1. Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I life my lamp beside the golden door.
Emma Lazarus

2. Tonight Review Where we Are: Assignments - webblogs, tech activity
Lecture: Immigration
Next CLASS: DECEMBER 10TH

4. Immigration
Centers around the link between American ideals of citizenship, freedom, and independence -- and American realities of class and race.
Americans' debates about "fitness" for citizenship, freedom, and independence and how those considerations and debates, in turn, shaped different immigrants' experiences.
The Push & Pull of Immigration
Immigration Waves
Different characteristics, different responses
Law and Race
Immigration Restriction
None, qualitative, quantitative . . .
Relationship b/ween race, eugenics and immigration

5. Immigration
International migration is the exception, not the rule, for two major reasons:
The first and most powerful is inertia: Most people lack the desire and drive to leave home and move away from family and friends.
[NB: modern]The second is the fact that governments regulate movements over their borders: virtually every government has passports, visas, and border controls, and a significant capacity to regulate migration.
However, migration is a natural and predictable response to differences between countries of origin and destination--differences in resources and jobs, in demographic growth, and in opportunities and human rights.
Immigration is thus driven by the Push and Pull forces at work between two peoples, which are determined by the historical forces at play.

6. Immigration There are four major types of immigrants, historically:
The largest category is relatives of U.S. residents. Of the 850,000 immigrants admitted in FY2000, 583,000 or 69 percent had family members in the U.S. who sponsored their admission by asking the the U.S. government to admit them.
The second-largest category was employment-based, the 107,000 immigrants and their families admitted for economic or employment reasons (13 percent)
The third group was diversity and other immigrants, 93,000 or 11 percent, most of whom were admitted because they entered a lottery open to citizens of countries that sent fewer than 50,000 immigrants to the United States in the previous five years
The fourth group is refugees and asylees, the 59,000 foreigners who were granted a chance to start anew as immigrants in the United States because they faced persecution at home.

7. Push - Pull
What “Push” Factors did we see in Indentured servants emigrating to U.S. in colonial Period?
What “Pull” Factors?
NOTE: These Factors drive people in “waves”
First Wave: Prior to 1790
Second Wave: “American Letters”
Third Wave:
Fourth Wave: ??

8. U.S. Immigration
US immigration policies went through three major phases:
laissez-faire, qualitative restrictions, and quantitative restrictions.
During its first hundred years, from 1780 to 1875, the United States had a laissez- faire immigration policy-
states, private employers, shipping companies and railroads, and churches all promoted immigration to the United States.
The federal government encouraged immigration in various ways:
subsidizing railroad construction - (recruitment of immigrant workers).
High tariffs (kept out European goods, created a demand for workers)
Fill the army (immigrants = third of the regulars in the 1840s, even higher proportion in state militias)

9. Note the Tension . . .
Franklin's warning in 1753 about the Germans in Pennsylvania:
. . . those who came hither are generally the most stupid of
their own nation, and as ignorance is often attended with
great credulity, when knavery would mislead it, and with
suspicion when honesty would set it right; and, few of the
English understand the German language, and so cannot address
them either from the press or pulpit, it is almost impossible
to remove any prejudices they may entertain Not being
used to liberty, they know not how to make modest use of it.
Franklin feared that the Germans would eventually outnumber the English, "and even our government will become precarious."

10. 2nd Wave “Pull & Push” to U.S. Immigration
The mass migration of the 19th century (2nd/3rd waves) was the result of a near perfect match between the needs of a new country and overcrowded Europe. Europe at this time was undergoing drastic social change and economic reorganization, severely compounded by overpopulation. An extraordinary increase in population coincided with the breakup of the old agricultural order
At approximately the same time, the industrial revolution was underway, moving from Great Britain to Western Europe, and then to Southern and Eastern Europe [NB: this tracks the evolution of U.S. Immigration]
America, on the other hand, had a boundless need for people to push back the frontier, to build the railways, to defend unstable boundaries, and to populate new States.

11. Immigration Waves in US History
antebellum, —largely northern European, especially England, Ireland and Germany—approx. 4.5 million
late —largely Southern and Eastern European, including Polish and Russian Jews, Italian, Greek—approx million
also Asian immigrants in the late 19th-early 20th century, in much fewer numbers (for example, Chinese immigrants built US railroads)
Immigration Act of 1924 establishes national quotas for immigration - immigration drops sharply
after 1965 immigration act reform - immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia outnumber those from Europe

12. 2nd Wave “Push” to U.S. Immigration
: Irish Potato Famine – mostly Irish Catholics come.
The influx of Roman Catholics in the 1840’s set off the first organized anti-foreign movement in the nation’s history, the “Know Nothing “ movement embodied in the American Party.
American Letters”
1850: Mexican - American War - U.S. seizes 1/3 of Mexico
Mexican border relatively open until 1920
: Chinese Rush to U.S.
: Opium War with Britain & Taiping Rebellion
Agricultural crisis and rice shortage
Between the fall of Napoleon and World War I, from 30 to 35 million immigrants

13. What is this man’s ethnic background?
Immigration & Race
Cartoon Fragment
What is this man’s ethnic background?

14. Immigration & Race
Entire Cartoon, 1864

15. 2nd Wave: “Pull” for Immigrants
Immigrants satisfy US economic & social needs:
The Frontier and Westward Expansion
The Homestead Act of 1862 made western lands available to immigrants as well as the native-born.
The Contract Labor Law passed in 1864: 1st comprehensive federal immigration law to work frontier
Encouraged immigration by advancing money for passage.(RR, mining, farming, e.g., Chinese recruited for Calif gold rush ).
1870s: Companies recruit in Mexico in part to replace Chinese, but mostly seasonal.
The American the frontier was closed by Most newcomers found factory jobs in cities in the northeast and midwest.
By 1910, immigrants were over half of all employees in steel and meat packing, and foreign-born men were over half of the work force in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Detroit

16. 2nd Wave of U.S. Immigration
Up to 1850s – 85% of immigrants were English, Scotch Irish, and German; all other groups suspect because “Not like us.”
After WWI: door slammed shut:
: 15 million enter U.S.
: 5.5 million enter U.S.
Limits usually accompanied by anti immigrant, xenophobic campaigns e.g., anti Chinese movement in midst of 1870 US depression.

17. Segway . . .
Official, albeit imperfect, immigration statistics were recorded beginning in by the Department of State, which continued to perform this task until 1870.
The immigration data collection function was subsequently transferred to the Treasury Department's Bureau of Statistics, and from there to the Bureau of Immigration, housed first in the Department of Labor and subsequently it to the Department of Justice.
Data collection began in 1819 in response to a Federal law requiring ship captains arriving from abroad to submit a manifest to the customs collector showing the sex, occupation, age, and country of all passengers aboard. Initially, data was recorded only on vessels arriving at Eastern ports; Western ports were included beginning in During the Civil War, data was available only from ports under Federal control. Immigration over land borders was recorded haphazardly until around 1910.
First Passports?
Border Patrol?

18. 3rd Wave: U. S. Policies
The US began to enact qualitative restrictions on immigrants in the 1870s.
In 1875, convicts and prostitutes were barred.
The Immigration Act of 1882 added paupers and "mental defectives” to the groups of undesirables
For the first time the U. S. barred immigration from a particular country: Chinese immigration was halted for 10 years, a ban that was kept until
The importation of foreign workers coming with pre-arranged work contracts was banned in the 1880s.
By 1900, the major issue = slowing the influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.
There were Congressionally sponsored studies that concluded that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were “inferior”

19. 3rd Wave: U. S. Policies
Congressional leaders wanting to restrict immigration argued that newcomers should be literate—able to read and write in some language— and Congress, starting in 1897, enacted literacy tests, but they were vetoed by three presidents, starting with Grover Cleveland. President Wilson twice vetoed the literacy test, but his veto was overridden in 1917:
after that date, anyone over sixteen who could not read in any language was refused entry.
In 1921, Congress imposed numerical restrictions based on National Origin
in 1924, an Immigration Act set annual immigration at up to 150,000, plus accompanying wives and children.
The national origins formula prescribed that the maximum number of immigrants from any country in the Eastern Hemisphere would be "a number which bears the same ratio to 150,000 as the number of inhabitants in the United States in 1920 having that national origin bears to the number of white inhabitants of the United States."

20. U.S. Immigration: Segway II
: Period of greatest immigration
Ellis Island: 1892 – 1924:
5000 enter daily, maybe 1 in 50 rejected
12 million had entered by 1954 when the Center closed
WWI generates Italian, Slav, Greek, Polish, Jewish immigrants (Southern Europe)

21. Post- WWI - U.S. Limits Immigration
1917: Literacy Act – very exclusionary
need to write or speak English and another language
aims to exclude southern Europeans & Jews & excluded all Asians, including Indians, Malaysians, etc. Even though 12% of US Army is Italian.
9th Proviso: exception for farm workers, mostly Mexicans.
: Red scare aggravates fear & anti- immigrant reaction.
: Quota Law –
1st time numerical limits; uses 1910 proportion, favoring north Europeans.
Border Patrol created; Mexican border becomes a tangible reality, though still permeable.

22. U.S. Limits Immigration
the Johnson Immigration Act severely limits based upon:
Racial superiority of Anglo Saxons
Immigrants cause lowering of wages
Do not assimilate
Threat to national identity & unity
Limits immigrants to 2% of their national group in 1890, thus against south & east Europeans

23. Immigration Restriction > Annual Immigration Quotas, 1924
Germany - 51,227
Great Britain - 34,007
Ireland - 28,567
Italy - 3,845
Hungary - 473
Greece - 100
Egypt - 100

24. Race & Immigration: Eugenics
the U.S. saw a particular synergy between eugenic ideas and strategic interests: motivated by political opportunism and (in some measure) racism, Congressman Albert Johnson, chair of the House Committee on Immigration, found in eugenic ideas a powerful justification, apparently backed by nothing less than science itself, for a restrictive immigration policy enjoying, it seemed, increasing public support.
Inspired by British eugenicists, the American eugenics movement originated in the late nineteenth century, and it enjoyed its greatest legislative achievements in the late 1910s and 1920s, peaking with the 1927 Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell
American eugenicists focused on the "racial" inferiority of nationalities whose entry into the U.S. threatened the American gene pool. These ideas enjoyed extensive support. Exploiting the "prestige of science," political elites cited eugenic research in support of policies to sterilize selected patients and, as this article illustrates, in support of restrictive immigration policies based on a purportedly scientific hierarchy of "races."
This role interacted favorably with the claim not only that physical traits were reproduced generationally but also that behavior, too, had its roots in biology. Social Darwinism pandered to this tenet, with its claims about the extent to which the offspring of the poor, or the criminal, or the feeble-minded were themselves likely to reproduce these traits

25. Race & Immigration: Eugenics
The eugenicists' alarm about racial degeneration reflected their specific fears: that higher birthrates among the genetically inferior would lead to a "menace of the feeble-minded" and that inferior nations, men, and races would, through immigration, under mine American supremacy.
The American eugenicists defined as superior those people descended from Nordic or Aryan stock, and they classed as inferior those of East European, Mediterranean, Asian, African, Native American, or Jewish descent.
Congress gave encouragement to the movement through the appointment of the Dillingham Commission (established in 1907, reporting in 1910). Like the Brock Com- mittee before it, the American commission saw a threat in concentrated pockets of genetic inferiority. While the former believed that "defectives drift to the slums," where "like marries like ... and the chances of two carriers [of defective genes] mating is many times greater than it is in any other section of the population."
The Dillingham Commission argued (from an exhaustive study of seven cities) that "the new immi grant races live largely in colonies .. . and ... are as a class far less intelligent than the old." The commission recommended a series of restrictionist measures: a literacy test to immigrants (enacted in 1917 after many previous failed attempts), a quota by race "

26. Mexican Experience 1900-1910: 49,000 immigrants enter,
50% are Mexicans.
1920: 500,000 Mexicans emigrated
Poverty & unrest in Mexico before 1910
Restrictions on Japanese, like Chinese
Demand for labor in RR, agriculture, mines
Waiver of $5 head tax
Seen as temporary, not staying
Will work in undesirable jobs & locations

27. Mexican Immigrants During the Depression
Mexican immigration slows to trickle
Emigration exceeds immigration 3-1
Violent reaction against Mexicans as cities & states round up and deport them
Many leave on own out of fear
In 15 month period in 1931, 2 million Mexicans leave.

28. “Pull” of Mexican Immigrants
WWII: ( ) Treaty with Mexico to contract workers (Bracero Program)
NB: Bracero Website:
Private contracts but feds help recruit
US demand initially small, but soon outstrips visas so in early 1950s growers recruit undocumented.
: 4.6 million braceros admitted
1950: 67,000 braceros to 450,000 in 1956
Same time: 5.2 million illegal immigrants arrested.

29. Naturalization Law and Race in US History: Segway III
Congress limits naturalization to white persons
Congress adds African Americans (naturalization limited to “free white persons” and “persons of African descent”)
racial prerequisite for naturalization eliminated

30. Construction of Racial Difference Supreme Court Decisions
In re Balsara, Asian Indians are probably not White Congressional intent
U.S. v. Dolla, Asian Indians are White Ocular inspection of skin
U.S. v. Balsara 1910 Asian Indians are White Scientific evidence 
In re Sadar Bhagwab Singh, 1917Asian Indians are not White Common knowledge 
Congressional intent
In re Mohan Singh, 1919 Asian Indians are White Scientific evidence 
In re Thind, Asian Indians are White Legal precedent
U.S. v. Thind, 1923 Asian Indians are not White Common knowledge 
In re Najour, Syrians are White Scientific evidence
In re Mudarri, 1910 Syrians are White Scientific evidence 
Legal precedent
In re Ellis, Syrians are White Common knowledge 
Ex parte Shahid, 1913 Syrians are not White Common knowledge
Ex parte Dow, 1914 Syrians are not White Common knowledge
In re Dow, Syrians are not White Common knowledge 
Dow v. U.S., Syrians are White Scientific evidence 
Congressional intent 

31. Construction of Racial Difference - Supreme Court Decisions
In re Mallari, Filipinos are not White No explanation
In re Rallos, Filipinos are not White Legal precedent
U.S. v. Javier, Filipinos are not White Legal precedent
De La Ysla v. U.S., 1935 Filipinos are not White Legal precedent
De Cano v. State, 1941 Filipinos are not White Legal precedent
In re Halladjian, 1909 Armenians are Whtie Scientific evidence 
Legal precedent
U.S. v. Cartozian, 1925 Armenians are White Scientific evidence 
Common knowledge  
In re Feroz Din, 1928 Afghanis are not White Common knowledge
In re Ahmed Hassan, 1942 Arabians are not White Common knowledge 
Ex parte Mohriez, 1944 Arabians are not White Legal precedent

32. Images in Immigration
Chinese
3rd Wave: Eastern European

33. Acts of 1882, 1884, and 1888 and related legislation
Only Chinese non-laborers and those who were born in the U.S. can enter
Those who resided in the U.S. prior to 1880 can remain if they don’t leave the country
If they leave they can come back if they have at least one thousand dollars worth of property or debts owned to them
The status of wife and child followed that of a husband
No Chinese could be naturalized as U.S. citizen

34. Loopholes in Legislation
Many Chinese were able to get into the U.S. by appealing to U.S. Courts even after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
The prohibition of judicial review of immigration decisions did not apply to the Chinese because unlike other immigrants until 1903 they did not come under purview of the Bureau of Immigration and immigration law
Judges often ruled in favor of Chinese plaintiffs because they adhered to Anglo-American common law traditions of habeas corpus and evidentiary rules of witness testimony (for example, did not require two white witnesses)
Newcomers relied on community groups and white lawyers to make their case for citizenship based on witness testimony
This continued until 1905 when the Bureau of Immigration took over Chinese immigration and was granted final jurisdiction in the question of citizenship

35. “The Chinese: Many Handed But Soulless,” The Wasp, 1885
Some Wasp Images
The Wasp, v. 15, July - Dec [cover]
"The Chinese : Many Handed But Soulless"

36. Cartoon on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

37. Using photography to emphasize difference
This print, though different from the published version, was made from the same negative. It represents one stage leading to the creation of the finished print. To Genthe's left is a blurry area that once included a second figure. Genthe, through retouching, eliminated this second figure from the photograph.

38. Construction of Racial Difference - Emphasizing difference
The original negative is different from the two preceding prints. In it, Genthe occupies a small part of the street scene and the second figure on Genthe's left is visible. Genthe created the printed or final version by cropping the background and retouching the second figure.

39. Construction of Racial Difference > Emphasizing difference
This copy negative shows the red dye and the retouching marks Genthe applied to remove the second figure and create the finished photograph.

40. Alfred Stieglitz, “The Steerage,” 1907
photograph of “immigrants” returning to Europe
Alfred Stieglitz
The Steerage
1907

41. Construction of Racial Difference > Jacob Riis, “Bandit’s Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street,” c. 1888
Jacob Riis Works

42. Construction of Racial Difference > Jacob Riis, “Bandit’s Roost,” How the Other Half Lives (1890)
Halftone reproduction

43. Construction of Racial Difference > Jacob Riis, “Mullen’s Alley, Cherry Hill,” 1888

44. Construction of Racial Difference > “Home of an Italian Ragpicker,” 1888
Jacob Riis
Home of an Italian Ragpicker
1888

45. Construction of Racial Difference > “One of Four Pedlars Who Slept in the Cellar of 11 Ludlow Street Rear,” c. 1892
Jacob Riis
One of Four Pedlars Who Slept in the Cellar of 11 Ludlow Street Rear
c. 1892

46. Immigration Waves > The Godfather, Part II (1974)

47. Nativism in Early 20th
Cities, where most immigrants settled, were derided and feared as places filled with dangerous people and radical ideas
:These sentiments were often formulated by intellectuals, but they resonated with many white Americans who were reared in rather parochial and homogenous rural and small town environments.
Most old-stock Americans in the late nineteenth century were appalled at the growing evils of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization.
Henry Adams, the descendent of two American presidents and a noted man of letters, expressed virulent nativism and anti-Semitism
Henry Ford, "looked upon big cities as cesspools of iniquity, soulless, and artificial" Through his general magazine, the Dearborn Independent, Ford spread his hatred of the "international Jewish conspiracy "to a mass audience during the 1920s.
It is no surprise that membership in the KK spiked during this era: "Speeches by Ku Klux Klan members (against immigrants) were virtually indistinguishable in substance and language, if not in style, from the writings of many university professors."

48. Nativism: Ku Klux Klan Marching in DC
Demonstrating their political power, Klansmen triumphantly parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., on September 13, 1926, in full regalia.

49. Immigration Restriction > Cartoon on the Literacy Test

50. Immigration Restriction > Cartoon on the Quota Act of 1921
Congress passed the Quota Act of 1921, limiting entrants from each nation to 3 percent of that nationality’s presence in the U.S. population as recorded by the census. As a result, immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe dropped to less than one-quarter of pre-World War I levels.

51. Rise in Legal Immigrants
Modern Echoes
Rise in Legal Immigrants
1950s: 2.5 million
1960s: 3.3 million
1970s: 4.5 million
1980s: 7.3 million
1990s: 9.1 million – biggest decade

52. Immigrants satisfy a U.S. demand
In the 1990s: over half of US workforce growth was from immigrants.
: immigrants accounted for 86% of increase in US employment (about 50% were Hispanics of which 50% Mexican).
For next 20 years, no net increase is predicted in the number of prime working-age natives (ages 15-54).