A major section of the U.S. ruling class favors instituting some form of “guest worker” program that would grant temporary residency to undocumented workers, and extend it to a certain number of future immigrants. After paying a large fee and registering in a federal database, guest workers would be required to be employed though a government-organized job registry for six years or lose their status and face deportation.

At the same time, U.S. legislators are discussing steps to beef up the number of cops along the borders and build fences along parts of the 2,000-mile frontier between the United States and Mexico.

A minority among the U.S. rulers is pressing for measures to further criminalize the undocumented. The Sensenbrenner bill, passed by the House of Representatives in December, would make it an aggravated felony to be an undocumented immigrant and criminalize those who aid them. This proposal has sparked the largest-ever demonstrations by immigrant workers in cities across the country in recent weeks.

The number of immigrant workers entering the United States in the 1990s exceeded 9 million, greater than the largest previous recorded migration of 8.8 million in the period 1901-1910. In the first decade of the 20th century, 92 percent came from Europe. Eighty years later this figure dropped to 14 percent, while 49 percent now arrive from the Americas, a majority from Mexico and across the Mexican border from other Latin American countries.

To gain a better understanding of the bosses’ current immigrant “reform” proposals it’s helpful to review the record of how the U.S. rulers have dealt with immigration in the past. This article reviews the period from the 1880s to the 1920s.

In 1882 Congress passed the first federal law restricting immigration to the United States—the Chinese Exclusion Act. This law halted immigration of Chinese workers—Chinese merchants, students, and diplomats were exempted—and declared Chinese already living in the United States to be ineligible to become naturalized citizens. The law remained in effect for 61 years, repealed only in December 1943. Its backers scapegoated Chinese workers, arguing that they were taking away “American” jobs.

Chinese began to arrive in large numbers after 1850 as part of the accelerated capitalist development of the United States from coast to coast. Faced with systematic discrimination, they were pressed into low-paying jobs such as railway construction and forced to live in segregated ghettos. In 1885 and 1887 the Alien Contract Labor Laws further restricted the immigration of foreign-born contract laborers.

Added restrictions on immigration were undertaken as Washington entered World War I and in its aftermath. In 1917 Congress approved a law requiring immigrants to pass a literacy test showing that they could read and write in their native language. It also included an “Asiatic barred zone” provision banning immigration from South and Southeast Asia, which remained in place until 1952.

Citing this 1917 immigration ban from Asia, the Supreme Court ruled in 1923 in U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind that those from India already living in the U.S. were ineligible to become naturalized citizens. This decision resulted in the denaturalization of some who had previously become U.S. citizens. In California, where a number of Chinese resided, a 1913 law prohibited those ineligible for citizenship from owning or leasing land.

In 1921, when 700,000 European workers immigrated to the United States, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act. It set limits based on national origin. Yearly European migration was not to exceed 356,000. Immigration was limited to no more than 3 percent of the population of a nationality living in the U.S. based on the 1910 Census. Annual quotas for southern and eastern Europe were set at less than a quarter of the numbers admitted before World War I.

The quota system was made permanent and the ceiling lowered even further in the Immigration Act of 1924. The annual worldwide quota was reduced to 165,000. In a blatant effort to limit immigration from southern and eastern Europe, annual quotas for that region were set at 2 percent of each nationality as recorded in the 1890 census. This slashed immigration from Poland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Russia, the Balkans, Portugal, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Spain, and Estonia by 87 percent, to less than 20,000. Only 3,845 were now allowed annually from Italy, 2,248 from Russia, 131 from Spain, and 100 from Greece.

In signing this bill, President Calvin Coolidge declared, “Every object of our institutions of society and government will fail unless America be kept American.” The law, making no distinction between immigrants and refugees, prevented many eastern Europeans from fleeing to the U.S. during World War II.

The legislation greatly curtailed immigration. From 1924 to 1947, only 2.7 million immigrants came to the United States, a total equal to the number entering during any two-year period before World War I. During the Depression years of the 1930s, only 528,000 immigrated to the United States. For the first time, those leaving the country outnumbered those entering.

The law required all immigrants to obtain a visa to enter the U.S. The quota system did not apply, however, to countries in the Western Hemisphere. This legislation remained in effect until 1965.
 
 
Related articles:
‘Legalize all immigrants!’
Demand 25,000 demonstrators in New York
Actions for immigrant rights continue across U.S.
Amnesty! Legalize undocumented now!  
 
 
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