| Description |
In the 1840s and 1850s, a nativist viewpoint was applied to all foreigners, particularly Catholics and the Irish. From 1850-1882, it was applied to Asians who were presumed to be of a lower racial and economic order. In the 1920s, the poverty of Eastern European Jews, Italians, Hungarians, and Poles, along with certain ethnic difference, made Italians deemed the "Chinese of Europe". This paper discusses the long-term rise of immigration since 1820 and its intermittent fluctuations, and its impacts on nativism and restrictionism. Immigration increased in tandem with the expansion in the U.S business cycle, and increasing heterogeneity, particularly racially non-Nordic European and Asian immigration caused great criticism against the open-door immigration system. This culminated in various laws to restrict certain nationalities and races, and a quota system which capped immigration at 160,000 per annum for the eastern hemisphere. Since then, racial exclusions and national preferential treatment was abandoned fully in 1965, and the quotas increased to 675,000 in 1990, where it currently remains, although the lack of a permanent residence quota outside of the preference categories has allowed immigration to surpass 1 million per annum in the 21st century. While improving the U.S's standing by abrogating official discrimination, congressmen gambled that in 1965, the dominance of a family preference mechanism would naturally limit undesirable immigration because the majority of the foreign-born was European, which would naturally facilitate very little family sponsorship of non-Europeans. But the current system works against its intentions; today Mexico has sponsored more immigrants through family and immediate relative preference categories than Europe as a whole in recent years. And the highly restrictive 140,000 employment preference immigrant visas for skilled immigrants are a fraction of the 1 million skilled and unskilled laborers that arrived in the early 20th century regularly every year, unadjusted for the 3.5-fold increase in the U.S population. Hence, the traditional Anglo-Saxon-Nordic Protestant conception of true American ethnicity, and perhaps the ethnic and ideological overrepresentation of this group in government, has led the U.S to change from a nation of free economic immigration, to one that has frozen unskilled immigration, tolerated highly skilled-immigration, and in comparative terms, encouraged family-sponsored immigration in the perceived struggle to preserve "racial and ethnic homogeneity". |
