Immigration, labour & the making of modern America
How mass immigration and organized labour built modern America, from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act through the Wagner Act and the 1965 Hart-Celler reform.
The Great Waves
Between 1820 and 1924 roughly 36 million immigrants entered the United States, transforming a largely Anglo-Protestant, agrarian republic into an industrial, polyglot nation. The first major wave (1840s-1850s) was dominated by Irish Catholics fleeing the Great Famine (1845-52) and Germans displaced after the failed 1848 revolutions. This influx triggered the first organized nativist reaction: the American (Know-Nothing) Party, which peaked in the 1854-56 elections demanding a 21-year naturalization waiting period.
The second wave (1880s-1924), the "new immigration," came overwhelmingly from southern and eastern Europe—Italians, Poles, Jews fleeing Russian pogroms, Slavs, and Greeks—processed after 1892 through Ellis Island in New York Harbor. On the West Coast, Chinese laborers recruited to build the Central Pacific Railroad arrived through Angel Island (opened 1910).
The Architecture of Exclusion
Restriction tracked nativist anxiety. The Page Act of 1875 barred Chinese women presumed to be prostitutes; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (signed by Chester A. Arthur, 6 May 1882) was the first federal law to bar a national group by name and was made permanent in 1902. The Immigration Act of 1917 created an "Asiatic Barred Zone" and imposed a literacy test over Woodrow Wilson's veto.
The statutory climax was quota-based national-origins restriction. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 capped immigration at 3% of each nationality's 1910 census population; the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) tightened this to 2% of the 1890 census—deliberately chosen to favor northern and western Europeans—and excluded "aliens ineligible for citizenship" (Asians) entirely. Mexican immigration was left unrestricted to supply Southwestern agriculture, then reversed during the Depression-era "Mexican Repatriation" (1929-36).
Supreme Court Markers
Three decisions anchor citizenship doctrine. United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) affirmed birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment for a child born on US soil to Chinese parents. Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) denied naturalization to Japanese and Indian applicants respectively, holding them not "free white persons" under the 1790 Naturalization Act.
The restrictionist edifice fell only with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act), signed by Lyndon Johnson at the Statue of Liberty on 3 October 1965, which abolished national-origins quotas in favor of hemispheric caps emphasizing family reunification and skills—reshaping the demographic future of the nation toward Asia and Latin America. Candidates should grasp this arc: the United States built its industrial labor force on open immigration, slammed the gate shut by race and origin between 1882 and 1924, and reopened it on new terms in 1965.