Wartime policies and the search for principle in immigration policy

Writing immigration law that functions as intended has proved difficult. The Quota Acts did end the new immigration, and arrivals from northern and western Europe did fall sharply, but immigration from the United Kingdom also declined. Even the western European nations with much reduced quotas left those unfilled. Nor did Congress guess that arrivals from ‘non-quota nations, such as Mexico, and US territories, such as the Philippines and Puerto Rico, would soar into the millions by 1960. Events during these years defied governmental plans. The depression of the l930s put a stop to mass immigration. Local authorities and ‘vigilantes’ forcibly deported about half a million Mexican Americans, many of them US citizens, during that decade. Nazi and fascist regimes caused an enormous flow of refugees, 250,000 of whom Congress admitted as non-quota immigrants under special laws. Many more, including 20,000 Jewish children, were turned away because the USA was unwilling to put aside national origins quotas during a time of high unemployment and rising anti-Semitism.

The Second World War and the Cold War caused several contrasting shifts in policy. The government imported temporary farm labour from Mexico under the bracero program’ due to wartime labour shortages and lifted the ban on Chinese immigration because of foreign-policy considerations. Yet it also bowed to panicky racists on the west coast, who feared foreign spies, and confined 115,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps’, confiscating most of their property. After the war, federal law provided for the entry of families formed by US service people abroad, and several hundred thousand displaced persons (those so uprooted by the war that they had no homes to return to) were admitted by Acts of Congress. Between 1948 and 1959, Cold War refugees from communist countries, like Hungary and Cuba, also came.

The total of non-quota immigrants for those years reached 750,000, and made a mockery of the idea of regulating immigration according to national origins quotas. Moreover, during the Cold War, when the USA competed with the USSR for the allegiance of non-aligned nations, the racist principles underlying the quotas were a foreign-policy embarrassment. In 1952, the McCarran—Walter Act stated that race was no longer a reason for refusing someone an immigrant visa. Instead it started the so-called ‘brain-drain’ to the USA by reserving the first 50 per cent of visas for each country for people with needed skills. But the law kept the national origins principle, gave many Third World countries tiny quotas, and made communist or socialist associations a bar to immigration. Pressure for an entirely new approach grew.

The Immigration Act of 1965 provided this new approach, but also had unforeseen consequences. It replaced national origins quotas with hemispheric limits to annual immigration. To emphasize equal treatment, all nations in the eastern hemisphere had the same limit of 20,000 immigrants annually. A system of preferences set principles for selecting immigrants. Reunifying families, the most important principle, reserved nearly three quarters of immigrant visas for relatives of American citizens or resident aliens. Spouses, minor children and parents were admitted outside the limits. Grown children, brothers and sisters were given special preferences. The second principle continued the ‘brain-drain’ by reserving 20 per cent of visas for skilled people. Refugees received the remaining visas. Legislation made the national limit and preference system global in the 1970s.

Congress intended to make up for past injustices to southern and eastern Europeans through ‘family reunification’ visas for siblings and grown children, which it hoped would lead to the reappearance of ‘new’ immigrants. For ten years the plan worked, but by 1980 it became clear that the family preferences benefited people from other nations much more. En 1965 Europe and Canada provided the majority of immigrants to the USA, but by 1980 less than a sixth came from those places and four fifths were almost equally divided between Asia and Latin America. Expecting western nuclear families, American lawmakers did not anticipate how Third World peoples would use the family reunification clauses to bring in extended families.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 891