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Essay On Immigration Then And Now

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Immigration; Then and Now
The 21st century has been marked as an era of change. Technological advances, the social media frenzy and the shifting of societal norms, lifestyle, and values are some of the things that are used to define this era. However not all things have changed. American attitude toward immigration dating as far back from the 1920’s and beyond has not changed present day. Fear of inclusion, the degrading of American society and economic decline due to immigrants “living off tax payer dollars has always been the defining point for citizens and lawmakers on the issue of immigration.
As early as the Nineteenth century America has been a xenophobic society. A brief timeline of immigration policy from hstry.com shows that the increasing wave of immigrants coming to the U.S. spurred lawmakers to become increasingly restrictive on immigration. These restrictions were not to prevent overpopulation but to exclude certain races entirely. “After the civil war ended in 1865 the ratification of the fourteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution allowed the naturalization of whites and persons of African descent, purposely excluding Asians” (Michelson). “Anti-Asian nativism continued with overwhelming bipartisan support for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882” (Michelson). Data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates …show more content…

Immigration policy then focused on encouraging immigrants of "desirable" races and ethnicities while discouraging or banning members of "undesirable" groups. By 1920, more than a third of the U.S. population was immigrants. American disdain and resistance to immigration increased and anti-immigrant in response to perceived threats to the American way of life and economic threats to laborers, as well as racism against nonwhites and "inferior" Europeans” (Michelson). In 1921 the Emergency Quota Act was

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