1

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK

For the first one hundred years of the nation’s history, the federal government was not heavily involved in immigration law. The only mention of migration in the U.S. Constitution comes in the Migration Clause, a fifty-four-word provision that guaranteed slavery would continue at least until 1808. During that same period, the first Congress in the nation’s history adopted the Naturalization Act of 1790, which extended citizenship rights to “free White persons” who met a two-year residency requirement and possessed “good character.” Adopting a variety of strategies, states, counties, and towns regulated movement across borders. Sometimes they focused on the external borders of the United States. Mostly they didn’t. In those days, borders between states were at least as important as borders between countries.

Some states targeted people convicted of certain crimes. In 1787, for example, Georgia barred any felon from setting foot in its territory. Rhode Island targeted criminals from other states; Connecticut focused on those coming from abroad.1 In 1837, Massachusetts began charging shipmasters a tax on some migrants brought to its ports. After the Supreme Court invalidated that fee in a decision called the Passenger Cases, the state started demanding that shipmasters post bond for all incoming migrants.² Meanwhile, several states targeted movement by black people. Some states that banned slavery made it difficult for formerly enslaved people to move in, fearing that slave owners would free old and economically unproductive slaves. Slave states didn’t want free blacks either, fearing the bad example their freedom would set for enslaved blacks.3 Some states expelled unwanted newcomers, some imprisoned them—others threatened death.

In the Civil War’s aftermath, when citizenship was extended to former slaves under the Fourteenth Amendment, focus turned westward. For decades, Chinese migrants had worked menial jobs like laying railroad tracks and operating laundries. Estimates vary on how many Chinese migrants came to the United States during the mid-1800s; some research suggests as many as 300,000 Chinese, mostly men, moved to the United States between 1850 and 1882, the vast majority to California. California’s economy became so reliant on Chinese laborers that in 1852 the governor pitched the idea of giving Chinese migrants land in the hope that more would be convinced to come.⁴ The governor’s idea didn’t become reality, but Chinese communities throughout California did. By the mid-1850s, 12 percent of San Francisco’s population was Chinese. Within a few years, San Francisco’s Chinatown covered fifteen square blocks.⁵

Political tides turn quickly. The open-armed embrace of Chinese migrants proved short-lived. In the decades that followed the Civil War, the Chinese became the picture of undesirability, exhibiting the enduring power of racism brewed in a nativist political cauldron. Illustrating the sharp turn of events, white Californians led the anti-Chinese fervor. In 1879, for example, Californians voted on whether to encourage additional Chinese migration. Almost 900 votes were cast in favor. Over 150,000 people voted against. The next year, San Francisco’s Board of Health declared Chinatown a public nuisance.⁶ Meanwhile, the state legislature consistently adopted anti-Chinese measures throughout the 1850s and 1860s.⁷

Despite successful efforts to make life difficult for Chinese migrants within California, anti-Chinese advocates were unsatisfied by the slow and inconsistent pace of state-level tactics. They wanted to make life difficult for Chinese migrants in one sweep. The only way to accomplish this was through federal action. For this reason, they turned their focus to Congress. By 1862 they began notching a series of legislative wins. That year, Congress banned migration by Chinese indentured servants—“coolies,” in the day’s vocabulary. In 1875, Congress banned entry of prostitutes, a thinly veiled attempt to keep out Chinese women. Anti-Chinese lobbying in Congress culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the only federal law ever to explicitly ban a national group by name. As a result, Chinese laborers could no longer come to the United States. Less than ten years later, in 1891, Congress again changed immigration laws. This time it excluded people who had committed a “crime involving moral turpitude,” an intentionally vague concept that is deployed to this day and “refers generally to conduct that is inherently base, vile, or depraved, contrary to the rules of morality and the duties owed between man and man, either one’s fellow man or society in general.” Spurred by increasing hostility toward almost all Asian migrants, exclusion was extended to the “Asiatic Barred Zone” in a series of laws enacted between 1917 and 1934.8

With federal immigration law growing year after year, government officials were suddenly tasked with distinguishing between desirable migrants and undesirable migrants. Who, for example, is a prostitute? Who is an excludable Chinese laborer and who is a Chinese merchant, who is allowed to enter? Who has committed a crime involving moral turpitude? A quick once-over isn’t enough to identify who fits into one category or another. The stark categorization of human beings, with all the messy, multifaceted nature of life, always fails. In one case, a divinity student was allowed to enter as a student but was removed once he started preaching—he had become a laborer, immigration officials said, and a court agreed. In another, a merchant became a laborer when he turned to selling fruits in a Los Angeles market after his grocery store failed.9

Government officials needed some way to figure out who was to be kept out of the United States and who could come in. Imprisonment provided the on-the-ground solution. Once migrants stepped foot on dry land, they had entered the United States. To the government, this was a problem. At the time, the Constitution protected people inside the country more than people who hadn’t entered. Intent on vetting people arriving on steamships, government officials forced transoceanic companies to keep passengers on board until they’d decided whether a person was fit to enter the country. Anything else would be to allow migrants to enter before government officials had decided if they should be kept out. Second thoughts would require an attempt to locate and deport a migrant—a tough law enforcement task in the 1800s that was compounded by the fact that Congress didn’t even enact the federal government’s first full-fledged deportation law until 1891. That year, Congress granted immigration officials the power to deport anyone who had entered in the previous twelve months but should have been excluded.¹⁰

With the federal government’s demand that ships keep passengers on board, immigration imprisonment had begun, and it started in the hands of private corporations. Not surprisingly, the shipping companies were not pleased about this requirement. They were in the business of moving people across oceans, not housing them harborside. Every day that a migrant sat on a ship was an inconvenience and expense. Passengers needed food, and the ship was stuck in port. Soon the companies and the government agreed on an alternative: the companies would provide onshore housing nearby. Steamship companies were obviously happy. They could now quickly offload passengers and cargo and send the ship back to sea. But doesn’t this mean that migrants were being allowed to enter the United States before government officials had a chance to decide whether they should be turned around?

The practical answer is clear—the land around a harbor is definitely part of the United States—but the law quickly muddled the practical reality. In 1891, Congress adopted a legal concept that people could enter the country physically without entering the country legally. This twist of logic, known as the “entry fiction,” meant that steamship passengers could be allowed off the boat without benefiting from the higher hurdle that government officials have to climb to deport someone rather than exclude them. For the government, this arrangement had a second advantage. They didn’t have to spend time or money locating people who had arrived from overseas. Officials could simply go down to the company-owned confinement facility.

Thanks to the entry fiction, the immigration detention center became an in-between space in law. It was neither outside nor inside the United States. Whether in California or New York, there was never doubt that on-shore detention sites were physically within the territorial boundaries of the United States. The entry fiction is no doubt a quirky legal doctrine: a person can be inside the United States as a matter of geography and outside it as a matter of law. But it also served to wedge open a broader space within the law that allowed early immigration detention centers to operate with minimal oversight and to blur traditional legal boundaries.

Soon conditions inside early immigration prisons were atrocious. “The air is impure, the place is crowded,” wrote one visitor to a San Francisco “Chinese jail,” as the dockside facilities were often described. “I have visited quite a few jails and State prisons in this country, but have never seen any place half so bad,” he added.11 Another account goes into more detail: “The Shed—rightly so-called—is a cheap, two-story wooden building, at the end of a wharf, built out over the water where the odors of sewage and bilge are most offensive; unclean, at times overrun with vermin, and often inadequate to the numbers to be detained. The food provided was poor and the conditions even more unsanitary than the police cells of the city.”12 With up to two hundred people jammed into a one-hundred-foot building, an inspector for the Department of Commerce and Labor called the two-story warehouse leased by the Pacific Mail Steamship Company a “death trap.”¹³ Even the federal government’s commissioner of immigration was said to have found the facilities too dirty for comfort.¹⁴

While on a minuscule scale compared to today’s immigration prison practices, there are uncanny parallels. The migrants locked in these unsanitary, haphazard sheds technically had not been charged with a crime. They were just waiting to find out whether they could enter the United States legally as well as physically. But it sure looked and felt like prison. Sociologist Mary Roberts Coolidge, who wrote about the Pacific Mail shed in San Francisco while it was still in use, claimed that detainees were “all under the guard of ordinary police.”¹⁵ A former detainee said, “One may look to the right and to the left and see only bunks and benches. ‘You stay here, you stay here,’ is all they say. Here you are cramped and doomed never to stretch.”¹⁶ It is easy to see how migrants might have missed the distinction between prison and temporary detention tied to immigration vetting, because the sheds were often modeled on prisons. The vice president of one transportation company “successfully argued that the new detention quarters ‘would have to be heavily stockaded and guarded … built and erected as a prison.”¹⁷ Completing the erosion of an already weak distinction between prison and temporary detention, sometimes migrants were confined in traditional county jails.¹⁸

With time, reformers sympathetic to Chinese migrants got wind of the atrocious and punitive state of detention. Their proposal was to take steamship companies out of the detention business. Instead, the government would run immigration detention—an “immigration depot” in New York harbor, as one congressional committee recommended in 1889.19 Removing profit-driven transportation companies, they hoped, would eliminate penny-pinching and improve the treatment migrants received. Two years later, Congress responded. For the first time, federal law explicitly authorized immigration imprisonment, and responding to these congressional directives, federal immigration authorities quickly launched a prison network and boosted their capacity to hold people. On the East Coast, for instance, Ellis Island opened on January 1, 1892, serving dual roles as a point of disembarkation and one of detention. Working under the direction of the newly created position of superintendent of immigration, federal officers were required to inspect migrants arriving by sea. If they could not conduct the inspection on board the ship, officers could “order a temporary removal of such aliens for examination at a designated time and place, and then and there detain them until a thorough inspection is made.”²⁰

Immigration imprisonment had now been added to the nation’s immigration-law infrastructure. Two years later, Congress revisited its newfound interest. This time it stripped inspection officers of discretion to detain. They were now required to detain anyone not “clearly and beyond doubt entitled to admission.”²¹

Like its East Coast counterpart at Ellis Island, immigration imprisonment in California centered on an island just offshore a thriving urban area: Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. The passengers arriving on steamships in San Francisco tended to come from Asia. In the words of Hubert Howe Bancroft, the prominent nineteenth-century Californian whose name still adorns the University of California’s library, these people were “in every sense, aliens. The color of their skins, the repulsiveness of their features, their under-size of figure, their incomprehensible language, strange customs, and heathen religion” combined to make them a “detested race.”22 Given this attitude by the era’s civic leaders, it is no surprise that they received a hostile reception. Imprisonment was a central feature. From 1910 to 1940, federal officials used Angel Island as an immigration holding facility. No comprehensive figures exist about how many people were forced to stay there. The best study indicates roughly thirty thousand people were confined on the island from 1913 to 1919. About two-thirds of those were the Chinese who were famously targeted by state and federal laws going back to the 1870s, but Japanese and non-Asian immigrants were also kept there.²³

In 1913, three years after the Angel Island detention facility opened, 38 percent of all people arriving in San Francisco were held. Excluding U.S. citizens arriving in San Francisco, 60 percent of arriving migrants were sent to Angel Island.²⁴ Not all Chinese migrants were confined at Angel Island, and not everyone confined there was Chinese. In 1913, for example, 76 percent of Angel Island detainees were Chinese. Most of the rest were Japanese. A mere 7 percent were not Asian.²⁵ Race was clearly an important factor in identifying detention targets. But so too were gender and class. Chinese women were more likely than men to end up at Angel Island, presumably because they were more likely to be pegged as prostitutes. Among passengers of all races, people traveling in steerage were more likely to be detained than were first-class or second-class passengers.²⁶

Among the people detained on Angel Island, Quok Shee stands out. When she arrived in San Francisco from Hong Kong at the age of twenty, immigration officials suspected that the man accompanying her, fifty-six-year-old Chew Hoy Quong, was bringing her for immoral purposes. Inspector J.B. Warner grilled each separately, fishing for discrepancies that might support his suspicion. “How was the bedroom lighted” in the building in which the couple had allegedly married, the inspector asked. “How was the parlor furnished? What kind of clock did you have in your parlor?” She recalled its being made of wood. He said it was metal. There were enough discrepancies for immigration officials to deny her admission into the United States. With the help of various San Francisco lawyers, the couple fought back in the courts. But while they did, Quok Shee spent her days at Angel Island. Fifteen months later, her lawyer warned immigration officials that she might kill herself. Still she was denied release. Fortunately, the worst didn’t happen. Instead, for almost two years, Quok Shee was held at Angel Island, “imprisoned and detained,” as the court order granting her release in August 1918 described it.27

Angel Island would serve as an immigration prison for more than two decades after Quok Shee left. After a fire destroyed the facility in August 1940, immigration officials moved the prisoners to the mainland, and Angel Island never again saw use as an immigration prison.²⁸

While detention emerged on both coasts, Ellis Island and Angel Island marked different patterns. At the turn of the century, migrants from Europe were arriving in enormous numbers. On Ellis Island, where the bulk of arriving migrants came from Europe, 10 percent of disembarking migrants were detained in 1907, the busiest year in that outpost’s history.²⁹ In those days, to be European wasn’t necessarily to be white, and plenty arrived from disfavored classes—Jews as well as newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, for instance—and the Supreme Court’s earlier willingness to free civil imprisonment from the restraints of judicial trials meant that immigration detention could quickly be deployed against dissident migrants.

Within sight of Manhattan, Ellis Island is remembered as a gateway for generations of migrants. It has been romanticized as the site where the United States embraced its twentieth-century migrants. “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” pleads the Emma Lazarus poem etched onto the nearby Statue of Liberty. But as is so often the case, the reality of Ellis Island is much more complicated. The immigration station there certainly welcomed millions of people to their new home. It also confined many others, especially as more immigrants entered the country from the less-favored southern and eastern Europe—“morally delinquent” people of “deteriorating character,” one doctor on Ellis Island complained.30 Through two substantial immigration-law amendments enacted in the 1920s, Congress tied future migration to past migration. The Immigration Act of 1921 limited migration from any one country to 3 percent of the number of migrants from that country living in the United States in 1910. The 1924 law capped per-country migration to 2 percent of the 1890 figures, giving Great Britain 43 percent of the total, slashing the allotment for southern and eastern Europeans, and just about excluding Asians.³¹ Governed by a strict quota linked to a period when migration from northern and western Europe was more common, unauthorized migration grew.³² But because legislators’ eyes were on disfavored Europeans, neither law limited migration from Mexico or any other Western Hemisphere country.

By the early twentieth century, foreign-born radical leftists also joined the Chinese as favorite targets. In the midst of World War I, following the success of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Congress enacted statutes excluding or deporting anarchists, communists, and socialists. Almost immediately, leftists were rounded up, imprisoned, and frequently deported. Planned to coincide with the Bolshevik Revolution’s second anniversary, a series of raids nationwide orchestrated by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer led to thousands of arrests. It remains unclear exactly how many people were apprehended, “but best estimates are that some 6,000 warrants of arrest were issued for alien ‘reds,’ and 4,000 arrests were made.” The assistant secretary of labor at the time, Louis Post, reported that in Boston prisoners were shackled and marched through city streets. Among those caught up in this ordeal was perhaps the most famous leftist of the era, the anarchist Emma Goldman. Automatically stripped of her U.S. citizenship when her husband lost his, she described the migrants forced onto the U.S.S. Buford, nicknamed the “Red Ark,” as “prisoners.”33 Recalling with horror the realization that she was being shipped out, Goldman described seeing New York from the window of a cramped transport ship: “Through the port-hole I could see the great city receding into the distance, its sky-line of buildings traceable by their rearing heads. It was my beloved city, the metropolis of the New World. It was America, indeed, America repeating the terrible scenes of tsarist Russia! I glanced up—the Statue of Liberty!”³⁴

After the federal government started detaining migrants, it wasn’t long before courts were asked to weigh in on immigration imprisonment’s legality. For a time, the Chinese community of California proved especially adept at tapping the power of the federal courts to limit detention. So many Chinese petitioned the federal trial court in San Francisco for entry into the United States that local newspapers in the 1880s referred to it as a “habeas corpus mill,” named after the legal procedure inherited from the British used to challenge the legality of detention.³⁵ Most, it seems, were successful. Of the approximately four thousand petitions filed between the moment when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was implemented and January 1888, one newspaper reported, 87 percent were granted permission to enter the United States.³⁶ For a time, the courts clearly represented a check on the government’s newfound detention interest.

Success was short-lived. As was inevitable, the legal fight moved from the trial courts to the Supreme Court. In 1896, the justices emphatically declared that immigration imprisonment was constitutionally permissible. “We think it clear that detention or temporary confinement, as part of the means necessary to give effect to the provisions for the exclusion or expulsion of aliens, would be valid,” a unanimous Court announced in Wong Wing v. United States.37 In that short phrase, the Court established civil immigration imprisonment: people can be deprived of their liberty while the government decides if they are to be allowed to remain in the United States. Only a few sentences later, the Court acknowledged criminal immigration imprisonment. “So, too,” the Court explained, “we think it would be plainly competent for congress to declare the act of an alien in remaining unlawfully within the United States to be an offense punishable by fine or imprisonment, if such offense were to be established by a judicial trial.” For immigration to be punished criminally through confinement, the government must rely on a standard criminal prosecution, including all the protections afforded defendants.

But being subjected to civil authority has never meant escaping prison’s cluthes. Among the most famous of those detained at Ellis Island was Ellen Knauff. Born in Germany, she spent part of Hitler’s reign in Czechoslovakia. When war caught up with her, she headed to England as a refugee, where she worked for the Royal Air Force, then the United States Army. While helping the Allied forces, she met U.S. citizen and Army veteran Kurt Knauff. After the war, the two married with the approval of the Army’s commanding officer in Frankfurt.³⁸ Taking advantage of the War Brides Act, a special immigration procedure created by Congress precisely to let war veterans return to the United States with their new wives, Ellen arrived in New York on August 14, 1948.

That’s when the honeymoon turned to a nightmare. Citing evidence that they refused to disclose even to the Knauffs, immigration officials at Ellis Island were anything but welcoming. Ellen was excluded from the United States and sent to the restrictive quarters of the island’s immigration station to fight for her freedom. “As we approached Ellis Island,” she later wrote, “I could see that parts of it were enclosed by double wire fences topped by barbed wire and marked by what appeared to be watchtowers. These fenced-off areas were subdivided by more fences which gave the whole place the look of a group of kennels.”39 An official history published by the now-defunct INS described it as “a grueling detention-like penitentiary.”⁴⁰

Ellen wasn’t even given a hearing at which she might claim her right to enter the United States or plead for mercy.⁴¹ Time and again immigration officials denied Ellen’s attempts to live freely in the United States with her husband. Time and again, they cited secret evidence that “her admission would be prejudicial to the interests of the United States.” Insistent, she fought all the way to the Supreme Court, where she found little comfort.

The Constitution’s promise of a fair hearing proved meaningless. Despite Justice Robert Jackson letting her off Ellis Island in May 1949, his colleagues weren’t so sympathetic. For people like Ellen hoping to enter the United States, the Court ruled, Congress can create any procedure it likes. “Whatever the procedure authorized by Congress is, it is due process as far as an alien denied entry is concerned,” the Court wrote in January 1950.⁴² The next month Ellen was back on the island. Eight decades later, courts continue relying on this line to deny all but the most limited procedural protections to migrants who have not been inspected and legally authorized to enter the United States.⁴³

Undeterred, the Knauffs mounted a public-relations campaign, harnessing the power of public sympathy toward veterans and their “war brides.” Full-page advertisements supporting Ellen appeared in major newspapers. Editorial writers called for the courts to revisit their position. Members of Congress introduced legislation to help her.⁴⁴ After Kurt personally appealed to the attorney general, Ellen was once more let off Ellis Island in January 1951 and, despite not being required to, the attorney general granted her a hearing. Again, she was denied admission as a national security threat and returned to the island prison four months after her release. Government witnesses claimed she was a Communist spy who had given classified information to Czechoslovakian officials. On appeal, she finally obtained the relief she wanted. The government’s immigration appeals unit, the Board of Immigration Appeals, concluded that the spying accusations that had resulted in her long imprisonment on Ellis Island were flimsy. They were nothing more than “hearsay, uncorroborated by direct evidence,” the appeals board wrote in its official decision.45 More than three years after Ellen was first held at Ellis Island, the Knauffs were finally able to enter the United States together.

Just three years later, the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit brought by another Ellis Island prisoner, Ignatz Mezei. Born on the British territory of Gibraltar to parents of “Hungarian or Rumanian” origin, Mezei had lived in the United States for a quarter century when he left in an attempt to see his dying mother in Romania.⁴⁶ He never made it. Romania didn’t let him in. Instead, he spent roughly nineteen months in Hungary waiting for a visa allowing him to leave. When he finally returned to the United States, he was unceremoniously sent to Ellis Island. As with Ellen Knauff, the world superpower thought him too dangerous to admit. Indeed, too dangerous to know why he was barred and too dangerous to receive a hearing. His time inside the Soviet bloc was enough to minimize his twenty-five years of unremarkable residence in the United States. Fighting all the way to the Supreme Court, he too fared poorly. To the majority of the justices, Ellis Island wasn’t a prison. It was “harborage … temporary refuge,” wrote Justice Tom Clark.⁴⁷

Four of the justice’s colleagues disagreed. Justices Hugo Black and William Douglas complained that the government refused to let Mezei visit his wife in Buffalo even temporarily. But it was Justice Robert Jackson, who just years before had led the victorious Allies in prosecuting the most senior Nazi officials at the post-war Nuremberg tribunal, who was most forceful.

His commitment to procedural fairness remained a guide post. Evoking the ancient legal principle that no one should be imprisoned without knowing why, he took issue with the majority of his colleagues, who viewed Ellis Island as a humanitarian refuge. “It overworks legal fiction to say that one is free in law when by the commonest of common sense he is bound,” Jackson wrote.48 Mezei was imprisoned on Ellis Island due to the power of federal immigration officials. To treat the speck of land as a place of safety made no sense to Jackson. “That might mean freedom, if only he were an amphibian!” he wrote in one of the most memorable lines of any Supreme Court decision.⁴⁹ Recognizing that he was on the losing end of this argument, he complained that the majority opinion would seem to allow government officials to exclude Mezei by “eject[ing] him bodily into the sea.”⁵⁰ As far as we know, the government has yet to test Jackson’s fear of brutish violence.

Despite embracing immigration imprisonment, the Supreme Court never got around to elaborating its position. Given that all immigration imprisonment targets violations of immigration law, why is the civil type of imprisonment permissible without a judicial trial but its criminal variety is not? Neither the Supreme Court nor the lower courts have ever shed light on this distinction. More than fifty years after Wong Wing, the Supreme Court could do no more than repeat itself: “Detention is necessarily a part of this deportation procedure.”⁵¹ Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the Supreme Court’s simple conclusion about the procedures required—or not—of immigration imprisonment’s two iterations isn’t intuitive. The two types of imprisonment are almost identical. From the psychological toll of confinement and invasive security checks to the literal architecture of the facilities used, it is difficult for anyone to see meaningful differences. That was true in the late nineteenth century when dockside sheds were cast as worse than jails. And it is true today.

Just as World War II battles reshaped European landscapes, wartime politics turned foes into friends. Long the focus of harsh discrimination in the United States, Chinese citizens played an instrumental role combatting the Allies’ powerful foe in Asia, Japan. Some 14 million Chinese citizens lost their lives during the war.52 Meanwhile, the United States’ broad legal regime of racial discrimination came under attack by African Americans and Latinos, who could die alongside white soldiers on European battlefields but could not dine or study with them in stateside restaurants and universities. In the war’s aftermath, these critics did not let up. On the contrary, the pressure intensified when the Soviet Union began using racial discrimination as a rallying point in its search for allies for the emerging Cold War. Numerous countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were all too willing to capitalize on the global power struggle to improve their citizens’ access to the United States.⁵³

Eventually, the United States could no longer ignore its blatantly discriminatory immigration laws. During the mid-1900s, several presidents tried and failed to remove patently racist provisions from immigration law. In 1952, President Harry S. Truman vetoed a proposal that favored migration from northern and western Europe and limited migration from all of Asia to a measly two thousand people per year. Congress overrode his veto.⁵⁴ The following year, Truman’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization recommended abolishing racial and national-origin discrimination in immigration law. His successor, Dwight Eisenhower, agreed. As a candidate for president, Eisenhower declared, “We must strike from our statute books any legislation concerning immigration that implies the blasphemy against democracy that only certain Europeans are welcome on American shores.” A few months later during his first State of the Union address, he told Congress, “Existing legislation contains injustices. It does, in fact discriminate.…”55 Despite his complaints and stature as a wartime hero, even President Eisenhower was unable to successfully prod Congress to eliminate immigration law’s racist sorting mechanism. Where presidents failed, “the critical impetus for dismantling the national-origins quota system in 1965” was the threat of Soviet influence.⁵⁶ That year, Congress finally brought national-origins discrimination to an end.