The United States has a longstanding identity as a country of immigrants; however, large-scale immigration to the US has been concentrated into four distinct periods. 1) the settling of the country including slaves, 2) the opening of the west, 3) industrialization between the civil war and, WWI and 4) the current period since the 1970s. All four of these periods coincide with economic transformation within the country. Immigration policy, however, did not arrive until at least the second stage.
Of course, any examination of immigration policy needs to be undertaken in the demographic context of its time. The size, composition and dynamic of certain demographic cohorts play pivotal roles in how people perceive migration and thus how policy makers decide to address the issue. Consider for example the first US census carried out in 1790, that is, 14 years after independence. At that time perhaps only 40% of the population would have technically been born in the United States (the data for women and slaves was not disaggregated), so any notion of a policy on immigration would have been absurd. Due to limited immigration this was the case up until the 1830’s. During that period immigration policy was left to the states with the federal government only entering the field in 1819 with the Steerage Act.
The first reliable immigration statistics start in 1820 and identify 8,385 immigrants arriving to the US that year, nearly three-quarters of which were from the British Isles. This second period of massive immigration to the US was dominated by Europeans, in particular Irish and Germans. By 1850 the foreign-born population was estimated at 2,244,602. The following chart illustrates the evolution of the foreign-born population between 1850 and 1930. The red and green vertical lines indicate the passage of important immigration laws, with red identifying restrictive laws and green neutral or permissive laws. (Of course this is an over-simplification, but does help to visualize the trend).
It is interesting to note that several of the restrictive laws passed during this period focused on reducing Chinese immigration, while the percentage of Asian immigrants remained fractional. Thus brute demography is only the tip of the ice berg of “context” with regard to immigration. As Jerome Frank bitingly commented on the 1886 California zoning law case, In re Hang Kie, the decisions for law making do not always spring from the noblest human traits. (See Jerome Frank, Are Judges Human?)
A further look at this evolution shows that the origins of immigrants living in the US has changed dramatically, as Asia and Latin America have grown in importance. Also, the frequency of federal lawmaking in the field has decreased (probably in part due to the delegation of administrative functions to immigration departments like the INS or the current USCIS). Again, the red/green classification is a bit of an obtuse tool, but we can generally see that post-WWII immigration legislation has been relatively permissive.
There are no clear conclusions that I would dare to posit regarding this information, and in fact, this brief examination raises more questions than it answers. However, I think the key element here is that immigration policy analysis must launch from a contextual analysis, and the context for our world (and the focus of this blog) is globalization. The world is no longer made up of island nations (if in fact it ever was), but an increasingly connected and fluid amalgam that challenges domestic laws and policies as never before. Our understanding of immigration and immigration policy must use this understanding as our guiding star.
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