HISTORY41 - Legal Immigration to America
Principal sources for this
article include Pew Research Center; A Nation of Immigrants, by John F.
Kennedy; “U.S. Immigration Before 1965,” history.com; “Historical
Overview - Immigration,” Georgetown.edu; “Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the U.S.,”
Migration Policy Institute; and “The History of Immigration to the United
States,” “Immigration to the United States,” “List of United States Immigration
Laws,” and “History of Laws Concerning Immigration and Naturalization in the
United States” - all on Wikipedia.
Note: In 1992, my son Steven
traced our Ring-family tree back to the early 1700s. A passenger list from the port of
Philadelphia shows that a “Christ Rink” arrived from the Palatine region of Germany
on August 17, 1731. We believe that he
is our ancestor. In 1735, he arrived in
Rhinebeck, New York, about 100 miles north of New York City, along the Hudson
River, with his name Americanized as Christopher Ring, to join a group of other
recent immigrants from Palatine Germany.
We have traced Christopher Ring and his descendants from 1735, down
through the next 286 years, to today.
Religious persecution, political oppression, and economic
hardship in their home countries - provided the chief motives for voluntary mass
immigration to America. Migrants were
responding in their own way, to the pledge of the U.S. Declaration of
Independence: the promise of “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Immigration has been a major source
of population growth and cultural change throughout much of U.S.
history. America’s
historical openness to immigration has enriched our culture, expanded economic
opportunity, and enhanced our influence in the world. Immigrants complement native-born workers and
raise general productivity through innovation and entrepreneurship. Immigrants continue to integrate successfully
into American society.
We must also acknowledge the extensive amount of
involuntary immigration, aka the shameful Atlantic slave trade, that brought
millions of black Africans to the New World, against their will, to work under
horrible conditions.
Note: Between 1525 and
1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were
shipped to the New World. 10.7 million
Africans survived the Atlantic Passage, disembarking in North America, the
Caribbean, and South America. Surprisingly to some, only 388,000 slaves
were shipped directly to North America.
Also, the economic, social, and political aspects of
immigration have caused controversy regarding such issues as
maintaining ethnic homogeneity, workers for employers versus jobs for
non-immigrants, settlement patterns, impact on upward social
mobility, crime, and voting behavior.
America
is a nation of immigrants. All Americans today, with the exception of Native
Americans, either immigrated themselves or are descended from immigrants. Today, one out of every four people residing
in the United States is either a first- or second-generation immigrant.
Immigration to British Colonial
America
From its earliest days, America has been a nation
of immigrants, starting with its original inhabitants, who crossed the land
bridge connecting Asia and North America more than ten thousand years ago. By
the 1500s, the first Europeans, led by the Spanish and French, had begun
establishing settlements in what would become the United States.
In 1607, the English founded their first
permanent settlement in present-day America at Jamestown, Virginia - thus
establishing the start of British Colonial America. Once tobacco was
found to be a profitable cash crop,
many plantations were established along the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and
Maryland.
This
began the first and longest era of immigration to America, lasting until
the American Revolution in 1775. During this time, settlements grew
from initial English toe-holds in America to 13 American colonies, with
a population of more than three million people. The
English Crown attempted to regulate and limit immigration into the Colonies.
This regulation became a source of political and social tension within
the Colonies.
Because the price of crossing the Atlantic was steep, an
estimated one-half or more of the white Europeans who made the voyage did so by
becoming indentured servants. Their passage was paid by
employers in the colonies who needed help on the farms or in shops. Indentured servants were provided food,
housing, clothing and training but they did not receive wages. At the end of the indenture (usually around
age 21, or after a service of seven years), they were free to marry and start
their own farms.
Seeking
religious freedom in the New World, one hundred English
Pilgrims established a small settlement near Plymouth,
Massachusetts in 1620. Tens of thousands of English
Puritans arrived, mostly from the East Anglian parts of England
(Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex), as well as Kent and East
Sussex, and settled in Boston, Massachusetts and adjacent
areas from around 1629 to 1640 to create a land dedicated to their
religion. The earliest New England colonies, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode
Island, and New Hampshire, were established along the northeast coast.
Large scale immigration to this region ended before 1700, though a small but
steady trickle of later arrivals continued.
Dutch colonies were first established along the Hudson
River in present-day New York state, starting about 1626. Wealthy Dutch set up large
estates along the Hudson River and brought in farmers who became renters.
Others established rich trading posts to trade with Native Americans and
started cities such as New Amsterdam (now New York City)
and Albany, New York. After the
British seized the colony and renamed it New York, new German immigrants (from
the Palatine region, including my Ring-family progenitor), and Yankees (from
New England) began arriving.
Pennsylvania
was settled by Quakers from Britain, followed by Ulster
Scots (Northern Ireland) on the frontier and numerous German Protestant
sects. From around 1680 to 1725,
Pennsylvania was controlled by the Quakers. The commercial center of
Philadelphia was run mostly by prosperous Quakers, supplemented by many small
farming and trading communities, with a strong German contingent located in
villages in the Delaware River valley.
The
inland parts of Pennsylvania, and the southern colonies, were mainly settled
from about 1717 to 1775 by Presbyterian farmers from England, Scotland,
and Ulster, fleeing hard times and religious persecution. Many arrived in Philadelphia and made their
way westward and then down the Appalachians, populating the southern colonies.
Initially,
the plantations established in the southern colonies were mostly owned by
people from Britain.
British Colonial America before the American Revolution in 1775.
The
growing of tobacco, rice, and indigo in plantations in the southern colonies
required large numbers of people for field labor. Plantation owners began importing slaves from
Africa in 1619 and relied heavily on the labor of slaves throughout the British Colonial period.
The slave trade to British Colonial America began in 1619,
continued throughout British rule, and was extended under the United States of
America, until 1808, when the U.S. Congress outlawed the importation of
enslaved people.
Between
1700 and 1740, a large majority of foreign arrivals to the southern colonies were
Africans. In the third quarter of the 18th
century, the population of that region amounted to roughly 55% British, 38%
black, and 7% German.
The
American Revolution in 1775 changed immigration patterns in two ways. First, German immigration increased markedly
when many of the Hessian mercenaries Great Britain had hired to help put down
the American rebellion decided to stay.
Some deserted; others returned to Germany only long enough to collect
their families and return. Second,
Britain, which had transported between 50,000 and 120,000 criminals to the
American colonies, could no longer do so. (As a result, Britain founded a penal
colony in Australia in 1788.) Also, the Atlantic slave trade to British
Colonial America stopped during the Revolution.
The following table shows the number of
immigrants and the place of origin for new arrivals to America, before 1790,
the year of the first United States census. Great Britain, and African slaves
dominate this British Colonial immigration history, with Germans a distant
third. Other immigrants (with even
smaller numbers) included Dutch, French, Jews, and Swedes.
Immigrants to British Colonial
America before 1790.
|
Place of Origin |
Immigrants before 1790 |
% Immigrants |
Population in 1790 |
% Population |
|
Great Britain (Includes England, Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland,
Ireland)
|
425,500 |
44.8 |
2,560,000 |
65.6 |
|
Africa |
360,000 |
37.9 |
757,000 |
19.4 |
|
Germany |
103,000 |
10.8 |
270,000 |
6.9 |
|
Others (Includes Netherlands, France, Jewish, Sweden)
|
61,000 |
6.4 |
316,000 |
8.1 |
|
Total |
950,000 |
100 |
3,900,000 |
100 |
The ancestry of the 3.9 million population in
1790 (not counting Native Americans) was estimated by various sources by
sampling last names from the 1790 census and assigning them a country
of origin. The 1790 population reflects the loss of approximately
46,000 Loyalists, or "Tories", who immigrated to Canada at the
end of the American Revolution, 10,000 who went to England, and 6,000 to the
Caribbean. Again, Great Britain (British
Isles), Africa (blacks), and Germany dominate the 1790 population numbers.
Immigration to the United
States of America
Upon establishing its independence from England, the United
States Congress passed an immigration act. The Naturalization Act
of 1790 allowed white and free immigrants to gain naturalized
citizenship after having lived within the boundaries of the United States for
two years. The Naturalization Act of 1795 included the
stipulation that all immigrants must reject any allegiance to any foreign head
of state or government and banned British citizens who fought against the
United States in the Revolutionary war. It also raised the occupancy
period to five years.
There was relatively little immigration to the
U.S. from 1790 to 1820, with an estimated average of 60,000 immigrants per
decade. The foreign-born population in
the U.S. likely reached its minimum around 1815, at approximately 100,000 or 1%
of the population. By 1815, most of the
immigrants who arrived before the American Revolution had died, and there had
been almost no new immigration thereafter.
Nearly all population growth up to 1820 was by internal increase; around
98% of the population was native-born.
Starting in 1820, some federal records, including
ship passenger lists, were kept for immigration purposes and immigration
increased; more complete immigration records provide data on immigration after
1830. Though conducted since 1790, and every 10 years thereafter, the census of
1850 was the first in which place of birth was asked specifically.
The figure below shows the number of immigrants to
the U.S. from 1820 to 2015. These almost
200 years are divided into phases or periods, with the predominant immigrant origin
locations for each phase: Frontier
Expansion, Industrialization, The Great Pause, and Post-1965. I will present more details below for each
immigration phase, along with U.S. immigration policy that affected arrivals in
the different periods. (Note: The
very large peak in 1993 will be discussed below under the “post-1965”
subsection.)
Immigration numbers to the U.S. by year, 1820-2015.
Frontier Expansion (1820-1880). This was the age of U.S.
Expansion. By
1803, the geographical reach of the United States had been greatly extended
westward through the Louisiana Purchase, and its southern boundary had been
expanded by the seizing of Florida from Spain.
In 1848,
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, concluding the Mexican War, extended U.S.
citizenship to approximately 60,000 Mexican residents of the New Mexico
Territory as well as 10,000 living in California. An additional
approximate 2,500 foreign-born California residents also become U.S. citizens.
In 1849,
the California Gold Rush attracted 100,000 would-be miners from the
Eastern U.S., Latin America, China, Australia, and Europe. California became a state in 1850 with a
population of about 90,000.
By 1880, the U.S. had expanded
almost to its current size - to include 38 states, nine territories, and two
unorganized territories. The total U.S.
population in 1880 was about 50.2 million.
B y 1880, the U.S. had almost reached is size today, and had a population of over 50 million people.
A major wave of immigration occurred during this period. The majority of these newcomers came from Northern and Western Europe. Most were Irish, German, British, and French. Many immigrants during this period were attracted by the cheap farmland. Some were artisans and skilled factory workers attracted by the first stage of industrialization.
Approximately one-third of the immigrants came
from Ireland, which experienced a massive famine in the mid-19th
century. In the 1840s, almost half of
America’s immigrants were from Ireland alone. Before 1845, most
Irish immigrants were Protestants. After
1845, Irish Catholics began arriving in large numbers. Typically
impoverished, these Irish immigrants settled near their point of arrival in
cities along the East Coast. The Irish were primarily unskilled workers who
built a majority of the canals and railroads.
Many Irish went to the emerging textile mill towns of the Northeast,
while others became longshoremen in the growing Atlantic and Gulf port cities.
Many German immigrants journeyed to the
present-day Midwest (some to Texas) to buy farms or congregated in such cities
as Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, and became craftsmen.
During the mid-1800s, a significant number of
Asian immigrants settled in the United States.
Lured by news of the California gold rush, some 25,000 Chinese
had migrated there by the early 1850s.
By 1860, Chinese immigrants constituted approximately 9% of California's
population.
The failed Europe-wide revolutions of
1848 brought many intellectuals and activists to exile in the U.S. Bad times and poor conditions in Europe drove
people out, while land, relatives, freedom, opportunity, and jobs in the U.S.
lured them in.
The influx of newcomers resulted in
anti-immigrant sentiment among certain factions of America’s native-born, predominantly
the Anglo-Saxon Protestant population.
The new arrivals were often seen as unwanted competition for jobs, while
many Catholics - especially the Irish -experienced discrimination for their
religious beliefs. In the 1850s, the anti-immigrant,
anti-Catholic American Party (also called the Know-Nothings) tried (without
much success) to severely curb immigration, and even ran a candidate, former
U.S. president Millard Fillmore, in the presidential election of 1856.
In response to the extensive frontier
expansion, the immigration policies of the United States were initially directed
to promote settlement of these new territories.
Immigration from European countries was actively solicited by the United
States via the Homestead Act of 1862. This act
granted land tracts to naturalized citizens for a nominal price of $1.25 per
acre. In 1864, Congress, under President Abraham Lincoln, passed the first and only major law in American history to
encourage immigration, the Act to Encourage Immigration,
which established the office of Commissioner of Immigration and outlawed
compulsory military service for male immigrants.
European immigrants joined the Union
Army in large numbers, including 177,000 born in Germany and 144,000 born
in Ireland, a full 16% of the Union Army.
Following the Civil War, the United States
experienced a depression in the 1870s that contributed to a slowdown in
immigration.
American political cartoon by Thomas Nast titled "The Usual Irish Way of Doing Things," depicting a drunken Irishman sitting on a barrel of gunpower while lighting a powder keg and swinging a bottle in the air. Published September 2, 1871, in Harpers Weekly.
Most of the Catholics and German Lutherans
became Democrats, and most of the other Protestants joined the new Republican
Party. During the Civil War, ethnic communities supported the war and produced
large numbers of soldiers on both sides. Riots broke out in New York
City and other Irish and German strongholds in 1863 when the military draft was
instituted, particularly in light of the provision exempting those who could
afford payment.
After the California Gold Rush, Californians
were upset with Chinese immigrants, who were willing to work for less, for a
decline in wages.
Shortly after the U.S. Civil War, some
states started to pass their own immigration laws, which prompted the U.S.
Supreme Court to rule in 1875, that immigration was a federal
responsibility. In 1875, the nation
passed its first restrictive immigration law, the Page Act of 1875,
also known as the Asian Exclusion Act, outlawing the importation of
Asian contract laborers, any Asian woman who would engage in prostitution, and
all people considered to be convicts in their own countries.
Industrialization
(1880-1920). The period
between 1880 and 1920, was a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization.
After 1880, larger steam-powered oceangoing
ships replaced sailing ships, which resulted in lower fares and greater
immigrant mobility. In addition, the expansion of a railroad system in Europe
made it easier for people to reach oceanic ports to board ships. Meanwhile, farming improvements
in Southern Europe and the Russian Empire created surplus labor.
Young people between the ages of 15 to 30 were predominant among newcomers.
They shared one overarching characteristic:
they flocked to urban destinations and made up the bulk of the U.S. industrial
labor pool, making possible the emergence of such industries as steel, coal,
automotive, textile, and garment production, enabling the United States to leap
into the front ranks of the world's economic giants.
This era is also known as the
"great wave of immigration,” due to the enormous growth in immigration,
which resulted in approximately 23 million immigrants settling in the United
States. The majority of immigrants were from Southern
and Eastern Europe, as well as Scandinavia. By 1920, 5.3 million Italians
had entered the United States. Jews from
Eastern Europe, fleeing religious persecution, also arrived in large numbers;
over two million entered the United States between 1880 and 1920.
About 1.5 million Swedes and Norwegians
immigrated to the United States within this period. They settled mainly in the
Midwest, especially Minnesota and the Dakotas. After 1900, many Danish
immigrants were Mormon converts who moved to Utah.
Lebanese and Syrian immigrants
started to settle in large numbers in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. The vast majority of the immigrants from Lebanon and Syria
were Christians, but smaller numbers of Jews, Muslims,
and Druze (political and religious sect of Islamic origin) also
settled; many lived in New York City's Little Syria and
in Boston.
While pale in comparison to immigration from
Europe, approximately one million immigrants arrived from Japan, Turkey,
and Mexico. The rate of immigration slowed briefly in the 1890s.
However, by 1910, immigration had increased again. Between 1820 -1920, the peak year for
admission of new immigrants was 1907, when approximately 1.3 million people
entered the country legally.
With immigration growing so
rapidly, two iconic symbols arose in New York Harbor. In 1886, the 305-foot-high Statue of Liberty,
a gift from the French people, was dedicated.
On a tablet on the statue’s base, are inscribed words penned
by Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning
to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” In 1890, President Benjamin
Harrison designated Ellis Island, near the Statue of Liberty, as
a federal immigration station. (More than 12 million immigrants entered the
United States through Ellis Island during its years of operation from 1892 to
1924.)
 |
| New York City harbor with the Statue of Liberty in the left foreground and Ellis Island behind it. |
Ellis Island was an "Island of Hope" - the first stop on an immigrant's way to new opportunities and experiences in America.
As the “great wave of
immigration” proceeded during this period, considerable anti-immigration
sentiment developed.
Chinese immigration to the West Coast was
increasingly restricted until 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act
banned it altogether. The Act severely
curtailed the number of immigrants of Chinese descent allowed into the United
States for 10 years. (The law was renewed in 1892 and 1902. During this
period, Chinese migrants illegally entered the United States through
the loosely-guarded U.S.-Canadian border.)
The immigrants’ urban
destinations and numbers, and perhaps the existing population’s antipathy
towards foreigners, led to the emergence of organized prejudice against
immigrants.
By the 1890s, many Americans,
particularly from the ranks of the well-off, white, and native-born, considered
immigration to pose a serious danger to the nation's health and security, and began
to press Congress for severe curtailment of foreign immigration.
The first comprehensive immigration law for
the U.S. was the Immigration Act of 1891 that established the Bureau of
Immigration in the Treasury Department - directed to deport unlawful aliens,
and empowered the superintendent of immigration to enforce immigration laws.
In 1907, the Dillingham Commission, a bipartisan Congressional
committee, was formed to study the origins and consequences of
recent immigration to the United States. This was in response to
increasing political concerns about the effects of immigration in
the United States and the commission’s job was to report on the
social, economic and moral state of the nation. The committee’s report in 1911
differentiated between "desirable" and "undesirable"
immigrants, based upon ethnicity, race, and religion, with northern European
Protestants being favored over southern or eastern European Catholics and Jews,
with non-European immigrants considered highly undesirable.
The report highly influenced public opinion
around the introduction of legislation to limit immigration and played an
integral part in the adoption of the Immigration Act of 1917, that
restricted immigration from Asia and introduced a literacy test for immigrants,
and other legislation in the 1920s.
The Great Pause
(1920-1965). The period from
1920 to 1965 is called “The Great Pause” because the “great wave of
immigration” that dominated the Industrial Period came to a dramatic halt, due
to events like the World Wars, the Great Depression, and new laws that
restricted immigration.
As mentioned earlier, the outbreak of World
War I (1914-1918) caused a steep decline in immigration. After the war, anti-immigration sentiment, as
expressed in the Dillingham Commission Report of 1911 and the Immigration Act
of 1917, resulted in additional immigration restrictions.
In 1921 the United States Congress passed
the Emergency Quota Act, which established national immigration
quotas. The quotas were based on the
number of foreign-born residents of each nationality who were living in the
United States as of the 1910 census.
Political cartoon from 1921, showing the effect of the quota system.
Note: Until 1924, Native Americans were not
citizens of the United States. Many
Native Americans had, and still have, separate nations within the U.S. on
designated reservation land. On June 2,
1924, Congress granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the
U.S. Yet even after the Indian
Citizenship Act, some Native Americans weren't allowed to vote because the
right to vote was governed by state law.
Until 1957, some states barred Native Americans from voting.
The Acts of 1921 and 1924
drastically reduced the number of immigrations from Eastern and Southern Europe,
the countries of the former Ottoman Empire, Russia, and obliterated
immigration from Asia. Western
Europe inflows were largely unchanged, and immigration from Latin America was
not restricted.
From 1925 - 1930, the total number of immigrants
decreased to 1.7 million; 53% arrived from Europe and 45% arrived from Central
and South America.
From the 1920s onward, with the exception of
the depression era, Mexico served as the primary labor source for much of the
agricultural industry in the U.S., especially in the Southwest. Every year during the 1920s, some 62,000
workers entered the U.S. legally.
In 1932, President Hoover and the
State Department essentially shut down immigration during the Great
Depression (1919-1939), as immigration went from 236,000 in 1929 to 23,000
in 1933. This was accompanied by voluntary repatriation to Europe and Mexico,
and coerced repatriation and deportation of between 500,000 and
2 million Mexican Americans, many U.S. citizens, in the Mexican
Repatriation. For the first time more people
emigrated from the U.S. than immigrated to it. Total immigration in the decade of 1931 to
1940 was 528,000, averaging less than 53,000 a year.
Immigration stayed low during World War
II (1939-1945). Between 1930 and
1950, America’s foreign-born population decreased from 14.2 to 10.3 million, or
from 11.6 to 6.9 percent of the total population, according to the U.S. Census
Bureau.
During World War II, the Mexican and American governments
developed an agreement known as the Bracero program, which allowed
Mexican laborers to work in the United States under short-term contracts in
exchange for stricter border security and the return of illegal Mexican
immigrants to Mexico. Two million
Mexican nationals participated in the program, but tensions between the
program's stated and implicit goals, plus its ultimate ineffectiveness in
limiting illegal immigration into the United States, eventually led to
Operation Wetback in 1954, when the U.S. federal government
began, with the cooperation of the Mexican government, a highly effective
program to deport illegal Mexican workers.
More than a million were deported.
Also, during World War II, the
Chinese exclusion laws were repealed in 1943.
After World War II, Congress passed special
legislation enabling refugees from Europe and the Soviet Union to
enter the United States. Following the
communist revolution in Cuba in 1959, hundreds of thousands of refugees from
that island nation also gained admittance to the United States.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of
1965 (the Hart-Celler Act) abolished the system of national-origin
quotas. There was, for the first time, a
limitation on Western Hemisphere (the Americas) immigration (120,000 per year),
with the Eastern Hemisphere limited to 170,000.
The law changed the preference system for immigrants, not defined by
race, sex, gender, ancestry, or national origin. Specifically, the law provided preference to
immigrants with skills needed in the U.S. workforce, refugees, and asylum
seekers, as well as family members of U.S. citizens. Family reunification became the cornerstone
of the bill.
Post-1965. The Immigration and Nationality Act of
1965 resulted in greatly increased immigration from non-European
countries, particularly Asian countries - once again changing the character of
the American population.
The issue of refugees remained at the forefront
of immigration debate due to the impact of the war in Southeast Asia in the
1960s and 1970s, and Cuba's revolution in the late 1950s. Approximately
450,000 refugees fled Southeast Asia to the U.S. in the 1970s and
1980s. In 1980 a brief period of
mass migration from Cuba to the United States occurred after the announcement
by President Fidel Castro that any Cuban who wished to emigrate to the United
States could do so by leaving by boat at Mariel Harbor. From April to
September of 1980 approximately 124,000 Cuban refugees arrived in Florida via
boat.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the United
States became the destination for persons fleeing from instability and civil
war in Central and South America, as well as escapees and emigres from
Soviet bloc countries. The problem of refugees coming to the United
States was compounded by the increase of illegal immigration into the United
States from South and Central America. The 1980 Census estimated
the total number of illegal immigrants in the United States to be between
2 and 4 million persons.
In 1986 Congress passed the Immigration
Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which attempted to address illegal
immigration through amnesty programs for illegal immigrants, as well as
criminalizing the hiring of illegal aliens as workers. Four years after
the passage of IRCA, Congress passed a new act - the Immigration Act of
1990, also known as IMMACT. IMMACT negated the previous
immigration caps based on hemisphere and instituted a total number cap of
675,000 persons, with 480,000 spots designated for family members of United
States citizens, 140,000 designated for employment-based immigrants, and
55,000 for "diversity" immigrants.
Immigration rose continuously from 1989 to
1993, with a total number of immigrants of 603,000 in 1989 to 971,000 in 1993.
The majority of immigrants were family members of United
States citizens, with humanitarian immigrants and refugees rounding out
the majority of legal immigrants.
Illegal immigration issues continued in the
1990s and early 2000s. Various government acts were instituted to address
illegal immigration, which increased funding for border patrol, and denied
Federal services for illegal aliens, and denied states the ability to provide
services to illegal immigrants.
From 1994 - 2000 the total number of
legal immigrants fluctuated, but averaged about 770,000 per year – many from
Mexico. (Note: The extreme immigration numbers peak, over
1.8 million, in 1992-1994, shown on the chart at the beginning of the
discussion of immigration to the U.S., is due to the amnesty provisions of the
IRCA legislation, under which 2.7 million undocumented foreign U.S. residents
obtained legal immigrant status.)
The first two years of the new
millennium ushered in a large increase in total immigration, but the total
dropped precipitously in 2003 as a direct result the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001.
In 2002, the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) was founded as a result of the reorganization of multiple agencies under
the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Many immigration and
naturalization functions were brought under the umbrella of the DHS, including
the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Customs and Border Protection
(CBP), Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) - with an overall mission to monitor the entry of non-U.S. citizens.
The preference system for legal immigration created in the 1960s remained
in place.
The total number of legal immigrants grew in
the two years after passage of the Homeland Security Act in 2002, and from 2004
to today, while fluctuating slightly, has remained at approximately one million
immigrants per year,
The
Pew Research Center reported that in 2019, of a total U.S. population of 328.2
million, 44.9 million were immigrants, including about 11.4 illegal (or
unauthorized) immigrants. Immigrants
today represent about 13.7% of the population and 5% of the work force.
The
figure below shows the historical record, from 1850 to 2016, of the number of
immigrants as a percentage of the U.S. population. The share of immigrants varied from about 10%
in 1850, to a peak of about 15% in 1890, to a low of about 5% in 1970, and a
steady increase since then to 13.7 % in 2019.
Number of immigrants and their share of the total U.S. population, 1850-2016.
In 2018, the top country of origin for new
immigrants coming into the U.S. was China, with 149,000 people, followed by
India (129,000), Mexico (120,000), and the Philippines (46,000).
By race and ethnicity, more Asian immigrants
than Hispanic immigrants have arrived in the U.S. in most years since 2009. Immigration from Latin America slowed
following the recession in 2007-2009, particularly from Mexico, which has seen
both decreasing flows into the United States and large flows back to Mexico in
recent years.
The figure below shows the largest immigration
groups residing in the U.S. in 2019. Immigrants
from Mexico dominate the pie chart at 24.3%.
The top 10 immigration groups represent 57% of the approximate 45
million immigrant total.
Top 10 largest immigrant groups residing in the U.S. in 2019.
Asians are projected to become the largest immigrant group in the U.S. by 2055, surpassing Hispanics. Pew Research Center estimates indicate that in 2065, those who identify as Asian will make up some 38% of all immigrants; as Hispanic, 31%; White, 20%; and Black, 9%.
Paths to U.S. Citizenship
The paths to U.S. citizenship for immigrants today
start with a “green card.” A green card,
known officially as a permanent resident card, is an identity
document which shows that a person has permanent residency in
the United States. Green card holders are formally known as lawful
permanent residents. (Green cards started in 1940 as a way to register
aliens, and evolved over the years to a permanent resident card, along with a
process to secure permanent legal residency.)
Elements of a U.S. Green Card.
There are four main ways to obtain a Green Card: 1) Employment (You are offered a job
in the U.S.), 2) Diversity (You - or via a spouse or parent - are a
native of a country with a low rate of immigration to the U.S., 3) Family
(You can identify a U.S. family member to sponsor you), 4) Investment (You are
willing to invest heavily in U.S. business).
Green card holders are statutorily entitled to
apply for U.S. citizenship if they have been a legal permanent resident (with a
green card) for at least 5 years; or are married to a U.S. citizen and have
been a legal permanent resident for at least 3 years; or are in the military,
or their spouse or parents are in the military; or any of their parents is a
U.S. citizen.
Illegal immigration continues to
be a major component of the current discussion on immigration in the United
States. Since 2001, there have been
attempts (so far unsuccessful) to pass legislation to provide a means by which
persons who do not have a legal status, but who were brought to the United
States as minors, could apply for legal permanent status, leading to
naturalization. Presidents Barak Obama
and Donald Trump both tried to address the issue with executive orders and
policy memoranda. I will discuss the
history of illegal immigration to the U.S. in my next blog article.
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