ABSTRACT
In the first decade of the 21st century, politicians at all levels of government in the US are facing difficult questions of immigration policy. This is, of course, not the first time that immigration issues have had a prominent place in national politics. Earlier episodes focused largely on questions of ethnicity, culture, and the potential for assimilation of immigrants from particular countries. In the 1850s, the American Party (or the Know-Nothing Party) built a platform on the importance of responding to the tremendous increase in Irish-Catholic inflows to the US. In the early 1880s, anxieties about immigration from China gave rise to the first substantial restriction on immigration to the US – the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. As the volume of immigration from Eastern and Southern European sources grew in the late 1800s and early 1900s, broader efforts to restrict immigration finally gained a critical mass of support, leading to the national quota laws of the early 1920s and dramatic reductions in immigrant inflows. These national quotas were removed under the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, replacing the old system with one that gave priority to family reunification in immigration policy and raising, but maintaining, general limits on annual inflows.1
