ABSTRACT
I IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION Coming to another country to live and becoming a citizen. In the fi nal decades of the nineteenth century, immigration legislation began to place limits on who could enter the United States. The fi rst restrictive immigration legislation, the PAGE ACT of 1875 (see Volume 2), attempted to discourage Chinese women suspected of “ immoral purposes” from entering the country. In the early years of the twentieth century, further restrictions were added, which in some cases placed women at a disadvantage. Immigration legislation passed in 1917, for example, excluded, among others, people who could not read, making immigration more difficult for many women and members of the peasant class. In 1924, a quota system was established that ranked immigrants by country of origin.
