Fifty years ago, the U.S. enacted a
sweeping immigration law, the Immigration and Nationality Act, which
replaced longstanding national origin quotas that favored Northern
Europe with a new system allocating more visas to people from other
countries around the world and giving increased priority to close
relatives of U.S. residents.
Just prior to passage of the 1965 law,
residents of only three countries—Ireland, Germany and the United
Kingdom—were entitled to nearly 70% of the quota visas available to
enter the U.S. (U.S. Department of Justice, 1965). Today, immigration to the U.S. is dominated by people born in Asia and
Latin America, with immigrants from all of Europe accounting for only
10% of recent arrivals.
The 1965 law undid national origin quotas
enacted in the 1920s, which were written into laws that imposed the
first numerical limits on immigration. Those laws were the culmination
of steadily tightening federal restrictions on immigration that began in
the late 1800s with prohibitions or restrictions on certain types of
immigrants, such as convicts, in addition to a ban on Chinese migrants
and later virtually all Asian migrants.
This chapter explores the history of
immigration law in the U.S., focusing on provisions of major legislation
from the 20th century onward. Accompanying this chapter is an
interactive timeline (below) of U.S. immigration legislation since the
1790s.
