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INTRODUCTION: A SHORT HISTORY OF IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES

H ow important has immigration been in American history? One leading historian of immigration,

Harvard's Oscar Handlin, wrote in 1951, "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history."

Of course, Handlin was clearly exag- gerating, but he was not exaggerating by very much. What he meant, at a time when the history of immigration was not highly thought of, was that it is not possi- ble to understand American history with- out understanding America's immigrants.

Except for some 2 million American Indians, immigration in the past four cen- turies has been responsible for the pres- ence of the more than a quarter of a bil- lion people who now populate the United States. Immigrants and their descendants are the authors of American diversity, of what can be called the American mosaic. They have created a culture that, despite its largely European roots, is clearly not European, any more than it is African, or Amerindian, or Asian, or Caribbean, or Latino. Americans are, as the French sojourner Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur noted in 1782, new persons, who, over time, have been transformed by their new environment and ever changing heredity. It is impossible to imagine what America would be like if no immigrants had come; nor is it possible to imagine what it would have been like had only Europeans come, or only British, and so forth. The American people are a product of what they have been, and where they have come from, as well as of what has happened to them in the United States. When nativists—opponents of immigration—rant and rave about the dangers of being overrun by immigrants, or about losing control of our borders, or complain that immigrants and some of their children do not speak English well, they are denying the validity of an essen- tial and enhancing part of the American

An 1 898 Judge magazine cover portrays immi- grants as a source of strength. The left eye refers to the annexation of Hawaii, which took place earlier that year.

experience. They are denying the vitaliza- tion that has come from the constant enrichment and reenforcement of Ameri- can society by the muscles, brains, and hearts that every generation of immi- grants has brought with them to America.

The history of immigration to the Unit- ed States can be divided most conveniently into four distinct periods: the formative era, up to 1815; the so-called "long" 19th cen- tury stretching from 1815 to 1924; the era of restriction, 1924-1965; the era of renewed immigration, since 1965.

The Formative Period (1565-1815) During the formative period, which begins with the settlement of St. Augustine, Flori- da, by Spanish in 1565 and ends with the conclusion of a series of wars between Britain and France in which Americans took part, the overwhelming majority of

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immigrants came either from the British Isles or from Africa. We must remember, however, that the first permanent Euro- pean settlements in what is now the United States were made by Spanish people at St. Augustine and in New Mexico in 1598, and that immigrants from other European countries, particularly France and Ger- many, were in almost every colony. Of the roughly 1 million people who came in this period, more than half were not free. All of the 350,000 Africans came in chains, and perhaps half of the 650,000 Europeans were indentured servants or convicts.

Most of the British who came were from England, and most of them were from the southern part of England. Smaller but still substantial numbers of Scots and Irish came, as did a yet smaller number of Welsh. Even in modern times, immigration statistics are often incomplete or unreli- able, and they were less reliable in the 17th and 18th centuries. The most useful esti- mates come from the first United States census, taken in 1790, which found some 3.15 million white Americans and 750,000 African Americans. The 1790 census did not count most Native Americans, and the census takers did not try to do so until 1880. Scholars have analyzed the informa- tion contained in that first census and tried to estimate the number and percentage of the population represented by each ethnic group. The vast majority of the 3.9 million Americans had been born in what became the United States, as there had been rela- tively little immigration between the begin- nings of the American Revolution in the mid-1770s and 1790.

The distribution of the members of the different ethnic groups was uneven. Most of the German Americans lived in Pennsylva- nia, where they were about one-third of the population. Similarly, most of the Dutch were in New York and adjoining states. By region, New England was the most heavily English, while the South was home to most African Americans, who, in some districts,

Estimated Non-Native American Population in 1790

English African. American Irish Germans Scots Dutch French Miscellaneous and

unassignftd

6.5% 2,5%

9,7%

Amedcan His|0iieal Association, Annual

outnumbered whites. This clustering of eth- nic groups in certain regions and smaller areas, called enclaves or neighborhoods, is typical of the immigrant experience every- where in the modern world.

The United States Constitution, which went into effect in 1789, required that a census be taken every 10 years, but it said very little about immigration: in fact, the word immigration does not appear anywhere in the document. But the founding fathers clearly foresaw and encouraged continued immigration, as three separate provisions testify. In Article 1, Section 8, Congress was told to "estab- lish a uniform Rule of Naturalization." The following section provided that Con- gress could not interfere with the African slave trade before 1808, and Article 2, Section 1 provided that the President— and by extension the Vice President— must be "a natural born Citizen." This left immigrants eligible for all other offices under the Constitution. From the beginning of the United States immigrants have filled these offices, serving in Con- gress, in the cabinet, and on the Supreme Court. For example, the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, was an immigrant from the island of Nevis in the West Indies and Madeline Albright, Secre- tary of State under Bill Clinton, was an immigrant from Czechoslovakia.

49% 16%

7.6% 6.9%

1.8%

Report, 1931

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In the second year of the American republic, 1790, Congress passed a natural- ization statute that provided for the natu- ralization of "free white persons." The law was intended to exclude Africans and indentured servants: later interpretation by the Supreme Court expanded the ban to include Asians, but for much of the 19th century some Chinese and Japanese were naturalized. In 1798, Congress passed the short-lived Aliens Act, which threatened to deport aliens who were involved in poli- tics, but no one was deported.

Only two other laws passed in the first half of the 19th century affected immigra- tion. In 1808, at the first legal opportunity, Congress abolished the slave trade but not slavery, and in 1819 it ordered that incom- ing immigrants be counted, but not those leaving the United States.

The "Long" 19th Century (1815-1924) Historians sometimes define centuries not by the calendar, but by events: for Ameri- can immigration two events define the 19th century more effectively than do the "normal" dates, 1801-1900. The first date, 1815, marks the end of a series of wars between Britain and France and our War of 1812 with Britain. The end of the fighting signaled a renewal of immigration. The second, 1924, denotes the enactment of a "permanent" restrictive immigration law by the United States. During that "long" 19th century, more than 36 million people immigrated to the United States. This is an absolute majority of all the immigrants who have ever come. The table on the right shows, by decade, how many came after 1819 and the rate of immigration in relation to the total U.S. population.

The mere numbers of immigrants do not tell the whole story. In the earlier part of the "long" century of immigration, the relative impact of immigration was higher than the table on the left seems to indi- cate because the population was much

smaller. The table below shows the rate of immigration per thousand pre-existing inhabitants. Thus, for example, the rate for the 1850s is much higher than for the 1890s even though 42 percent more peo- ple came in the latter period. Immigration was discouraged in the 1860s by the Civil War and in the 1870s and 1890s by hard times in the United States.

This mass immigration was dominated by Europeans, and, to a lesser degree, the descendants of European immigrants com- ing from Canada. It also marked the begin- nings of large-scale immigration from Asia, largely of Chinese and Japanese. Historians now believe that even though the interna- tional slave trade had been outlawed by Congress in 1808, perhaps 50,000 illegal slaves were brought into the United States between then and 1865, mostly from Caribbean islands. Toward the end of the 19th century, free Afro-Caribbeans began to come to the United States.

In the years before the Civil War (1861-65), immigration was dominated by Irish and Germans. Even before the dreadful

1820-1924 Immigration

Immigration to the United States

Rate of Immigration per Thousand

of U.S. Population

1820-30 ,.-"..... 151,824 1.2 1831-40 . . . . . » . 599,125 .. 3.9 1841-50,..... 1,713,251 . .. 8.4 1851-60...... 2,598,214 .., 9.3 1861-70...... 2,314,824 .6.4 1871-80...... 2,812,191 6.2 1881-90,..... 5,246,613 ........... 9.2 1891-1900.... 3,687,564 5.3 19QMO...... 8,795,386 .......... 10.4 1911-20...,-., 5,735,811 .. 5,7 1921-24...... 2^44,599 5.3 TOTAL...... 35,999,402

U.S. Bureau ol the Ceimis

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A German-language map from 1853 indicates routes used by German and other European immi- grants coming to the United States in the 19th century.

potato famine of the 1840s, large numbers of Irish—mostly poor male laborers— came, and heavy Irish immigration of all kinds continued throughout the century, during which a total of 4.5 million Irish came. Almost all the Irish were Roman Catholics and most settled close to the northern Atlantic seaboard, particularly in New England.

Even more Germans—almost 6 mil- lion—came in the same period. No dread- ful event pushed Germans out of Europe, and few were as poor as many of the Irish. Many Germans settled in eastern cities between New York and Baltimore but even more went to interior cities and farms, particularly in the so-called "Ger-

man triangle," the area bounded by Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. Most German immigrants were Protes- tants, but there was a sizable Roman Catholic minority and a smaller but sub- stantial Jewish one.

Two other groups, Scandinavians and Chinese, began their mass migration before the Civil War. More than 2 million Scandinavians—Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes—came during the century. There were more than a million Swedes, 700,000 Norwegians, and 300,000 Danes. This was largely a migration of families, of whom an overwhelming majority settled in the upper Middle West, particularly in Nebraska, Iowa,Co

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Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Most were farmers and practiced Protestant religions, chiefly variants of Lutheranism.

A smaller number of Chinese, per- haps 350,000, were the first large group of immigrants to cross the Pacific. They were, at first, chiefly gold miners and rail- road workers in California and other western states and territories, and all but a few were single males who practiced Buddhism or Taoism. For both economic and cultural reasons they suffered from severe discrimination in both custom and law: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 stopped the further immigration of Chi- nese laborers. This law began the system- atic restriction of voluntary immigrants. Before 1882 there was no effective restric- tive immigration legislation. Anyone not a slave who reached American shores or crossed a land border could enter legally.

After the Civil War the pace of migration increased, and, although British, Irish, German and Scandina- vian immigrants contin- ued to come from Europe, they were soon outnumbered by eastern and southern Euro- peans—Poles, eastern European Jews, Italians, southern Slavs and Greeks. The migration of these latter groups was aided by the improvement of Euro- pean steamship lines and railroads. European shipping companies, such as the Cunard Line, based in Liver- pool, England, and the German-based Ham- burg-Amerika and

North German Lloyd lines, built special ships for the immigrant trade and coordi-

An advertisement from about 1872 shows how Minnesota, like California and other states, competed for immi- grants. As the ad states, they got special reduced rates on transportation.

nated their sailings with railroad sched- ules. By the end of the century, a person in Poland could buy one ticket that would cover rail fare to Hamburg, an ocean pas- sage, and a railroad ticket to an American city. Or, as often happened, a recent immigrant in an American city—Detroit, for example—could buy a ticket for a family member or friend in Krakow, Poland, for example, and have it delivered to that person in Poland. Similar condi- tions prevailed in the Pacific, where Japanese steamers, mostly of the NYK line, brought perhaps 275,000 Japanese to the United States. Historians call this kind of migration "chain migration," because immigrants send for and follow one another, like links in a chain.

Most of the members of these eastern and southern European immigrant groups had several things in common: almost all worked at industrial and urban occupa- tions, they lived in American cities rather than in small towns or on farms, and very few were Protestants. Except for the Jews, and, after 1907, the Japanese, these popu- lations were heavily male and large num- bers of them, including Japanese, would work in the United States for a time and then return home. Such return migration was important in this era, because for every three immigrants, perhaps one went home, although, to be sure, many came back, sometimes more than once. Where- as Italian men worked largely in construc- tion of all kinds, Polish and eastern Euro- pean men worked at the dirtiest jobs in heavy industry, and Jewish and Italian immigrant women worked in the garment factories that clothed America. Large numbers of these folks would have pre- ferred to work on their own farms, as many earlier immigrants had done, but the era of free land was long past. And even if free land had been available, few of these immigrants had the capital neces- sary to get started. The only immigrant group in this era that settled largely onCo

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This cartoon from the 1860s attacks both Irish and Chinese. The Irishman (left) and the Chinese are devouring America, represented by Uncle Sam in his striped trousers; then the Chinese devours the Irishman.

the land was the Japanese, who did so in the expanding agricultural economy of the West Coast.

The restriction of immigration began with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which became the hinge on which the "golden door" of immigration began to swing closed. A whole succession of laws between 1882 and 1924 narrowed the opening through which immigrants came, although only in the 1920s did the total number of immigrants admitted begin to fall as a result of legislation.

The reasons that large numbers of Americans have supported immigration restriction are various and complicated, but two reasons stand out: fear of eco- nomic and cultural competition, and racial and ethnic prejudice. This was true in the mid-18th century when Benjamin Franklin and other English-speaking Pennsylvanians expressed fear that Ger- man immigrants and the German lan- guage would "take over" their colony. It was also true in the mid-19th century when many in the Northeast opposed the entry of Irish immigrants who were both poor and Roman Catholic. It was true again in the 1860s and in the following

decades, when many westerners insisted that "the Chinese must GO!", both because of their race and the fact that they, like many immigrants, were willing to work for very low wages. White work- ers feared that this would depress their own wages. And, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries many—perhaps most—Americans felt that too many east- ern and southern Europeans were filling up American cities and competing for unskilled and semiskilled jobs.

These anti-immigrant notions were greatly stimulated by an official govern- ment commission, the U.S. Immigration Commission, whose 1911 report put forth many of the arguments used to justify dras- tic immigration restriction in the following decade. It argued that most of those then coming to the United States—what it called "new immigrants," people from eastern and southern Europe—were essentially dif- ferent from and inferior to most of those who had come previously—what it called "old immigrants," people from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia.

Similar kinds of arguments had been raised against Irish and German immi- grants early in the 19th century and would be raised in the closing decades of the 20th century against Asians and Latin Americans.

These opponents of immigration, or nativists, were and are largely motivated by fears of all kinds, particularly fears about their economic well-being and about their culture being swamped by incoming strangers. Few noted that, although the number of immigrants rose steadily from about 230,000 a year in the 1860s to about a million a year in the early 20th century, the relative number of foreign-born people living in the United States remained remarkably constant. In every census between 1860 and 1920—a period of remarkable change in almost every aspect of American life—one signifi- cant social statistic remained constant:Co

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Tfeis s/7/p's manifest—a passenger list from January 2,1892—sA;oM/s nine immigrants and one returning American. Such lists are a major source of information about immigrants.

immigrants, persons who were foreign born, were just about 14 percent of the population. In other words, every seventh person was an immigrant. By 2000, for the sake of comparison, the figure was about 10 percent, or every 10th person.

The Era of Restriction, 1924-65 Although the beginning date of 1924 is commonly assigned to the era of restric- tion, the process had begun long before. Before 1882 there was nothing in Ameri- can law to stop a free immigrant from entering the country. If you could get here, you were in. To be sure, many countries tried to prevent their inhabitants from leaving, but that is a different matter. The U.S. restriction of free immigration began in 1882 with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred the entry of Chinese laborers who had not been here before. Once that first restriction had been made, more restrictions followed.

The restrictions came piecemeal, as various categories of people were declared ineligible for entrance. By the end of World War I (1918), the once free and unrestricted immigration policy of the United States had been limited in seven

major ways as the following kinds of immigrants were barred from immigrat- ing: Chinese laborers and other Asians, except for Japanese and Filipinos; certain criminals; people who failed to meet cer- tain moral standards, including prosti- tutes and polygamists; people with vari- ous diseases; paupers; certain radicals, including anarchists and people advocat- ing the overthrow of the government by force and violence; and illiterates.

Only the test to keep out illiterates caused significant political controversy. It was vetoed four times over a 20-year peri- od by presidents as diverse as the conserv- ative Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1897, the liberal Republican William Howard Taft in 1913, and the progressive Democ- rat Woodrow Wilson in 1915 and 1917. It was enacted in 1917 over Wilson's second veto. Unlike the 1901 Australian literacy test, which allowed government inspectors to choose the language or languages that immigrants had to read, the American law was reasonably fair. It allowed each immi- grant to specify the language in which he or she would be tested. It also exempted close female relatives of any age and close male relatives over 55 years old joiningC

op yr ig ht @ 2 00 1. O xf or d Un iv er si ty P re ss .

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2674 Class No. 4 Serial Number French

Tu tires le fondement de ta puissance de la bouche des petits enfants et de ceux qui tettent, a cause de tes adversaires. afin de confondre 1'ennemi et celui qui veut se venger.

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.

(Ps. 8:2) (French Ps. 8:3)

A number of the texts used for the literacy examinations of immigrants were drawn from the Bible. This one, from the eighth Psalm, is the copy the examiner used, which had the text in both French and English.

immigrants already in the United States, and it provided that if any adult member of an immigrating family was literate the whole family could be admitted.

Despite this impressive list of restric- tions, nothing was done before 1920-21 to place any kind of numerical cap on immigration, and in no year before 1921 did the percentage of prospective immi- grants turned away at Ellis Island and other ports of entry reach 2 percent. The fluctuations in the numbers of immigrants were due to either economic conditions— during hard times in the United States fewer immigrants came—or political ones: during the American Civil War (1861-65) and World War I (1914-18) immigration was significantly reduced.

Amid the political and social reaction of post-World War I—a period one histo- rian has called the "tribal twenties" because of the many social and cultural issues that divided the American people— drastic immigration restriction became politically expedient. In 1920 the House of Representatives voted 296-42 to bar all immigration for one year. The Senate sub- stituted a more rational bill, which Wilson vetoed in 1921 just before he left office. Within months Congress repassed it and President Warren G. Harding signed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. A similar

but more restrictive measure was enacted three years later: the Immigration Act of 1924. Most of the provi- sions of that act remained in effect until 1965.

The thrust of the 1921 and 1924 laws was undis- guised ethnic discrimina- tion directed largely against people from south- ern and eastern Europe. It put numerical limits on the number of immigrants who could enter in any given year from each of

more than a hundred countries and politi- cal entities. The number for each country was based on the presumed number of people from each place who were already in the United States. But when the 1920 census figures became available they showed what restrictionists in Congress thought were "too many" Italians, Poles, and Jews. So in 1924, Congress chose to base the new quotas on the 1890 census, taken nearly 35 years earlier, when fewer southern and eastern Europeans had been present. The quotas were relatively gener- ous toward immigrants from the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia—in fact many of the "slots" for those countries went unused year after year—and strin- gent toward the rest of Europe. Asians were not allowed to immigrate, except for Filipinos, who were American nationals as long as the United States owned the Philippines, from 1898 until a law promising independence for the islands was enacted in 1934.

Yet it is an indication of how different American concerns were then from what they are today that the 1924 act placed no limits at all on immigration from Mexico or from any other independent country in the New World. It also allowed a very lim- ited kind of family reunification: an immi- grant who was the minor child, or spouseCo

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of a United States citizen could enter as a "nonquota immigrant."

Textbooks often illustrate the 1924 act by reprinting contemporary cartoons showing immigration reduced to a trickle. Those cartoons overstate the effect of the 1924 law. The new law did reduce annual immigration to about 300,000 annually. This was far below the 1 million a year that had been coming before World War I, but was hardly a trickle. In the 1930s im- migration was really reduced to a trickle— an average of 50,000 a year. But it was not Congress but the worldwide Great Depression that slowed the traffic. Eco- nomic conditions were so poor in the United States that in two different years— 1932 and 1933—more people left or were excluded from the United States than immigrated to it. This had not happened since the Loyalists (or Tories, as their opponents called them) fled the country in the 1780s after the successful American Revolution, and it has not happened since.

Late in the 1930s large numbers of refugees from Nazi Germany, most but not all of them Jews, tried to enter the United States, and, although eventually some 250,000 did find a permanent or temporary refuge in the United States, large numbers were turned away by con- sular and immigration officials, some of whom were prejudiced against Jews. Con- gress refused to pass a bill to let in several thousand Jewish refugee children. Some escaped elsewhere but others became part of the millions who were later sent to the death camps of the Holocaust. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, although sympa- thetic to the plight of the refugees, provid- ed no significant leadership on this issue until late in the war. In 1944 he estab- lished, by executive order, the War Refugee Board, which brought about a thousand mostly Jewish refugees to the United States and set up camps for many others in Europe and Africa. Many years later, in 1979, Vice President Walter Mon-

This cartoon, entitled "The Only Way to Handle It," reflects what many people thought would happen after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1921. The restriction was actually much less severe.

dale described the situation well: in regard to the Jewish refugees from Nazism, he judged that the United States and other western democracies "failed the test of civilization."

Many of the refugees who did get to the United States made outstanding contri- butions both to the war effort and to American culture. Much of the research that developed the atomic bomb was done by refugee scientists such as the Italian Enrico Fermi, the Hungarian Leo Szilard, and the Austrian Lise Meitner. The moral authority of the German-born Albert Ein- stein, perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20th century, had been crucial in persuad- ing President Roosevelt to consider estab- lishing the project which led to the cre- ation of the bomb. American culture was enormously enriched by the temporary or permanent residence of such composers as the German Paul Hindemith and the Hun- garian Bela Bartok, the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, the German authorCo

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Thomas Mann, and a great number of painters, sculptors, and architects.

The years of World War U (1939-45) were, historians now agree, years of great social change in the United States. From the special point of view of immigration history a crucial turning point was reached in late 1943 when Congress, at the urging of Pres- ident Roosevelt, repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act and, even more important, enabled Chinese, but not other Asians, to be naturalized. After the war was over and the United States began to exercise global influence more powerfully than ever before, it became apparent that U.S. naturalization and immigration policies were not congru- ent with American foreign policy. It was difficult to be "the leader of the free world" when much of the world's population was ineligible to immigrate to the United States. These peoples naturally resented the dis- crimination. Following the pattern of Chi- nese exclusion repeal, both Filipinos and "natives of India" were made eligible for naturalization and thus immigration in 1944, and in 1952 all ethnic and racial bars to naturalization were dropped.

In contrast to its refusal to make exceptions to the quota system for refugees during the war, in 1948 and 1950 Congress passed two bills that allowed some 450,000 "displaced persons" to enter without reference to quotas. Dis- placed persons were refugees in Europe who were unable or unwilling to be set- tled in their former homes, largely because the Soviet army had occupied their home- lands and installed totalitarian regimes in them on the Russian model. Few of these refugees were Jews: most European Jews had perished in the Holocaust and most of the relatively few survivors went to Israel, not the United States.

In 1952 the McCarran-Walter Act, a major modification of immigration law, was passed over President Harry S. Tru- man's veto. In addition to its broadening of naturalization, it continued the quota

1,762,610 528,431

1,035-039 2,515,479 1,450,312 7,291,871

Immigration During the Era of Restriction

1925-30 1931-40 1941-50 1951-60 1961-65 TOTAL US. Bureau of the Census

system, applied new and more rigorous political tests on incoming immigrants and visitors, and greatly expanded the family reunification provisions of the law to include special preferences for brothers, sisters, and unmarried children of U.S. citi- zens and for spouses and children of resi- dent aliens. Under its provisions, immigra- tion began to climb steadily, so that during its 13-year existence nearly 3.5 million persons immigrated to the United States.

The Era of Renewed Immigration, 1965 to the Present In 1965, at the high point of the period of social reform that President Lyndon B. Johnson called the "Great Society," Con- gress finally scrapped the quota principle and substituted an overtly two-track system that began the era of renewed immigration and is still our basic law. In place of nation- al quotas, equal numerical caps were estab- lished for each hemisphere, and, at the same time, close relatives of both U.S. citi- zens and resident aliens were given pre- ferred status; some could come in without regard to numerical restriction. The table on the next page compares the preference systems under the 1952 and 1965 acts.

The growth in the number of immi- grants has increased sharply and steadily. There were 2.5 million in the 1950s, 3.3 million in the 1960s, 4.5 million in the 1970s, more than 7 million in the 1980s, and more than 8 million in the 1990s.

Even more important than the increas- ing numbers were the changes in theCo

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sources of immigration and the kinds of immigrants who were coming. Through the 1950s, Europe was the chief source of immigration to the United States, although the preponderance of Europeans was diminishing. By the 1960s, Europeans were only a third of all immigrants; in the 1970s they were less than a fifth; and in the 1980s and 1990s they were just over a tenth. Replacing them were persons from Latin America and Asia in roughly equal num- bers. Between 1981 and 1996, about 13.5 million legal immigrants were admitted to the United States. Of the top 10 countries of origin, which accounted for 58 percent of all immigrants, half were in or around

the Caribbean and half were in Asia. In more recent years, partly because

of the collapse of the Soviet Union and partly because of the diversity programs enacted in 1988, there has been a signifi- cantly wider distribution of immigrants. In 1996, for example, the top 10 coun- tries accounted for a little less than half of all immigrants (49.5 percent) and two European countries, Ukraine and Russia, were numbers 8 and 9 of the top 10.

But it was not just the regional and national origin of immigrants that changed. Large numbers of recent immi- grants have been very well educated and possessed of valuable entrepreneurial and

Preference Systems: 1952 and 1965 Immigration Acts

Immigration and Nationality Act, 1952 Exempt from preference requirements and numerical quotas: spouses and unmarried minor children of U.S. citizens. 1. Highly skilled immigrants whose services are

urgently needed in the United States and the spouses and children of such immigrants. 50 percent.

2. Parents of U.S. citizens over age 21 and unmar- ried adult children of U.S. citizens. 30 percent.

3. Spouses and unmarried adult children of perma- nent resident aliens. 20 percent.

4. Brothers, sisters, and married children of U.S. citizens and accompanying spouses and children. 50 percent of numbers not required for 1-3.

5. Nonpreference: applicants not entitled to any of the above. 50 percent of the numbers not required for 1-3 above, plus any not required for 4.

Immigration Act of 1965 Exempt from preference requirements and numerical quotas: spouses, unmarried minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens. 1. Unmarried adult children of U.S. citizens.

20 percent. 2. Spouses and unmarried adult children of

permanent resident aliens. 20 percent (26 percent after 1980).

3. Members of rhe professions and scientists and artists of exceptional ability. 10 percent: requires certification from U.S. Department of Labor.

4. Married children of U.S. citizens. 10 percent. 5. Brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens over 21.

24 percent. 6. Skilled and unskilled workers in occupations

for which labor is in short supply in the United States. 10 percent: requires certification from U.S. Department of Labor.

7. Refugees from communist or communist-dominat- ed countries, or the Middle East. 6 percent.

8. Nonpreference: applicants nor entitled to any of the above. (Since there are more preference appli- cants than can be accommodated, this has not been used.)

Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1997 Statistical yearbook

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

Leading Countries of Origin, 1981-96

1. Mexico 3,304,682 2. Philippines 843,741 3. Vietnam 719,239 4. China 539,267 5. Dominican Republic 509,902 6. India 498,309 7. Korea 453,018 8. H Salvador 362,225 9. Jamaica 323,625 10. Cuba 254,193

U.S. Bureau of the Census

professional skills. Large numbers of oth- ers, however, including many refugees from Southeast Asia, had little education and few marketable skills.

The difference in treatment received by immigrants from two adjacent Caribbean islands, Cuba and Haiti, demonstrates the wide gulf that has exist- ed between contemporary groups. The nearly 1 million Cubans who have been admitted since 1959 from Fidel Castro's Cuba as refugees from communism were given special status and relatively gener- ous financial support by the United States government. The much smaller number of Haitians, whom the government refused to regard as refugees, were often rejected and returned to Haiti; those admitted received relatively little financial help.

By the 1980s, many Americans were again becoming nervous about "so many foreigners" coming to the United States. Many advocates of restricting immigra- tion pointed out, correctly, that the total volume of immigration was approaching that of the peak years before World War I, when an average of about a million immigrants entered annually. But they rarely pointed out that the incidence of foreign-born people in the population was much lower than in those years. Despite much debate and many laws enacted by Congress since 1965, none has changed

Spanish-speaking members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union proclaim their loyalty in two languages at a New York City parade in 1985.

significantly the volume of immigration. These laws have been aptly described as "thunder without lightning"— that is, laws without much effect. Although pub- lic opinion polls showed that, when asked, a majority of Americans was likely to say that there were too many incoming immigrants, when asked, in other polls what issues concerned them most, few put immigration high on the list. Many seri- ous students of immigration believe that as long as the American economy remains reasonably prosperous, there is little like- lihood that major bars against immigrants will be raised. A major reason for this is that immigrants in contemporary Ameri- ca, like their predecessors in other eras, come here to work. The work that they do, whether unskilled, semiskilled, or highly skilled, will continue to be a vital element in American economic growth.

Co py ri gh t @ 20 01 . Ox fo rd U ni ve rs it y Pr es s.