In October 1945, German scientist Wernher von Braun arrived in the United States to begin work for the US Army. His development of the German V-2 rocket made him one of the most sought-after scientists of the postwar period. In order to facilitate his arrival, government authorities expunged records of his memberships in the Nazi Party and the German elite paramilitary organization known as the SS. They also expedited his immigration and security clearance so he could develop ballistic missiles for the United States and, eventually, design the NASA rockets that transported the first satellites and men into space. By 1955, he was an American citizen.
Three years after von Braun came to the United States, Sachiko Pfeiffer, a Japanese national, immigrated as the war bride of an American military veteran. Though most Asians were barred by law from immigrating to the United States at this time, Pfeiffer and her white husband were able to settle in Illinois, one of the few states where interracial marriage was possible. Sachiko’s path to integration took longer than von Braun’s for she would not even qualify for citizenship until the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act permitted Japanese immigrants to naturalize. Though sympathetically portrayed in a Life magazine article in 1955 by novelist James Michener, it took until the birth of her first son for Sachiko to overcome the reservations of Frank’s family and her neighbors.
Unskilled workers faced new barriers in the 1950s too. Following in the foot-steps of many other Mexicans, Lorenzo Macías left his family and friends to find higher-paying employment in Los Angeles, California. Lured by the robust postwar economy, he was one of the thousands of Mexican migrants who arrived without authorization to work in agricultural fields, factories, loading docks, construction sites, and service industries. As an undocumented worker, Macías labored long hours in very difficult conditions, hoping to avoid deportation; he tried to save enough money to buy an apartment and marry Judith, his fiancée. Despite his many sacrifices, the young couple was unable to survive the distance and the separation, a loss Macías would mourn decades later.
The experiences of Wernher von Braun, Sachiko Pfeiffer, and Lorenzo Macías, discussed by three of the contributors to this anthology, exemplify some of the major shifts in immigration policies and priorities that emerged in the United States between 1924 and 1965. These stories show that policies were far from fixed.1 Von Braun’s expedited immigration reveals, in dramatic fashion, the federal government’s expanding interest in the recruitment of highly skilled workers in service of American economic and technical competitiveness. Pfeiffer’s immigration story illustrates how the government’s commitment to family reunification allowed many to bypass the race-based restrictions. In contrast, Macías’s story demonstrates that even those who lacked skills and family connections could still find ways to enter and remain in the United States, even though a lack of authorized status marginalized them in certain sectors of the US economy and imposed severe constraints on their personal lives.
Readers may find these accounts surprising. The period 1924 to 1965 has often been portrayed as an unremarkable interlude between two great eras of mass migration to the United States: 1880–1924, when more than twenty million people entered the country, and the post-1965 period, which has witnessed the arrival of more than fifty-nine million people. This periodization has over-simplified a complicated history and obscured histories that do not fit into neat chronological categories. It has also incorrectly suggested that the draconian system in place successfully brought immigration to a halt and fully “Americanized” immigrants already in the United States. To this day, critics of open immigration point to this period as a time when immigration policy successfully stemmed the tide of unwanted immigrants.2
Building on recent trends in research, the authors in this anthology challenge the traditional periodization in US immigration history and explain how and why the years from 1924 to 1965 constitute a formative—not a static—period.3 Immigration to the United States did decrease in the wake of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, but it did not stagnate. Instead, it changed form, composition, aspiration, and legal expression. The years 1924–1965 solidified trends that had first emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and laid the foundations for many of the developments attributed to the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, such as removing discriminations based on race and national origins, prioritizing family reunification and skilled labor as selection criteria, and establishing permanent provisions for the admission of refugees. This anthology brings together leading scholars of migration, ethnicity, race, and labor in a broadly comparative reconsideration of how immigration policy became a site for reimagining the attributes of citizenship, realigning labor priorities, and reconfiguring international relations.
The chapters demonstrate that the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act was not a dramatic departure from the status quo but rather the product of longstanding political struggles and debates of the preceding four decades. The discriminatory national-origins quotas attracted criticism as soon as they became policy in 1924, but the deeply contested nature of the congressional legislative process made reforms difficult and slow to enact. Instead, legislators took advantage of the gaps, exceptions, and loopholes in the national-origins system to shape the American workforce and society toward particular ends. A broadening range of considerations determined who received immigration visas to come to the United States, among them family relationships, educational and employment credentials, investment capacities, foreign-policy priorities, and humanitarian concerns. Concurrently, as Mae Ngai so authoritatively discusses, this era also witnessed the expansion of legal and enforcement bureaucracies targeting “impossible subject” categories of workers defined as temporary and thus deemed ineligible for citizenship and its protections from deportation.4 Thus, changing conceptions of race relations, parameters for citizenship, and America’s role in the world, as well as new demands for specialized labor, produced a number of policy shifts between 1924 and 1965 that made both the positive and negative aspects of the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act possible. The debates and struggles of the period critically reshaped American society in ways that reverberate to this day.
The contributors to this volume also make a persuasive case for recognizing the intersection between foreign policy and immigration. Immigration policy, traditionally viewed as a domestic matter, served as a tool for the advancement of geopolitical interests abroad after 1924. If immigration was central to nation-building in the nineteenth century, it became critical to state-building in the twentieth, the so-called American Century.5 The national-origins quotas deeply offended US allies in Asia, whose support was increasingly critical during the Cold War. Congress muted international criticism by enacting immigration policies that emphasized economic rather than racial criteria for admission. Congress also became increasingly responsive to a broader array of domestic actors, namely ethnic and religious groups, who adopted the language of US Cold War priorities to lobby for a more humane immigration reform. These developments facilitated shifts in the sources and patterns of migration flows.
In addition, the chapters in this collection highlight the ideological and strategic transformations in policy and society through the four cataclysmic decades that witnessed the Depression of the 1930s, the Second World War, the decolonization campaigns around the world, the global human rights movement, and the emerging Cold War. In comparing the trajectories of various immigrant, ethnic, and racial groups, this anthology illustrates how powerfully immigration laws enact and maintain inequalities and socioeconomic hierarchies that affect the various immigrant groups differently. More important, the authors reclaim the period from 1924 to 1965 as a critical watershed in US history—a period that profoundly reshaped ideas about American identity and the types of immigrants that should be prioritized for admission to the United States.
A Nation of Immigrants Explained
During the second half of the nineteenth century, immigration flows to the United States shifted and came increasingly from Asia, southern and eastern Europe, and Mexico.6 Americans of northern and western European ancestry regarded immigrants from these areas of the world as nonwhite, biologically and culturally inferior, and unassimilable. These perceptions stemmed from the United States’ first decades as a nation, when race, national origins, and religion emerged as key markers of eligibility for citizenship. Drawing on the 1790 Nationality Act, which restricted citizenship by naturalization to “free white persons,” Congress produced the legal category of “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” which remained in place until 1952, when Congress abolished racial restrictions on citizenship altogether.7 These ideas about race, citizenship, and belonging had a long-term impact on the country’s immigration policy and on American perceptions of new immigrants.
Drawing on these well-established ideas about citizenship, Congress took action to protect the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the nation and enacted the first federal immigration controls beginning in the 1870s.8 Chinese were the first targets of these restrictions because many Americans saw them as the quintessential “other.” Following passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, established leaders of northern and western European descent turned their attention to other groups. They mobilized and passed legislation that limited the legal entry and citizenship rights of other newcomers, especially those from southern and eastern Europe. While some of the new restrictions relied on race and national origins to determine admissibility, other restrictions were more qualitative in nature. By the beginning of the twentieth century, immigration laws categorized potential immigrants by socioeconomic class, literacy, criminality, political beliefs, diplomatic standing, physical and mental health, and sexuality. Immigration authorities often used the “likely to become a public charge” clause (LPC) to turn away the poor and unmarried or unaccompanied women. Alongside the expanding array of legislation, the federal government developed institutions to enforce the laws, including the creation in 1891 of the Immigration Bureau. First located in the Treasury Department, the bureau transferred to the Department of Commerce and Labor (1903–1913) and the Department of Labor (1913–1933), revealing the different areas of government concerned with immigration restriction over time.9 The government also opened immigrant inspection stations on Castle Garden (1855), Ellis Island (1892), and Angel Island (1910). Beginning in 1904, the Immigration Service’s special force, the “Mounted Guards,” patrolled the US-Mexico border to stop unauthorized Chinese immigration.
Many of these developments reflected the influence of eugenics, a pseudoscience popular during the era, which encouraged controlled breeding to ensure the reproduction of desirable traits such as intelligence, thrift, and industriousness in the interest of creating a healthy and productive population. Legislators in the United States used eugenics to offer scientific justification for the harsh and often violent action to repress persons and behaviors considered disruptive to American progress. Its principles permeated educational, health, and carceral policies across the country. Immigration policy emerged as a critical arena to put such beliefs into practice.
In drafting new immigration policies, legislators regularly consulted eugenicists of national prominence, such as Harvard-educated Prescott Hall of the Immigration Restriction League and Harry H. Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office. The 1907 Immigration Act, for example, imposed a head tax on every “alien” entering the country and gave authorities great latitude to bar the entrance of “idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons … paupers; persons likely to become a public charge; professional beggars; persons afflicted with tuberculosis or with a loathsome or dangerous contagious disease” and any others found to be “mentally or physically defective” and unable to earn a living.10 The 1917 Immigration Act imposed a literacy test and outlawed the immigration of “inferior peoples” from the “Asiatic barred zone,” a vast territory that extended from the Middle East to East Asia, excluding only the US territory of the Philippines. The newly barred joined Chinese immigrants, who had been excluded since 1882, and Japanese immigrants, whose migration was controlled by the 1907–1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement. None of these laws reduced overall immigration numbers, however, because most immigrants were European. Immigration numbers did not begin to fall until the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, which imposed the first numerical limits on European immigration. Individual country quotas were limited to 3 percent of the total number of foreign-born persons from each European country recorded in the 1910 United States Census. Three years later, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act further reduced European immigration through a cap of 165,000 per year on immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere and by instituting a system of national-origins quotas calculated at 2 percent of the total number of foreign-born persons recorded in the 1890 census, before eastern and southern European immigration reached its peak. Through this “scientific” approach, Congress set Germany’s quota at almost twenty-six thousand while limiting Armenia and Albania to tiny quotas of one hundred each.
Like many of the immigration laws that followed it, the Johnson-Reed Act revealed the tensions and contradictions between the calls for restriction and the demands for family reunification and certain types of highly valued labor. The law expanded the ban against Asians to exclude almost all “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” but it also exempted from exclusion specified categories of highly skilled immigrants, domestic servants, and the wives or unmarried minor children of US citizens. Laborers from Latin America and the Caribbean, who were exempt from the quota system, subsequently compensated for the lost European and Asian labor—a manpower which was still desperately needed in the factories, mines, and agricultural fields of the continually growing nation. Even so, Congress created the Border Patrol to police the southern border with Mexico to prevent the migration of potential undesirables who might become public charges.11 This tension between nativist desires to control the composition of US society and the reality of labor priorities virtually guaranteed that the 1924 Immigration Act would not halt immigration to the United States despite the rhetoric and promises of nativists.
Other contradictions emerged in the 1930s. Although Congress had severely restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe, legislators allowed tens of thousands of Europeans unlawfully in the United States to adjust their legal status so they could remain in the country. Asian immigrants, on the other hand, faced an almost complete ban, except for Filipinos, who, as American nationals from a US territory, migrated freely until 1934, when the Tydings-McDuffie Act put the Philippines on the path toward independence so that their immigration could be restricted.12 Western Hemisphere countries may have been exempt from quotas, but this did not protect their nationals from discrimination. During the 1930s, the federal government, working with state and local authorities and the Mexican consulates in the southwest, repatriated hundreds of thousands of workers of Mexican origin and their families, including some US-born citizens.13
Throughout the 1930s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, now located in the Department of Justice, also regulated immigration flows through a system of “remote control,” a process identified by political scientist Aristide Zolberg, that relied on consulates and embassies abroad to cut back on the number of visas to the United States.14 This system became particularly effective at curtailing immigration before it even reached US shores and helped to ensure that the annual cap remained unfilled for the entire decade. This system of remote control also accounted for the great ethical failures of the 1930s. Though facing one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twentieth century, the United States routinely denied entry to Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Third Reich unless they were persons of extraordinary accomplishment like Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, and Hans Bethe. Even when national quota slots remained available, consular and immigration officials refused to grant visas to refugees on the grounds that they might inadvertently allow spies and saboteurs to enter the country. At home, nationalist and anti-Semitic congressmen blocked a vote on the Wagner-Rogers bill that would have allowed twenty thousand Jewish refugee children to enter the United States. In response to these developments, Jews and others fleeing from Europe settled in Palestine and other countries or found ways to circumvent US immigration law. Some exploited a loophole that entailed settling somewhere in the Americas and then immigrating as citizens of those countries. Because of its geographic proximity, Cuba was particularly popular as a destination for this purpose.15 Others simply entered the United States without authorization and later adjusted their status. Despite the unfilled quotas, the number of immigrants increased as the 1930s came to an end, especially as immigrants took advantage of the family reunion provisions of the existing immigration system to enter the United States. In the 1940s and 1950s, this strategy became even more popular.16
World War II forced US policymakers to modify immigration policies to manage demands for different kinds of labor on the home front as well as to honor allies critical to the war effort. From 1939 to 1965, Congress passed legislation on an ad hoc basis that allowed certain groups of immigrants to sidestep restrictionist barriers. The 1943 Magnuson Act, for example, repealed Chinese exclusion in acknowledgement of the United States’ chief ally in the Pacific. Although the act only assigned Chinese immigrants a token immigration quota of 105, it granted them the right to naturalize, a critical first step toward the complete elimination of racial barriers on citizenship in 1952. Congress also bowed to pressure from southwestern growers and authorized the Bracero Program to bring temporary farm workers from Mexico beginning in 1942.17 This set a precedent for the postwar temporary-worker programs discussed in this anthology that brought farm laborers from the Caribbean, Mexico, and Japan. Factory owners, chambers of commerce, business coalitions, agricultural organizations, and employment agencies in the United States also intensified earlier efforts to recruit Puerto Rican workers. As US citizens from an American territory, Puerto Ricans could travel unhindered to the United States to provide critically needed labor.
With the onset of the Cold War in the 1940s and 1950s, advocates of immigration reform mobilized and pushed Congress to abolish the discriminatory national origins quota system in the interest of international goodwill and positive foreign relations, economic competitiveness, and racial equality. Many critics of immigration restriction argued that these changes would prevent the Soviet Union from using the racist US immigration policy for propaganda. Congress continued to respond on an ad hoc basis. Recognizing the need to honor wartime obligations, legislators lifted the bars to Indian and Filipino migration and granted nationals of these countries the right to naturalize. Congress also passed the War Brides Act of 1945, the Fiancées and Fiancés Act of 1946, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 (renewed in 1950), and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 to facilitate the entrance of thousands of immigrants who would have been inadmissible before the war. Many of these policies were token gestures, however, rather than a true commitment to substantive change. Once again, Congress kept numbers small, set narrow limits on who was eligible, and imposed deadlines for entry. India and the Philippines, for example, received token quotas of one hundred. The displaced persons (DPs) admitted to the United States counted against the yearly quotas assigned to their countries of origin, thus creating decades-long backlogs for their countrymen trying to secure visas. The DP acts also overwhelmingly favored European refugees and, within Europe, privileged the admission of Protestant and Catholic over Jewish refugees. Because it served American Cold War interests, Congress also helped to bring former Nazi scientists like Wernher von Braun to the United States to prevent them from using their expertise to help the Soviet Union. In all of these cases, the restrictionists in Congress grudgingly agreed to these reforms because of their limited or temporary nature but feared the legislative changes would provide “side doors” for entry and portend long-term trends that would undermine the national origins system and American society’s racial status quo.18
Under pressure for an overhaul of the entire immigration policy, restrictionists in Congress, led by Senator Patrick McCarran (D-NV), grew alarmed and tried to wrestle the reform process away from their more liberal colleagues. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, enacted over President Truman’s veto, perfectly incarnated the politicized atmosphere of the early Cold War period.19 Responding to fears of communist infiltration and subversion, the act retained the national-origins quota system, introduced more screening measures to bar those who were ideologically suspect, and incorporated harsher provisions for the exclusion and deportation of undesirables. At the same time, the act increased overall immigration slightly (from 153,714 to 154,657), ended racial restrictions on citizenship, and extended immigration quotas, albeit small ones, to all nations.20
Despite its nods to egalitarianism, the act still reserved more than 80 percent of visas for western and northern Europeans. Asians gained citizenship rights and the right to immigrate, but they remained the only group tracked by race rather than nationality or place of birth, with overall numbers capped at two thousand. A Cuban of Chinese ancestry, for example, was counted against China’s national quota. As nations around the world decolonized and won their independence, each newly established nation received an immigration quota. Such gestures of respect weighed against the practical reality that certain immigrants to the United States faced greater obstacles. No longer did Caribbean islands under British rule fall under the generous British quota. Instead, the McCarran-Walter Act created a small token quota for West Indian Blacks out of concern that the new immigrants would alter American society’s racial status quo.
Its contradictions notwithstanding, the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, along with other immigration and refugee acts passed in the 1950s, profoundly reshaped immigration flows to the United States and paved the way for the legislative changes that allowed a more diverse American society after 1965. These developments, like many of those that followed passage of the 1965 immigration act, were unintentional. The sponsors and supporters of the 1952 immigration act had hoped that the law would continue to stifle immigration, especially from Asia. However, prioritizing family reunification and skills—50 percent of visas went to persons with higher education, technical training, or some other specialized knowledge or exceptional ability, and their family members—created possibilities for circumventing the law. Many prospective immigrants from Asian countries, though bound by tiny quotas, immigrated at higher levels than their prescribed numbers by entering the country as highly skilled migrants or international students, applying for permanent status with the help of their employers, and then sponsoring their families.21 By the mid-1960s, this immigration flow of highly skilled individuals produced what some in the countries of origin called a “brain drain,” with Taiwan, India, and South Korea the most affected. International adoptions, which became popular as an emergency measure to evacuate the mixed-race children of American GIs during the Korean War, also became a regular form of non-quota immigration until 1961, when it became categorized as a form of family reunification.22
Refugee policy in the 1950s provided another “side door” entry to the United States. From 1948 to 1965, the US government responded to several political and humanitarian emergencies around the world, including the Hungarian Revolution and the Suez crisis of 1956, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and the Hong Kong crisis of 1962. Displaced persons, refugees, and “escapees” numbering 430,000 entered the United States during the period 1948–1956 under various congressional acts.23 Sidestepping Congress, the executive branch also drew on the then little-known “parole” authority granted in the McCarran-Walter Act to admit people of humanitarian interest outside of the numerical quotas. In such cases, special legislation (the so-called “adjustment acts”) then allowed these “parolees” to become legal permanent residents.24 The majority of refugees, displaced persons, “escapees,” and “parolees” admitted before 1965 came from communist countries, in line with the geopolitical interests of the day, and this remained true for the rest of the Cold War. These admissions operated in ways unanticipated by the sponsors of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act by providing legal means to increase admissions for groups with few regular options to immigrate. As with family reunification provisions, immigration liberalizers continued chipping away at the national origin system’s restrictionist agendas and increasing the categories of persons with legitimate grounds to immigrate into the United States.
These slight expansions of permanent immigration based on family reunification, the recruitment of skilled labor, and foreign-policy interests ran parallel to the exploitation and marginalization of workers from Mexico. In 1951, as a concession to agricultural interests, the US government negotiated a new bilateral agreement with Mexico to bring in hundreds of thousands of the temporary farm workers called “Braceros”—a program that lasted until 1964. Thousands more crossed the border, sometimes without authorization, in search of economic opportunities in the United States, hoping one day to return to their country with their hard-earned savings, as their countrymen had done for generations. Unauthorized entry was fairly easy during the postwar period since vast stretches of the US-Mexico border remained poorly patrolled and immigration authorities often turned a blind eye when demands for workers were high. Regional growers, hungry for cheap labor, sent representatives to border towns to recruit workers who had recently crossed.25 Although many Mexican workers did not enter the United States with the idea of permanent settlement, policymakers became concerned by the “uncontrolled immigration” of Mexicans. This led federal authorities to enact “Operation Wetback” in 1954, which resulted in the forced removal of an estimated 250,000 “illegal” Mexican workers (some sources place the number at closer to one million).26 Ironically, as the US government brought in thousands of braceros to meet the needs of American growers, it was expelling thousands of the braceros’ countrymen.
In 1965, after four decades of protracted struggles, Congress finally abolished the racist national-origins quota system. Immigration reform, which had been a priority for President John F. Kennedy, became a reality under his successor, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who leveraged his electoral mandate to include it in the sweeping civil rights legislative package along with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Although he had been a latecomer to the cause of immigration reform, Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Immigration Act on October 3, 1965, during a ceremony held at the base of the Statue of Liberty. His speech acknowledged that the national-origins system, in place since the 1920s, had been “un-American.” It had violated the basic principle of American democracy: “the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man.”27
The 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act replaced the national-origins quotas with a system of hemispheric caps. The law set an annual limit of 170,000 visas for immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, with no country allowed more than twenty thousand visas. To appease supporters of the national origins quota system, the act imposed for the first time a numeric cap on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, which was set at 120,000. While the skills and training of applicants were important considerations in the issuing of visas, the law reserved three-fourths of admissions for the relatives of US citizens and permanent residents at the insistence of leading conservative politicians such as Rep. Michael Feighan (D-OH), who sought to maintain the nation’s predominantly European stock. (In 1965, whites of European descent made up 84 percent of the US population). The act also exempted the immediate relatives—spouses, minor children, and parents—of US citizens and permanent residents, which meant that the number of immigrants who entered each year was always much larger than the annual cap. In 1976, Congress amended the 1965 law further to impose a twenty-thousand-per-country limit on the Western Hemisphere as well as the Eastern Hemisphere; and in 1978 it abandoned the hemispheric caps altogether in favor of a global immigrant ceiling of 290,000 a year.
The law also included a small numerical allotment for refugees, recognizing a continuing humanitarian and international obligation to assist displaced peoples. The law defined refugees as those persecuted on account of race, religion, or political opinion; those uprooted by natural calamity; those fleeing from communist or communist-dominated countries; or those fleeing from the Middle East.28 Fifteen years later, Congress amended the definition of “refugee” once again in the 1980 Refugee Act, adopting the United Nations’ definition.29
Hart-Celler has been called the immigration act that “inadvertently” changed the demographics of the United States and created the “illegal immigration problem.”30 If the architects of the bill imagined these possibilities, they never said so publicly. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), one of the bill’s most vocal supporters, stated: “The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”31 Likewise, President Johnson assured Americans that Hart-Celler did not signal revolutionary change: “It does not affect the lives of millions,” he said. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”32
Despite attempts to maintain the predominantly European ancestry of the US population, European migration to the United States fell in the final decades of the twentieth century. The rapid postwar recovery of Western European nations, greatly facilitated by the financial assistance the US Marshall Plan provided, meant that citizens of these countries no longer felt compelled to emigrate, while totalitarian governments in poorer nations in eastern and central Europe blocked aspiring migrants from leaving altogether. Meanwhile, the demands to emigrate increased in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Improvements in healthcare and education created highly mobile populations who sought better wages in industrialized nations, while others crossed international borders because of war, revolution, economic displacement, or environmental disasters.
In 1920, 13.2 percent of the US population was foreign-born; by 1965, that number had dropped to just under 5 percent and over three-quarters of the foreign-born had come from Europe and Canada.33 Yet, as this anthology demonstrates, this lower percentage obscures many trends that emerged from 1924 to 1965, including the recruitment of highly specialized labor, the rise of temporary labor migration, the migration of US citizens from Puerto Rico who do not appear in immigration statistics, and the arrival of international students from Asia who later remained in the United States and sent for their family members. Five decades later, a significant demographic change had occurred in large part because of these trends: half of all immigrants were from Latin America and the Caribbean, and 27 percent were from Asia.34 The bearers of the so-called “green cards”—the residency visas—also steadily rose from 297,000 in 1965 to an average of one million each year since around 2005.35 As a result, by 2014, 13.2 percent of the US population were once again foreign-born (forty-two million).36 Mexico, India, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, South Korea, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala, accounted for nearly 60 percent of the immigrant population.37
The Hart-Celler Immigration Act also produced a rise in undocumented immigration, especially from the Americas. Prior to 1965, immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean circulated to and from the United States comparatively freely because of the lack of numerical quotas on most of the Americas. It was common for Mexican and other Latin American/Caribbean workers to spend part of their working lives in the United States and then return to their homelands with the wages they had saved. Once Hart-Celler imposed caps on the Western Hemisphere, however, these long-established migratory patterns suddenly—and officially—became “unauthorized” and were subjected to escalating levels of surveillance and restriction. The cap of twenty thousand on each country (raised to 26,500 in 1990) meant that many of the workers who had traveled unhindered across the border for work were now “illegal,” and they had limited avenues for lawful entry. The imposition of uniform quotas for each nation—presented by restrictionists as an egalitarian remedy to the discriminatory national-origins quotas—created new and severe forms of inequality. National Visa Center bulletins showed that in some countries the waiting period for a green card was a decade or longer.38 This prompted many either to cross the US-Canada or US-Mexico border without authorization, or to come in with tourist, student, or other temporary visas and then remain in the United States past the expiration of their visas. The twenty-first century’s crisis of undocumented immigrants is rooted in these legal changes that tried to alter longstanding practices of mobility.
We, the co-editors, are excited to introduce readers to this small but illustrative sample of the rich historical scholarship that is changing our understanding of immigration and US society during 1924 to 1965, a formative period in US history. Collectively, the contributors to this anthology draw on a wide range of sources, topics, methodologies, and histories to demonstrate that, even when political actors sought to block entry to the United States, the American population replenished itself through immigration. The chapters also demonstrate that immigration policy, though regarded as domestic policy, is also foreign policy. Immigration policy may originate in a desire to protect national sovereignty, safeguard economic interests, and shape US society, but it is often crafted with an eye to international relations and relies on international collaboration to be enforced.
The anthology is divided into three sections, each with its own introduction to the main themes explored in the chapters. The first section, “Policy and Law,” with contributions from Elliott Young, Kathleen López, Laura Madokoro, and David FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín, focuses on the intersections of immigration policy and foreign policy. Even though restrictionists embraced isolationism in the interest of national sovereignty, immigration policy from 1924 to 1965 showed how much immigration law remained intertwined with international interests and US foreign policy. In order for the United States to consolidate its regime of immigration restriction, it had to rely on the collaboration of sending and transit countries, especially when it came to creating systems of remote control. This interdependency highlighted the reach but also the limitations of US influence. Once the role of the United States changed in the geopolitical order that emerged after the end of World War II, foreign policy considerations and international developments profoundly shaped immigration and refugee policy in the 1950s and 1960s. This shift allowed supporters of immigration reform to connect their domestic agenda to broader foreign policy priorities, but, in the face of xenophobia and nativism, their efforts yielded contradictory results. As the next two sections of the anthology show, these international dimensions had profound domestic repercussions for Americans’ ideas about labor, citizenship, and identity.
The second section, “Labor,” with contributions from Heather Lee, Ronald Mize, Monique Laney, and Eiichiro Azuma, explores changing labor markets and the emerging legal distinctions between skilled and unskilled workers. During this period, immigration policies became more explicitly linked to advancing economic agendas. Policymakers began to privilege the migration and settlement of workers with education, credentials, and specializations in fields they viewed as enhancing the nation’s drive to lead the world in technical and scientific innovation. Concurrently, while demands for unskilled labor remained high, especially among agricultural growers in the Southwest, temporary labor programs restricted their protections and access to citizenship. Though often pawns in the United States’ agenda to become a world leader, immigrants still found ways to use US immigration policy to further their own advancement.
The third section, “Who is a Citizen? Who Belongs?” with chapters from Ruth Ellen Wasem, Lorrin Thomas, Arissa Oh, and Ana Elizabeth Rosas, examines understandings of citizenship and belonging during this formative period. Those who secured admission to the United States during the 1924–1965 period—or traveled from a US territory, as in the case of the Puerto Ricans and Filipinos—encountered a suspicious American population that needed their labor, and occasionally facilitated their entrance, but viewed them as potential economic, cultural, and political threats to the nation. Adaptation to “American” cultural norms did not guarantee acceptance or political rights and legal protections, especially if immigrants were racial minorities or lacked permanent immigrant status. Those who arrived without authorization found themselves in an especially precarious position, marked as perpetual outsiders unless they found ways to normalize their legal status. The chapters in this section discuss the various ways newcomers claimed an American identity or carved a place for themselves in US society through their labor and/or political and civic engagement. Contrary to traditional immigration narratives, immigrants did not always shed their previous identification with the homeland. An American identity—and any claim to citizenship—was crafted in relation to two (or more) countries. This was especially true for those who, for reasons of work and family, traveled back and forth between countries.
The contributors to this volume address only some of the transformations that occurred from 1924 to 1965. In an effort to encourage further exploration, the anthology ends with an afterword by Violet Showers Johnson, who discusses migrations from Africa and the West Indies during this era and the dearth of scholarship on these flows for the period. She directs our attention to populations usually not associated with immigration before 1965 and, in so doing, underscores not only the remaking of racial categories and migration flows but also raises important questions about why some histories receive scholarly attention while others are obscured. Although immigration from Africa remained low for most of the period covered in this anthology, immigration reforms had a transformative effect on the composition of the African diaspora in the United States. African migrants created thriving communities in the United States or returned home to become involved in nation-building. The stories she weaves through her afterword demonstrate the centrality of the African experience in US immigration history even before 1924, illustrate the striking similarities with the experiences of migrants from other parts of the world discussed in this volume, and integrate more fully these neglected migration flows into traditional histories of immigration.
We hope that these chapters will challenge readers to reconsider some of the widely held but misguided interpretations of the immigrant experience that circulate in school curriculums, journalism, and popular culture. The familiar trope describing the United States as a “nation of immigrants” is as true in the twenty-first century as it was in the nineteenth and twentieth. Political and civic engagement requires us to be familiar with this history and reality.
Notes
1. In Coming to America, for example, Roger Daniels writes that although “immigration never ceased,” the national-origins system, the Great Depression, and World War II “brought an entire era of American immigration to an end.” See Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Perennial, 1991), 287. In the first edition of Natives and Strangers, the authors wrote that immigration restriction in the 1920s “cut the flow of unskilled labor to America, but the nation’s economy no longer needed so many unskilled workers for its mines and mills.” They also argued that the 1965 Immigration Act “led to a major transformation in the national origins of immigrants to the United States” because of the “growing ethnic tolerance in American society.” See Leonard Dinnerstein, Roger L. Nichols, and David M. Reimers, Natives and Strangers: Ethnic Groups and the Building of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 246–47. Reed Ueda noted that while the overall number of immigrants decreased during this period, their numbers “were still quite substantial.” In reference to the 1965 act, Ueda writes that the “liberalization of immigration policy (following the 1965 Act) … did not produce geographic balance in immigration sources; instead, it reversed the former imbalance in which Europe predominated over other regions” See Ueda, Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1992), 31–32 and 58. Mae Ngai writes that as a result of immigration reform in 1965, “patterns of migration to the United States changed tremendously in the last decades of the twentieth century.” See Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 227. In reference to the impact of the changes in immigration after 1965, David Reimers titled one of his books Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Other books that have focused on the passage of the 1965 immigration act as a new beginning of mass migration include Deward Clayton Brown, Globalization and America since 1945 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Gabriel J. Chin and Rose Cuison Villazor, eds., The Immigration and Nationality Act: Legislating a New America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Tom A. Gjelten, Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015); and Margaret Sands Orchowski, The Law that Changed the Face of America: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).
2. See, for example: Center for Immigration Studies, “The Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act,” September 1, 1995, https://cis.org/Report/Legacy-1965-Immigration-Act; David North, “The ‘Most Favored Nation’ Approach in America’s Immigration Policy,” November 25, 2014, https://cis.org/Most-Favored-Nation-Approach-Americas-Immigration-Policy; and Otis L. Graham, Jr., “Tracing Liberal Woes to ’65 Immigration Act,” December 28, 1995, https://cis.org/Tracing-Liberal-Woes-65-Immigration-Act. The 1924 law also continues to influence current policymakers. See, for example Ben Mathis Lilley, “Jeff Sessions Once Said Restrictions on Jewish and Italian Immigration Were ‘Good for America,’” Slate, September 5, 2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/09/05/jeff_sessions_praise_of_1924_eugenics_immigration_law_remains_insane.html.
3. In addition to the publications of the authors in this volume, Marilyn Halter, Marilynn Johnson, Katheryn Viens, and Conrad Wright’s 2014 anthology and Nancy Foner and George Fredrickson’s edited collection identified some of the continuities and discontinuities in the pre-and post-1965 experience. See What’s New about the “New” Immigration? Traditions and Transformations in the United States Since 1965 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004). See also Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS (New Orleans: Quid Pro, 2010); Lori Flores, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016); Libby Garland, After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race During the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2014); S. Deborah Kang, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1917–1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010); Mireya Loza, Defiant Braceros: How Migrants Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011); Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Oakland: University of California Press, 2010); Natalia Molina, How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Oakland : University of California Press, 2014); Deirdre Moloney, National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy Since 1882 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015); Allyson Varzally, Making a Non-White America: Californians Coloring Outside Ethnic Lines, 1925–1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
4. Ngai, Impossible Subjects.
5. The United States’ emergence as a global economic and military power led many social scientists, historians, and even literary critics to refer to the twentieth century as the “American Century.” See, for example, Walter LaFeber, Richard Polenberg, and Nancy Woloch, The American Century: A History of the United States Since 1941, 6th ed. (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 2008); Alfred E. Eckes and Thomas W Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Joseph S. Nye, Is the American Century Over? (Cambridge: Polity, 2015); Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2007).
6. Over half of what became US territory belonged to France, Spain, and Mexico until the first decades of the nineteenth century. The 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty, the Texas Revolution of 1836, and the Mexican War of 1846–48 led to the acquisition of these territories and extended the United States to the Pacific coast.
7. Early immigration laws included the Alien and Sedition Acts and an 1803 act banning importation of “any negro, mulatto, or other person of colour” (Act of Feb. 28, 1803, ch. 10, 2 Stat. 205), but these were not systematically enforced.
8. The United States was not unique in these efforts. See David C. Atkinson, The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Labor Migration in the British Empire and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); see also Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), on global efforts to curb the circulation of immigrants of color; Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), on how practices of border control arose from attempts to control Asian migration around the Pacific; and Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), on the hemispheric exclusion of Chinese immigrants. For efforts to regulate immigration at the local level prior to federal efforts, see Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), and Beth Lew-Williams, “Before Restriction Became Exclusion: America’s Experiment in Diplomatic Immigration Control,” Pacific Historical Review 83, no. 1 (February 2014): 24–56.
9. Today these functions are lodged in the Department of Homeland Security, revealing the growing importance of national defense in goals for immigration controls.
10. “Immigration Act [1907],” http://www.historycentral.com/documents/immigrationact.html.
11. The Land Appropriate Act of 1924 established the Border Patrol as part of the Immigration Bureau in the Department of Labor. On the use of the “LPC Clause” to control Mexican immigration at a time when it was exempt from the national-origins quota system, see Moloney, National Insecurities, ch. 2.
12. For a discussion of the rights of Filipinos and Puerto Ricans from the “unincorporated territories,” see Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall, Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Charles R. Venator-Santiago, Puerto Rico and the Origins of U.S. Global Empire: The Disembodied Shade (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015); and Allan Punzalan Isaac, American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
13. Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez estimate that as many as two million Mexican-origin people were deported in the 1930s and 1940s, and as many as 60 percent were US citizens. See Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, rev. ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).
14. Aristide Zolberg, “The Archaeology of Remote Control,” in Andreas, Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil, Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Inter-War Period (New York: Berghahn, 2003), 195–222. See also Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, ch. 3, and Tichenor, Dividing Lines, ch. 6.
15. Robert M. Levine, Tropical Diaspora: The Jewish Experience in Cuba (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993). On Jewish refugees’ efforts to enter the United States, see also Garland, After They Closed the Gates.
16. Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door, ch. 3, and Tichenor, Dividing Lines, ch. 6.
17. For a discussion of the history and chronology of the Bracero Program, see Rosas’s and Mize’s chapters in this anthology.
18. Madeline Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), 5. See also Zolberg, A Nation by Design, 20.
19. Truman opposed the national-origin quotas retained in the legislation because they perpetuated racism and discrimination. He subsequently appointed a commission to review the nation’s immigration policy. The commission’s report recommended that national-origin quotas be replaced by a system that privileged family reunification, labor skills, and refugees. See President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, Whom Shall We Welcome? (Washington, DC: US GPO, 1953), https://archive.org/details/whomweshallwelco00unit.
20. The McCarran-Walter legislation based the annual number of immigrant visas on the 1920 census and set the level at one-sixth of 1 percent of the 1920 population of the United States. On the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act, see Maddalena Marinari, “Divided and Conquered: Immigration Reform Advocates and the Passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act,” Journal of American Ethnic History 35, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 9–40.
21. Hsu, Good Immigrants.
22. See Arissa Oh, To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015); Eleana Kim, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); and SooJin Pate, From Orphan to Adoptee: U.S. Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
23. The Displaced Persons Act authorized the admission of two hundred thousand European refugees, and the 1953 Refugee Relief Act authorized an additional 214,000 over the next three years. The US Escapee Program, authorized under the Mutual Security Act of 1951, brought in an additional fourteen thousand “escapees” from the Communist bloc countries. See “Mutual Security Act 101 (a)(1) MSA 1951 Escapee Program,” https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01731R003300330002-2.pdf.
24. Parole status did not offer a path to citizenship, and parole status could be revoked at any time. The best-known of the adjustment acts is the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, which allowed the Cuban parolees to adjust their status and remain permanently in the United States. See María Cristina García, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
25. Two excellent discussions of the role of the US Border Patrol along the border with Mexico are Lytle Hernandez, Migra! and Patrick W. Ettinger, Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882–1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).
26. Juan Ramon García, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980); Avi Astor, “Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization and the Making of Operation Wetback,” Latino Studies 7, no. 1 (2009): 5–29; Kelly Lytle Hernández, “The Crimes and Consequences of Illegal Immigration: A Cross-Border Examination of Operation Wetback, 1943 to 1954,” Western Historical Quarterly 37, no. 4 (Winter 2006), 421–44; and Thomas C. Langham, “Federal Regulation of Border Labor: Operation Wetback and the Wetback Bills,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 7, no. 1 (1992): 81–91.
27. “President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Remarks at the Signing of the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York, October 3, 1965,” http://www.lbjlibrary.org/lyndon-baines-johnson/timeline/lbj-on-immigration.
28. The numerical allotment for refugees was set at 6 percent of overall admissions. The Middle East was defined as the territory between and including Libya on the west, Turkey on the north, Pakistan on the east, and Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia on the south. See the text of the “1965 Immigration and Nationality Act” at http://library.uwb.edu/static/USimmigration/1965_immigration_and_nationality_act.html.
29. The 1980 Refugee Act defined a refugee as “any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, or is unable and unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. “United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees,” http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/protection/basic/3b66c2aa10/convention-protocol-relating-status-refugees.html.
30. See, for example, Tom Gjelten, “The Immigration Act that Inadvertently Changed America,” The Atlantic, October 2, 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/immigration-act-1965/408409.
31. “Edward Kennedy,” http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h2015.html.
32. “President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Remarks at the Signing of the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York, October 3, 1965,” http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/651003.asp.
33. US Census Bureau, “Table 1: Nativity of the Population and Place of Birth of the Native Population: 1850 to 1990,” https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab01.html.
34. Andrew Kohut, “Fifty Years Later, Americans Give Thumbs-Up to Immigration that Changed the Nation,” Pew Research Center, February 2, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/04/50-years-later-americans-give-thumbs-up-to-immigration-law-that-changed-the-nation.
35. Muzaffar Chishti, Faye Hipsman, and Isabel Ball, “Fifty Years On, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act Continues to Shape the Nation,” Migration Policy Institute, October 15, 2015.
36. Pew Research Center, “Statistical Portrait of the Foreign-Born Population of the United States, 2014,” http://www.pewhispanic.org/2016/04/19/2014-statistical-information-on-immigrants-in-united-states. Pew Research Center, “U.S. Foreign-Born Population Trends,” ch. 5 of “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Change and Growth through 2065,” September 28, 2015, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/chapter-5-u-s-foreign-born-population-trends.
37. Migration Policy Institute, “Largest US Immigrant Groups over Time, 1960 -Present,” http://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/largest-immigrant-groups-over-time.
38. “Annual Report of Immigrant Visa Applicants in the Family-Sponsored and Employment-Based Preferences Registered at the National Visa Center as of November 1, 2016.” https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Immigrant-Statistics/WaitingListItem.pdf. See also Jacquellena Carrero, “The Immigration Line: Who’s on It and for How Long?” April 11, 2013, http://nbclatino.com/2013/04/11/the-immigration-line-whos-on-it-and-for-how-long.