increased funding for the Border Patrol, tightened asylum rules, and increased the deportation of undesirables. Most notably, welfare reform took food stamps and disability payments from immigrants. Although state and federal governments restored some welfare benefits for pre-1996 immigrants, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the welfare restriction laws in 2000.

Congress modified the rules in 1965, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1986, and 1990, each time enlarging the numbers of immigrants eligible to enter the United States. The 1976 Amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act extended the preference system to all Western Hemisphere countries and established a ceiling of 20,000 immigrants from any one country. The 1978 amendments combined the Eastern and Western Hemisphere ceilings to a single worldwide quota of 290,000. The 1980 Refugee Act set a separate policy for refugees, eliminated the previous emphasis on anticommu-nism, set a refugee target of 50,000, and reduced the worldwide ceiling to 270,000.

The 1981 “Report of the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy” recommended stopping illegal immigration and called for a clearly defined, fair immigration policy and an efficient organization to carry it out. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act provided amnesty and temporary status to all illegal aliens who had lived in the United States continuously since before January 1, 1982; it extended a more lenient amnesty to farmworkers and provided sanctions for employers of illegal aliens.

Table 1 Nativity of the population and place of birth of the native population, 1850 to 1990

* Starting in 1960, includes population of Alaska and Hawaii. For 1890, excludes population enumerated in the Indian Territory and on Indian reservations, for whom information on most topics, including nativity, was not collected.

t Puerto Rico is the only outlying area for which the number has ever exceeded l00,000.The numbers for Puerto Rico are: 1,190,533 in 1990; 1,002,863 in 1980; 810,087 in 1970; 617,056 in I960;226,010 in 1950;69,967 in 1940; 52,774 in 1930; 11,811 in 1920; 1,513 in 1910; and 678 in 1900.

+ Indicates sample data.

§ The data shown in Table I are based on the 15 percent sample. For 1970, data based on the 5 percent sample show total population as 203,193,774, native population as 193,590,856, born in the United States as 191,836,655, born abroad as 1,617,396, in outlying areas as 873,241, of American parents as 744,155, and foreign-born population as 9,739,723.

** In 1850 and I860, information on nativity was not collected for slaves.The data in the table assume,as was done in 1870 census reports,that all slaves in 1850 and I860 were native. Of the total black population of 4,880,009 in 1870, 9,645, or 0.2 percent, were foreign-born (1870 Census, vol. I, Dubester #45,Table 22, pp. 606-615).

tt Dash represents zero or rounds to zero.

In the 1990s the Diversity Lottery (through which 55,000 permanent resident visas are given per year on a lottery basis for people around the world) specifically targeted the under-represented, including Africans. This step led to an influx of immigrants from countries that had previously been under-represented in American society, though the number was still minuscule compared with the number of illegal Hispanics. The total for the entire history of African immigration amounts to less than the number of illegal aliens in a single year. But the Africans began moving to St. Paul, Minnesota, and other cities and making the same positive contributions and creating the same dislocations of welfare and culture that other immigrants had.

By 1990 the government began to cave in to pressures for change. The 1990 Immigration Act (IMMACT) increased the total number of visas approved annually to 700,000 and bumped up the number of available visas by 40 percent. The act kept the family reunion provision while doubling employment immigration. It also encouraged increased immigration from underrepresented areas to enhance diversity. Individuals seeking asylum also benefited as the law became more liberal almost every year in the 1990s.

As rules tightened and loosened, as funding fluctuated, as enforcement waxed and waned, the immigrants continued to come (see Table 1). The 1930s total was only 528,000. World War II brought just 120,000. But by the 1970s one year’s immigration almost exceeded the two-decade total. By 1978 the annual legal number hit 600,000, which was the average for each year of the 1980s. The 1990s averaged a million per year, and the total of that decade remains the greatest of any decade in American history. On top of the legal millions, another 275,000 to 500,000 illegal aliens enter the United States annually.

America became more diverse after 1970. From 1970 to 1996, the percentage of nonnative-born residents rose from 4.8 percent to 9.3 percent. And America’s immigrants— whether legal or illegal, refugees or asylum-seekers—were the world’s migrants, not just those of Europe.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, immigration has become more difficult. The Customs Service, now part of the Department of Homeland Security, has received additional resources to prevent illegal immigration across U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico. In addition, a proposed amnesty for illegal immigrants who have lived in the United States for more than five years is no longer being considered in Congress.