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The history of migration and immigration in the United States is one of the dominant forces shaping our experience of race today. While immigration for “white” Europeans has, for the most part, led to a smooth welcome into dominant society, immigrants who are people of color face a more difficult path to acceptance, much less belonging, in our nation. It is common to refer to the United States as a nation of immigrants, but the reality is that immigrants in our nation have been scapegoated, exploited for cheap labor, and treated as second-class citizens for hundreds of years.

The inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric embraced by President Trump’s campaign was in many ways an echo of campaigns against various immigrant groups throughout history. In this chapter, you will learn about the numerous times our nation chose fear and hatred of immigrants over welcome and acceptance. Unfortunately, this has been a cycle that repeats itself time and time again.

Studying the history of immigration in the United States, as well as the laws and customs that changed over decades, illustrates how the concept of “whiteness” has been manipulated to serve those in power. Moreover, a survey of history demonstrates how “white” is less a racial identity, and instead more a privileged legal and economic status that needed to be protected and restricted to the few.

The History of U.S. Immigration in the 1800s

Our nation’s very first immigration law passed in 1790, creating a process to grant naturalized citizenship to immigrants who had lived in the United States for at least two years. The more restrictive requirement, however, was only “free white persons” qualified (*for all intents and purposes, person meant “man”). This also excluded Native Americans, indentured servants, and both enslaved and free Black people from access to citizenship. In 1795, Congress amended the law to increase the minimum residency requirement to five years, which remains today. [1] From then on, the nation continued to grow and receive immigrants looking to start their lives in the United States.

Throughout the 19^th century, immigrants arrived in the United States from all over the world, particularly Northern and Western Europe and East Asia. Millions of individuals and families from Ireland and Germany arrived on the East Coast and settled in the East and Midwest. On the West Coast, Chinese immigrants arrived to work “first to work in the gold mines, but also to take agricultural jobs, and factory work” in the mid-1800s. [2]

Meanwhile, much of the land that currently makes up the southwestern U.S. still belonged to Mexico, making the residents there Mexican citizens or residents. In the 1840s and 1850s, due to President James Polk and the federal government’s actions, wars and treaties moved the border south. As a result, these families never “crossed the border,” the border crossed them. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 (following the U.S.-Mexico war) won much of the Southwest for the United States, including California, Texas, parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada. Six years later, in 1854, the Gadsden Purchase brought what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico into the United States. [3]

The provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo included safety and protection of: land ownership, language, and culture for Mexicans living in that territory, as well as access to U.S. citizenship. After the treaty was signed, however, many of those promises were broken, and it was difficult for U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry to access their right to citizenship and retain their land. During this time, many Mexican and U.S. citizens freely traveled between the two countries for work and had friends and family on both sides of the border.

Near the end of the 1800s, the welcoming of Chinese immigrants to California abruptly stopped as fear grew that Chinese immigrants were taking over jobs and posed “a threat to society.” Congress passed several laws to exclude Chinese immigrants from the country and society. In 1882, Congress passed the first of three Chinese Exclusion Acts, banning additional Chinese immigration. It was not until 1943 when China and the United States became allies during World War II that the exclusion laws were finally repealed. [4]

Anti-Immigrant Policies in the Early 1900s

Immigration to the U.S. from all over the world continued into the 1900s, but two factors led to the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment across the country. First, European immigration shifted away from Protestant, Western European countries and increasingly came from Russia, Austria, and Italy, bringing a significant portion of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. Second, the Great Depression caused terrible damage to the economy and wages in the United States.

In response to the first development, Congress passed the National Origins Act in 1924 establishing a quota system to limit the number of immigrants entering the United States. In order to reduce the number of these “less-desirable” Italian, Eastern European, or Jewish immigrants, the law deliberately based the new quotas on census data from 1890, more than 20 years earlier when the majority of immigrants in the U.S. were white Protestants from Northern and Western Europe. [5].

A few years later, during the Great Depression, those in power turned against Mexican immigrants, blaming them for the nation’s economic troubles. President Herbert Hoover led a wide-ranging campaign with the slogan “American Jobs for Real Americans.” White people across the country supported this campaign, as there was near-universal consensus among white people that the category “real Americans” excluded Mexican immigrants. State and local governments not only in the Southwest, but all across the country, conducted the “Mexican Repatriation” efforts of the 1930s with support and funding from the federal government. The various agencies involved did not keep consistent records, but historians estimate that around 1 million, if not more, people of Mexican descent were forcibly deported.

The various deportation efforts failed to limit the euphemistically named “repatriation” to Mexican immigrants, and included many U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. Some research says that as many as 60% of those sent “home” to Mexico in the 1930s were U.S. citizens: U.S.-born children of Mexican-descent who had never before traveled south of the border. [6] Thousands of people of Mexican descent were deported from Los Angeles, where local agencies conducted raids on the Mexican community and other parts of the Southwest. In the Midwest also, Mexican immigrants were removed from jobs and deported, all to make the factory jobs they held “available for white people.” Major companies, including Ford, U.S. Steel, and the Southern Pacific Railroad, colluded with the government by laying off thousands of Mexican workers. [7]

In 1935 a similar repatriation effort was instituted for Filipino immigrants after the Tydings-McDuffie Act set a plan for the Philippines to become an independent country. The Act also instituted a new immigration quota of only 50 Filipino immigrants per year. (Previously, when the Philippines was a United States colony, the U.S. government classified Filipino immigrants as “nationals” and immigration to the U.S. was unrestricted.) Facing much less coercion than the Mexican repatriation efforts, only about 2,000 immigrants voluntarily chose to return to the Philippines. [8]

Other policies, outside of immigration policy negatively affected the lives of immigrants and people of color. The Wagner Act of 1935, previously mentioned as a contributor to the racial wealth and income gap, excluded farm workers and domestic workers, many of whom were Latinx or Asian immigrants, as well as Black workers. This policy harmed Black workers and immigrant workers by prohibiting them from receiving the benefits of organizing and creating unions. Additionally, other policies that contributed to the racial wealth gap also disproportionately affected immigrant communities and the descendants of immigrants, including the National Housing Act, the Federal-Highway Act, subprime loans, and the war on drugs.