Today, immigration is one of the most controversial and discussed topics in America. The subject of immigration has had a long and confusing history that takes a lifetime of education to fully comprehend. Within the United States, there are over 300 years of legislation that has passed to maintain migration into the States. When looking at immigration there are three main facets that are interconnected with each other, which are law, demographics, and economics.
Immigration has drastically changed since the eighteenth and nineteenth century compared to what it is today in the twenty first century. In the 1700s-1800s the country kept fairly open borders and the people never really questioned the few laws in place (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
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Some of which prohibited people of certain labors to enter the United States and some created a tax on those who migrate. These new laws pushed the need for federal government oversight on immigration. In 1875 The Supreme Court declared the federal government to be the overall authority in immigration matters (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 2015). The first notable immigration legalization enacted by Congress prohibited people of a specific ethnicity and race, which is known as, The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited any one of Chinese descent to migrate the United States for 10 years. According to the Chinese Exclusion Act itself the government perceived people of Chinese descent as people who “endangers the good order of certain localities with the territory thereof” (Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 2008). Meaning that the Chinese were thought of as destructive to society and as a nuisance. The Chinese Exclusion Act not only prohibited migration of Chinese people, but also mandated the deportation of any Chinese that migrated after November 17, 1880 (Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 2008). Any Chinese who immigrated before then was branded and given an identification (The University of Washington-Bothell Library, n.d.). This Act was supposed to only be active for 10 years, however, the legislation was created permanent in 1904 due to the …show more content…
However, another major turning point in immigration history that impacted the U.S. occurred at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first century after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.