Sometimes the Door Slams Shut

By John Elson

% For most of its history, the U.S. has been wide open to immigrants -- those from Europe, that is. Countless 19th century voyagers from the Old World pursued the uniquely egalitarian shelter of a New World so different from Europe's rigidly structured nation-states. Barriers to immigration did not square with the American ideal of opportunity for all.

Not that each newcomer was welcomed by a fledgling society entirely free from fear and bias. In 1798 Congress raised the residency requirement for citizenship from 5 to 14 years, largely to exclude political refugees from Europe who might foment revolution. Later some states imposed taxes on alien ship passengers they feared might become public charges.

Such nativist sentiments only grew after the Civil War. The once vast frontier seemed less vast, and economic recessions raised fears that cheap foreign laborers might take American jobs. There was also the openly racist argument that some newcomers, Asians especially, could not be "assimilated." In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, imposing a head tax and excluding whole categories of people -- convicts and the mentally ill, for example. For the first time there were real limits on European immigration. Twelve years later, a group calling itself the Immigration Restriction League adopted the pseudo science of eugenics as the basis for its contention that breeding from "inferior stock" would fatally weaken America.

After World War I, there were fears that millions of displaced Europeans, newly influenced by Bolshevism, would infect America with alien ideology. As a result, a series of racism-tinted national-origins laws passed during the 1920s established an annual immigration quota of 150,000 that favored established groups like the Germans and Irish. Some nationalities, notably the Japanese, were excluded entirely. The national-origins system was preserved in the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, though that notorious law did establish tiny quotas -- 100 or so a year -- for such previously barred groups as Indians and Filipinos.

Underlying these laws was the belief that preserving America's ethnic mix as it existed in 1920 was politically and culturally desirable. After World War II, the quotas were relaxed only to allow in politically favored groups, such as the 38,000 Hungarians who fled the 1956 Soviet crackdown. Inspired by Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act, Congress in 1965 at last ended the national-origins system and opened America's doors to the Third World.

The 1980 Refugee Act radically expanded the definition of those eligible for political asylum. But because it has been poorly enforced and easily abused, it helped bring on today's growing demand for new limits on aliens. Still, for the first time in its history, the U.S. has an immigration policy that, for better or worse, is truly democratic. -- J.E.