This is Refresher Course on All Things Considered. I'm Julia Furukawa. Every other Tuesday, the team behind Civics 101 joins me to talk about how our democratic institutions actually work.
Over a year into President Trump’s second term, his administration has moved to dramatically reshape immigration policy in the U.S.
Civics 101 host Nick Capodice spoke with Julia about the history of immigration law in the U.S., when immigration became illegal and how those restrictions were determined.
Transcript
So Nick, when did the first laws get passed in the United States that determined who was and wasn’t allowed to come into the country?
Well, the very first federal immigration law passed in the U.S. was in 1880. At that point, for our first hundred years as a nation, literally any person who came to the U.S. could become a citizen after a certain period of time. And unlike now, where we have a system that determines how many people from certain countries are allowed into the country, our first laws in the 1880s were qualitative, not quantitative.
The first restrictions were against people with certain kinds of communicable disease, people with certain professions like prostitution or convicted criminals. Then, in 1882, the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, our first immigration law that banned immigration from certain countries. But the law that created a quota system, a system that resembles what we do today, was in 1924. It was called the National Origins Act, and it restricted individuals from certain countries, specifically from eastern and southern Europe.
How did they determine which countries would have restrictions on entering?
Well, Julia, the National Origins Act was, on its face, a racist piece of legislation. This was in the eugenics era. Academics were pushing forward this theory that some genes are superior as opposed to others. This theory, promoted in America, would be acted upon by Adolf Hitler over a decade later in Germany.
But anyway, back to the law. The immigration law was supposed to determine immigration based on who was in the United States at the time already. But legislators looked at the 1920 census, and they determined, frankly, it had too many Italians already. So they went back to the 1890 census, before the big waves of immigration from Italy and Russia, they determined that was the ethnic makeup they desired for the United States. So, to reiterate, prior to 1924, what we know as the Ellis Island years, almost nobody was turned away. Less than 2% of immigrants who came through Ellis were sent back.
The National Origins Act was lifted in 1965. The next major piece of immigration law was in 1986, when President Reagan signed a law that gave legal status to anyone who had come to the US illegally before that.
So where are we now? What are the current restrictions on coming to the United States from another country?
Well, we haven't changed our immigration laws in a long time, Julia, not since 1990, when there were about 3 million unauthorized residents in the United States. Today, there are about 13 million [residents] unauthorized in America. Every person who comes to the U.S. faces unique challenges, depending on what country they're coming from [and] whether they have family here already.
So, for example, if you're a millionaire from Norway with a sister already here, you're going to have an easier time getting to America than a middle income worker from Mexico. A person applying to come to the United States from India with an advanced degree has an estimated wait time of 150 years before they get their green card. And to make something very clear here, being unauthorized in the United States is not technically a crime. In Texas, for example, it is a class B misdemeanor, which was in recent years increased in severity from class C. All this to say, there has been no significant immigration legislation or reform in almost 40 years, and perhaps that plays a part in the heated rhetoric surrounding it.
