"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!"
Inscription on the Statue of Liberty
Without doubt, one of the main historical and cultural foundations of the United States of America is the country's origins in large-scale immigration. Giving due attention to the native American peoples, it is commonly said that America is a nation of immigrants. Many are proud to be part of that movement of people who left their native lands hoping to make a new life in the ‘ New World '.
Another main immigration theme is the ‘American Dream'. This powerful and attractive image of America as the land of the free, a haven for those fleeing persecution or poverty, where wealth and success are available as nowhere else, a ‘pull factor' drawing ever more people to the country.
The States have appealed to so many that legal limitations and conditions have been increased over time, and for a variety of reasons. This section illustrates some of the key developments in American immigration law.
When the USA gained independence, most immigrants had come from northern Europe and the population was mostly white. 80% were British and 98% were Protestant. About 20% of the population were slaves, taken from Africa , and they lived mainly in the southern states.
Between 1820 and 1865, around 50 million people arrived to settle in the USA . Most of them came from Britain , Ireland and Germany .
After the American Civil War, there followed a period of reconstruction. Industrialisation required workers and immigration was encouraged. Work was available on the railways being built across the country and in the factories. Famine in Ireland and revolution in Germany drove people from their homelands, and British and German companies began to operate steamships across the Atlantic, making the journey to America much quicker.
By the end of the 19th Century, the USA was the most powerful industrial nation in the world. As more immigrants arrived, the cultural make-up of the country began to change.
One of the first attempts to limit immigration by law was the Chinese Exclusion Act which, in 1882, banned the importation of Chinese labourers. The ban was not removed until 1945. The Act was passed in response to anti-immigrant feeling on the West Coast, and in California in particular.
Despite this, until the 1890s, the majority of immigrants still came from Northern Europe . After that the population became more diverse as the origins of America's immigrants widened to include Eastern and Southern Europe . Many Catholic, Jewish and Orthodox Christian immigrants arrived from countries like Russia , Italy , Hungary and Turkey.
In 1892 Ellis Island opened. Between 1892 and 1953, more than 12 million immigrants were processed at this one facility.
Immigrants settled in the rapidly expanding cities, so the demographic as well as the ethnic character of the United States began to change. A strong culture of assimilation began to develop and the concept of the ‘melting pot' was born. At the same time, fears arose that immigrants might not integrate into American society and anti-immigrant sentiment grew.
Towards the end of the 19th century, immigration began to be more systematically regulated. Quotas were introduced which gave preferential treatment to immigrants from certain areas of the world, primarily Europe , and restricted or prohibited entrants from other countries.
Gradually legislation tightened up on the overall numbers who were allowed to enter the country and on certain categories. People likely to become a financial burden, people whose politics might threaten the government and convicted criminals were among those likely to be rejected. By the 1920s, nationality was becoming more important. People from eastern and southern Europe , for example, were discriminated against in the quota systems.
In the 1930s and 1940s, more refugees were arriving from Europe , fleeing Fascism. After World War Two, large numbers of people whose lives had been disrupted headed for the USA . In 1948, the Displaced Persons Act allowed four hundred thousand refugees entry, but these people had to pass a security check and prove they had a job and a home to go to. In other words, that they would not threaten US citizens' jobs and homes.
During the war and in the post-war period, the demand for agricultural labour in the USA increased. Many workers from Mexico crossed the border to Texas to fill this demand and, between 1944 and 1954, immigration from Mexico is thought to have increased by about one million.
During the 1940s, the USA and Mexico attempted to legalise and regulate a labour exchange programme to safeguard the rights of immigrant workers. These attempts failed. Illegal immigration continued, driven by demand for cheap labour.
Resentment against the immigrants was fuelled by the fact that they were prepared to take jobs at much lower wages than US citizens. Immigrants were also blamed for a rise in criminal activities. In 1954, in the face of growing hostility to the immigrant workers, the United States began mass deportation of illegal Mexican immigrants.
(Operation Wetback is estimated to have forcibly removed more than one million people from the USA ).
Political factors also played a role in the 1950s, when tens of thousands of refugees arrived from countries such as Cuba and Hungary , where communist regimes had come to power.
The legal framework for immigration changed radically during the 1960s.
At the beginning of the 1960s, the population was still 85% non-Hispanic white. During the 1960s, however, various Supreme Court rulings moved policy away from a pro-European bias in immigration law. In 1965, the Hart-Cellar Act removed the immigration quota system based on national origin and replaced it with a ‘colour blind' law which recognised only economic and humanitarian considerations. Even so, the Act established an overall ceiling of 170,000 on immigration from the eastern hemisphere and 120,000 from the western hemisphere.
By the 1980s, largely as a result of the Hart-Cellar Act, most immigrants were now from outwith Europe . This significantly changed the demographic make-up in the United States .
In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act granted amnesty to about three million undocumented individuals, but it also introduced sanctions for businesses which employed illegal workers. The idea was to stop undocumented individuals being able to get work and, therefore, remove their reason for coming to the USA .
