ABSTRACT
Immigration policy debates in the United States (US) have long treated immigration as an almost exclusively domestic issue that Congress can solve by simply passing better immigration laws. Immigration, nation building, and foreign policy became intertwined from very early on in US history. The subsequent expansion of American merchants, investors, and missionaries into Asia and the Americas coincided with the vast international migrations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Congress narrowly passed the 1917 Immigration Act over President Wilson’s veto because advocates for immigration restriction successfully exploited the climate of rampant xenophobia caused by the war. Fear mongers argued that, unless Congress acted, poor, subversive, and dangerous immigrants from Europe would flood the country at the end of the war. Immigration bureaucrats’ activism, not just the draconian immigration policy in place, also accounted for the meager number of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Third Reich that the United States admitted in the 1930s.
