Mar 3, 2018 5 min read

For much of American history, the United States had no immigration restrictions, so there was no such thing as an “illegal immigrant.”

On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans did fight John Adams’ Federalists over the time required to become a voting citizen, with Jefferson wanting the time reduced from 14 years to seven. This occurred at a time when many Irish immigrants were fleeing British oppression, and were supporters of Jefferson’s fight against the Federalists, who modeled themselves after the English.

Immigration has always had political consequences.

For the first century of the United States’ history, while not everyone welcomed immigrants, no laws kept them out, and the combination of a small population and large area with abundant resources meant immigrants helped America grow. Immigration has two factors: a push (encouraging potential immigrants to leave their homes) and a pull (something to attract them to the country to which they immigrate). People who are happy at home generally hesitate to move to a foreign land to start over.

Large-scale immigration to the United States began with the Germans and the Irish in the 1840s. Germans were fleeing the chaos and backlash of the 1848 revolutions that happened throughout Europe, and the Irish were fleeing the potato famine. Since many of the immigrants were Catholic, many native-born Protestants saw them as “un-American,” which led to the rise of the “Know Nothing” Party, which was anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, and tapped the tribal hostility that led to discrimination, such as signs declaring “No Irish Need Apply.”

In what would be a common theme, the first legal restrictions on immigration were based on racism and fear. The Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 kept out all Chinese, primarily because railroads had employed them to build the Transcontinental Railroad from the West Coast, where there were few native-born workers available, and they had worked so hard for such low wages that native-born workers feared the Chinese would take their jobs.

As the industrial economy grew in the late 1800s, immigrants from Europe flocked to the United States. While initially most immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe, around the turn of the century the tide shifted south and east. These immigrants were less welcome. With the “closing of the frontier” in 1890, and the economic shift from agriculture to industry, immigrants no longer spread out across the vast continent, and remained concentrated in cities. Their concentration, poverty and profusion of languages and customs frightened many native-born residents, and the growing numbers of immigrants gave them political significance, especially in cities.

The rise of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution created an atmosphere of fear in the United States after World War I, which led to the Red Scare and the expulsion of many immigrants for their radical political beliefs. These conditions led to the first comprehensive immigration restrictions in 1924, which used quotas based on the proportionate populations in the 1890 census, which had many fewer people from the “undesirable” countries than the 1920 Census would have had, to limit the influx of the less desirable, more recent immigrants.

These tight restrictions lasted until 1965, when neutral quotas replaced the nativist restrictions. This led to a great increase in immigrants from Asia and Latin America. The United States welcomed political refugees from ideological foes like Cuba and Nicaragua, as well as people from countries where U.S. military activities created conditions that endangered them, such as Vietnam.

Mexican immigrants first came in great numbers in the 1910s, fleeing the Mexican Revolution, but many were forcibly deported during the Great Depression. They returned under the Brazeros program from 1942 to 1964, which allowed them to harvest crops in the United States for parts of the year, while still returning to Mexico. This created a legal, low-wage agricultural workforce. This led to a growing dependence on immigrants for farm labor, and also began the influx of undocumented immigrants when employers and workers did not bother to work through the program.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan tried to resolve the growing problem of undocumented immigrants by signing an “amnesty” bill that legalized many of them. While the growth of the U.S. economy in conjunction with the relative weakness of the Mexican economy meant immigrants looking for work continued to enter the United States through the early 2000s, those forces weakened considerably after the start of the Great Recession in 2007, so that in the last 10 years, there has been a net loss of population to Mexico. Ironically, efforts to make the border more secure in the 1990s led to an increase in undocumented immigrants staying in the United States, because border crossings became more difficult.

Historically, anybody that is not a Native American benefited from immigration – and even Native Americans immigrated from the Eurasian land mass, they just got here first. We are the nation we have become because of immigrants, so it is vital that our immigration policies recognize immigrants’ importance to our nation’s vitality.

Kent James is an East Washington resident and has degrees in history and policy from Carnegie Mellon University.