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by tzs
2092 days ago
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The US had completely open borders for its first hundred years or so. It wasn't until 1875 with the Page Act, which restricted Chinese women, that we stopped having wide open borders. That was followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which covered Chinese men. For white people the borders remained wide open. In the late 19th century some restrictions where added on white people, too, but the borders were still easy to get through. The restrictions were things like a small immigration tax, a requirement that you would be able to take care of yourself, exclusions of people with diseases, and things like that. If you were white and in good health, there was essentially no problem getting in. In 1917 they added a literacy test, but you could take it in your native language, so it wasn't much of a barrier. It wasn't until 1924, with the Immigration Act of 1924, that we started seriously limiting immigration beyond the restriction on immigrants from Asia. It limited immigration from a given country based on how many people from that country were in the US in 1890, to "preserve the ideal of US homogeneity". (You would probably not be wrong if you read that as "to keep too many Jews from coming to the US". As things got worse for Jews in many countries in Europe more Jews wanted to leave those countries than did before 1890. Countries that weren't persecuting their Jews did not have such an uptick in emigrants compared to before 1890. Thus, the proportion of Jews in the total set of people wanting to immigrate to the US was going up). |
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