Illegal Immigration

Thesis Statement

Over the course of the 20th century, the United States increasingly supervised and penalized illegal aliens, depending in part on their racial or ethnic background. At the beginning of the 21st century, laws surrounding immigration and asylum have become very restricted indeed.

Introduction

Prior to the late 1800s, the United States maintained an open immigration policy. Most free people could come and claim a piece of land for settlement thereby taking citizenship. By the early 1900s, America began to codify immigration laws through the establishment of quota acts (Welch, p63). Cycles of economic depressions in 1870, 1907, and later in 1921 fueled concerns of immigrants displacing Americans in the labor force. In response, the federal government began to restrict the number of immigrants allowed in the United States by setting limits on the number of legal entries. Fears of mass migration of the Chinese to the United States adding to labor shortages prompted the passage of the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882. This act prohibited Chinese from becoming U.S. citizens and prevented further Chinese immigration for a 10-year period. The terms of the act were extended three times before it was repealed in 1943 as a result of the U.S. and Chinese alliance during World War II (Scalia, 41).

In 1917, the first immigration act governing all migration to the United States was passed. This act required all foreigners to pass a literacy test and prohibited nonwhite immigration from most of Asia. In 1924, Congress passed and later amended the National Origins Act placing a ceiling on the number of allowable immigrants at 150,000 per year. It also established a quota for each nationality equal to 2% of that group already living in the United States according to the 1890 census. As the vast majority of the U.S. population was composed of people from Western and Northern Europe, considerable restriction was placed on entries from nations of Eastern and Southern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Hayes, 74).

There are other instances where U.S. immigration policy has discriminated against people based on their ethnicity. In 1924, some 112,000 Japanese Americans were removed by force from their homes and placed in concentration camps. Likewise, illegal Mexican migrants were targeted during enforcement campaigns that removed them from the United States and returned them to Mexico. The first campaign was conducted from 1929 to 1934 and was called a “repatriation campaign.” The second, referred to as “Operation Wetback” lasted from 1954 to 1958.

Over the next several decades, a series of immigration policy reforms were introduced that altered the landscape of legal immigration in response to the ebb and flow of geopolitical interests, economic conditions, and prevailing political ideology. Prior to the 1960s, immigration policy consistently specified particular groups and races of people for exclusion (Harrison, 48). In 1965, the United States adopted a new approach that eliminated racial and ethnic exclusions for the first time in history, yet maintained a ceiling of total allowable entries. Referred to as the “preference system,” the new act awarded immigration ...