The Birth of ‘Illegal’ Immigration
Until the late 19th century, there wasn’t any such thing as “illegal” or “legal” immigration to the United States. That’s because before you can immigrate somewhere illegally, there has to be a law for you to break.
American immigration didn’t really begin until the late 1700s, when the United States became an independent nation. Before that, Africans had unwillingly entered the Americas as enslaved peoples and Europeans had entered as settlers—which is something totally different. While immigrants are beholden to the laws of the land they migrate to, settlers come to disrupt the current system and implement their own laws,
write the scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang.
But once the U.S. made its Constitution the new law of the land, immigrants flocked to the country with few restrictions. This didn’t mean that they were welcomed in the “New World.” In the beginning, when immigrants came mostly from northern and western Europe,
anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment were rampant. By the mid- to late-19th century, people from southern and eastern Europe as well as China were coming over, and Americans resented the presence of Chinese, Italians, and more Catholics.
Asian exclusion continued with the
1924 Immigration Act, which banned all people who could not become naturalized citizens per the 1790 Naturalization Act. That naturalization law had originally said that only free white people could become naturalized citizens. Yet by 1924, previously excluded groups like Mexicans, black Americans, and Native Americans had won citizenship rights, and the law really only applied to Asians.
But the biggest change the 1924 act made to immigration policy was introducing numerical caps or quotas based on country of origin. These quotas gave enormous preference to people from northern and western Europe over those from southern and eastern parts of the continent. Turns out, the previous restrictions on Asian immigrants had made “very little impact on the growing levels of immigration to the United States,” Hsu says, because the vast majority of immigrants came from Europe. These new quotas were meant to address “a sense of crisis” that America was accepting too many immigrants, particularly too many non-Anglo Saxon ones.
The 1924 act resurfaced in the news in September 2017 when United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the U.S. would end DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), a policy to give people who came to the U.S. as undocumented children a legal avenue to stay. Sessions had earlier stated that the 1924 Immigration Act
“was good for America.”
