Historical Background Of Immigration Essay

I. Historical Background of Immigration

Immigration in the United States was primarily unrestricted and unregulated up until the 1880’s. It wasn’t until 1882 when federal regulation of immigration began. Congress passed the Immigration Act which established the collection of a fee from each noncitizen arriving at a U.S. port. Immigrants were screened for the first time under this act, and entry by anyone deemed a "convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge" was prohibited.

The United States industrial revolution brought immigrants from near and far. Chinese immigrants began to arrive in large numbers after gold was discovered in California in 1848 but as the mining boom decreased, hostility toward the Chinese and other foreigners swelled and that began a succession of legislative measures to restrict immigration of particular racial groups, starting with the Chinese. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 stopped immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and extradition of anyone in the country illegally which was extended ten more years in 1892 with the Geary Act. In 1888 Congress passed, the Scott Act and banned the return of any Chinese immigrant with legal status in the United States if they had left the country. As more and more people came to the United States,

Congress passed other bills to include other races to be excluded from entry into this country. The 1917 Immigration Act prohibited immigration from British India, most of Southeast Asia, and most of the Middle East.
The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1924 established the national-origins quota system, which set a limit on the number of immigrants that could be admitted to the United States from each country.

The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 dismantled the national-origins quota system and replaced it with a seven-category preference system based primarily on family unification. Before the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act amendments, Congress terminated the Bracero program, they had authorized during World War II to recruit agricultural workers from Mexico to fill farm and labor shortages in the United

States.
Today's large scale immigration began in the 1970s, and has been both legal and illegal. Mexico, has accounted for the largest share of both illegal and legal immigrants in the US since then and through the present. By the mid-1980s, an estimated 3 to 5 million noncitizens were living unlawfully in the country; to address this, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 which failed miserably. The legalization excluded a significant number of the unauthorized population, improvements in border enforcement did not begin until the 1990s and the main purpose of the law, employer sanctions, had weak enforcement provisions that proved ineffective. In an effort to rewrite all there wrongs from the 1986 Act, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1990 to renovate the legal immigration system and admit a greater share of highly-skilled and educated immigrants. It raised legal immigration caps, modified the temporary nonimmigrant visa system, and revised the grounds of deportation. The law also established Temporary Protected Status, giving permission to live and work in the United States to people of countries deemed unsafe for return. As much as Congress tried to regulated immigration, the flow of people coming to the United States continued to grow.
It wasn’t until the events of 9/11 that people began to realize that what was being done about immigration was not enough. The immigration system came under scrutiny because the 9/11 hijackers obtained valid visas to travel to the United States, despite some being known by U.S. intelligence. The Immigration and Naturalization Service was dissolved and its functions were transferred to three new agencies within Department of Homeland Security. Customs and Border Protection oversees the entry of all people and goods at all ports of entry and enforces laws against illegal entry. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is responsible for enforcement of immigration and customs requirements in the interior of the United States, including employer requirements, detention, and removals. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services evaluates immigrant benefit applications, such as visa petitions, naturalization applications, and asylum and refugee requests, and governs the E-Verify program. Since 9/11, the United States has used the IDENT biometric fingerprint information system to confirm the identity of noncitizens entering the country. 9/11 also led to the passage of a series of new national security laws, with regard to immigration. The most well-known is the USA Patriot Act, which expanded the authority of law enforcement agencies to search, monitor, detain, and remove suspected terrorists, and allowed for the detention of foreign nationals for up to seven days before the government files criminal or immigration charges. It also strengthened border enforcement. Laws that followed include the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002. The bill mandated information sharing systems that made national security data available to immigration officers responsible for issuing visas, making removal or admissions decisions, and for investigations and identification of noncitizens

II. Description of the Problem
Today’s immigration policy focuses on what to do with the immigrants that are already in the country and how to keep anymore from coming in. Issues that have come to play in recent news are unaccompanied children coming