During the colonial era, from the 1880s to 1920, the United States experienced a significant onslaught of immigrants as they trooped in search of better economic opportunities, while others, like the Pilgrims who came in the early 1600s, arrived in a bid for religious freedom.
While thousands and thousands of enslaved Africans were shipped against their will to America, many more came in and voluntarily became indentured servants to become citizens. These waves of immigration saw newcomers from Ireland, Asia, and Europe.
The flow of immigrants resulted in anti-immigrant sentiments among some parts of America’s native-born, prominently Anglo-Saxon Protestant community. The new immigrants were seen as threats, as they were unwanted competition for jobs and opportunities. At the same time, many Catholics, predominantly Irish, were being discriminated against due to their religious beliefs. The anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic American Party, popularly known as the Know-Nothings, in the early 1850s, tried to stop immigration; they ran a candidate, former U.S. president Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), in the 1856 presidential election.
However, after the Civil War, in the 1870s, the United States was thrown into a depression that slowed down immigration. In 1882, federal legislation aimed at restricting immigration was passed. This act, known as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, was implemented to stop Chinese labourers from coming to the United States.
The government, which had left the immigration policies to individual states in the early 1800s, had to step in as the onslaught of immigrants was at an all-time high. Ellis Island became a federal immigration station in 1890 under President Benjamin Harrison, and all through its years of operation, more than 12 million immigrants entered the United States.
From 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants entered America, but 1907 saw approximately 1.3 million people come into the country legally. There was a steady decline due to World War I; however, in 1917, Congress enacted legislation. This required immigrants over the age of 16 to pass a literacy test. By 1924, an immigration quota act that restricted entry to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in America as of the 1890 national census was created.
In 1942, the United States signed a series of diplomatic accords between Mexico and the United States known as the Bracero Program to enable millions of Mexican immigrants to come to the United States to work on short-term agricultural labour contracts. It remains the most prominent U.S. contract labour program, recruiting 4.6 million people from 1942 to 1964.
During World War II, immigration dropped, and after the war, special legislation that enabled refugees from Europe and the Soviet Union to enter the United States was passed. In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act, which ditched the quotas based on immigration, was passed and allowed Americans to sponsor relatives from their countries of origin.
