IM history

Indentured servitude

Contract paying for passage by working a fixed term (usually 4-7 years) for a master. WHEN: 1600s to late 1700s. BIG PICTURE: Immigration began as a labor system; a main way colonists arrived, alongside slavery as unfree labor.

Convict migration

Britain sent about 50,000 convicts to the colonies, where they were sold as laborers. WHEN: c. 1718-1775. BIG PICTURE: Early case of 'dumping' undesirables; echoed in the Page Act convict ban and Irish pauper dumping.

1790 Naturalization Act

First federal naturalization law: 'free white persons' of good character after 2 years. WHEN: 1790. BIG PICTURE: Legal root of racial ineligibility for citizenship; reused in Ozawa and Thind.

Alien and Sedition Acts

Federalist laws: residency raised from 5 to 14 years, president could deport 'dangerous' aliens, criticism of government punished. WHEN: 1798. BIG PICTURE: First federal deportation power; immigrants as political threat, a precedent for the Red Scare.

Hamilton (the musical)

2015 musical presenting Hamilton as an immigrant underdog; historians note the real Hamilton was a Federalist who backed the restrictive 1790s approach. WHEN: musical 2015, history 1780s-1804. BIG PICTURE: Feel-good 'immigrants build America' story that leaves out restriction.

Anglo-Normativity

Assumption that WASP identity, English language and traditions are the default standard of 'true Americanness.' WHEN: colonial era through 20th century, explicit 1890s-1920s. BIG PICTURE: Underlies nativism, the literacy test, quotas and Americanization.

Irish potato famine

Blight plus British/landlord response; 1.1-1.5 million died and about 1.8 million went to North America (1.5 million to the US). WHEN: 1845-c.1852, emigration into 1850s. BIG PICTURE: First mass poor Catholic immigration; triggered nativism, Know Nothings, Passenger Acts.

Irish assisted migration

Landlords, Crown estates, workhouses and Canadian almshouses paid poor people to leave; about 120,000 total (Hirota), landlords 50,000-100,000; 'pauper dumping.' WHEN: late 1840s-1850s. BIG PICTURE: Fueled public charge fears and the first state deportation laws (NY, MA).

Passenger Acts

Laws regulating emigrant ships ('coffin ships'); the 1847 US act required more space but raised fares, pushing migrants to Canada (12,000+ died at Grosse Isle in 1847). WHEN: British 1803; US 1847. BIG PICTURE: Early health regulation of migration that changed routes.

Papal conspiracy

Protestant belief that the Pope plotted to take over US democracy through Catholic immigrants (Morse, Beecher). WHEN: 1830s-1850s. BIG PICTURE: Fueled anti-Catholic riots, the American Republican Party and Know Nothings; religion used to define 'un-American.'

Nativism

Movement favoring native-born white Protestants and restricting foreigners; also racialized the Irish as 'Celtic.' WHEN: 1830s-50s, 1870s-80s, 1900s-20s. BIG PICTURE: Recurring reaction behind most restrictions; only the target group changes.

Know Nothing Party

American Party: 21-year naturalization wait, office only for native-born Protestants, pauper deportation; won Massachusetts 1854 (school Bible reading, disbanded Irish militias). WHEN: 1850s, peak 1854-56. BIG PICTURE: First national nativist party; collapsed over slavery.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Ended the Mexican-American War; Mexico ceded about half its territory and Mexican residents could become US citizens. WHEN: 1848. BIG PICTURE: Mexican Americans created by conquest; citizenship often ignored in practice.

Homestead Act

160 acres of public land for adults who were or intended to become citizens, after 5 years of living on and improving it. WHEN: 1862. BIG PICTURE: Pull factor for the Midwest and Plains; land taken from Native nations.

Scandinavian immigrants

About 2.5 million came up to the 1920s, mostly to the Upper Midwest, drawn by land like the Homestead Act. Fur: land was not empty (1862 Dakota War); two 'fictions' of vanishing Indians and friendly relations. WHEN: 1860s-1920s. BIG PICTURE: Seen as ideal immigrants, got the largest quotas; settlement as dispossession.

Playing Indian

Philip Deloria: white Americans taking Native names, dress and rituals to claim an 'authentic' American identity; Fur applies it to Scandinavians and links it to 'firsting.' WHEN: 1770s onward. BIG PICTURE: Connects nativism to settler colonialism.

Foreign Miners' Tax

California tax on foreign miners, neutral in wording but aimed at Mexicans, Latin Americans and later Chinese. WHEN: 1850 (repealed 1851), second law 1852. BIG PICTURE: Early economic discrimination in neutral language, a step toward exclusion.

Mob violence against Chinese immigrants

Shift from legal and economic discrimination to violence (1871 Los Angeles massacre, 1885 Rock Springs) to remove competition and pressure the federal government. WHEN: 1870s-1880s. BIG PICTURE: Violence and law worked together to produce exclusion.

Page Act

First federal restrictive immigration law: barred coolie labor, convicts and women brought for 'lewd and immoral' purposes; used against Chinese women. Luibheid: the wife/prostitute line is about power, and enforcement created interrogation, photographs and case files. WHEN: 1875. BIG PICTURE: Began federal control of immigration and policing of women's sexuality.

White slavery

Moral panic about forced prostitution, used to bar and screen immigrant women (Page Act, 1907 Immigration Act, 1910 Mann Act). WHEN: 1875-1910s. BIG PICTURE: Gender and sexuality fears became grounds for exclusion.

Denis Kearney

Irish-born leader of the Workingmen's Party of California who blamed Chinese workers for the depression. WHEN: 1877. BIG PICTURE: An immigrant group accepted as 'white' turned on another; pushed Congress toward 1882.

Chinese Exclusion Act

Suspended Chinese labor immigration for 10 years and barred Chinese naturalization; first ban by nationality; merchants and students exempt. WHEN: 1882 (Geary Act 1892, permanent 1902, repealed 1943). BIG PICTURE: Model for later restriction; created Angel Island inspections and paper sons.

Case files

Government records on individuals: interrogations, photographs, measurements, medical reports. Luibheid: began with Page Act enforcement; ancestor of passports and biometrics; not neutral evidence. WHEN: 1870s onward. BIG PICTURE: The paper trail of the screening system.

Angel Island

SF Bay immigration station where Asian arrivals, mainly Chinese, were interrogated and often detained. WHEN: 1910-1940. BIG PICTURE: West Coast counterpart to Ellis Island; Bayor: presumption of exclusion, about 25% rejection of Chinese.

Paper sons

Chinese immigrants entering with false papers as sons of US-citizen Chinese men; the 1906 earthquake destroyed records; applicants memorized coaching details. WHEN: c. 1906-1940s. BIG PICTURE: Resistance to exclusion by gaming the system.

Gentlemen's Agreement

Japan stopped issuing passports to laborers; the US agreed not to pass a formal exclusion law and ended SF school segregation. WHEN: 1907-1908. BIG PICTURE: Diplomatic limit on Asian immigration; ended in practice with 1924.

Asiatic Barred Zone

Part of the 1917 Act banning immigrants from most of Asia and the Pacific; targeted South Asians and anti-colonial activists like the Ghadar Party. WHEN: 1917. BIG PICTURE: Sohi: joined Asian exclusion and suppression of radicals; tied immigration to security and empire.

Racial ineligibility for citizenship

Legal category 'aliens ineligible to citizenship' from the 1790 'free white persons' rule; blocked Asians from naturalizing, owning land and (after 1924) entering; Mexican status contested (Andrade 1935, 1937 INS circulars). WHEN: 1790-1952. BIG PICTURE: Citizenship law was the foundation of the exclusion system.

Thind v. US

Supreme Court held a Sikh veteran from India was not a 'free white person' by common understanding, not science. Lopez: science used only when it excluded; at least 65 Asian Indians denaturalized. WHEN: 1923, after Ozawa (1922). BIG PICTURE: Race decided by public opinion; reinforced ineligibility.

Likely to Become a Public Charge

Rule letting officials bar or deport noncitizens likely to depend on charity; vague, so inspectors had wide discretion. WHEN: 1882 Act, strengthened 1891 and 1903-07; still law. BIG PICTURE: All-purpose screening tool; roots in fear of assisted Irish paupers (Hirota).

Ellis Island

NY Harbor inspection station for most European arrivals; about 14 million passed through 1892-1924 and roughly 250,000 were rejected (Bayor). WHEN: 1892-1954. BIG PICTURE: Presumption of admission, but still a medical and moral inspection system; contrast with Angel Island.

Public health officials

Public Health Service doctors who ran medical inspections at ports; made 'medicalized nativism' possible. Molina: LA's Pomeroy cast Japanese farmers as a 'medicalized yellow peril' and Mexican workers were deloused with coal oil in 1916. WHEN: 1890s-1920s+. BIG PICTURE: Discrimination framed as science and safety.

Mental health and migration

Quick inspections for 'feebleminded,' 'idiot' and 'insane' immigrants, tied to the public charge rule. WHEN: 1880s-1910s, IQ testing in the 1910s. BIG PICTURE: Eugenics-style ideas of 'fitness' given legal force.

Eugenics

Pseudoscientific movement claiming traits are inherited and ranking human populations. WHEN: term from 1880s, peak c. 1900-1940. BIG PICTURE: Gave scientific language to the 1924 quotas (Albert Johnson hired Harry Laughlin) and to sterilization laws; also an American movement, not only Nazi.

"Scientific" racism

Ideology using craniology, social Darwinism and eugenics to claim fixed biological differences between races, including European 'Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean.' WHEN: late 19th-early 20th century. BIG PICTURE: Expert-sounding justification for exclusion, quotas and court rulings.

Literacy test

1917 requirement that adult immigrants read a short passage (in any language); passed over Wilson's veto; little effect, which pushed restrictionists to quotas. WHEN: 1917. BIG PICTURE: Shifted screening from health to cultural/ideological control (Tichenor: WWI anti-'hyphenated American' campaign).

1917 Immigration Act

Created the literacy test and Asiatic Barred Zone, added excluded categories (including radicals and 'constitutional psychopathic inferiority'), and extended the deportation window from 3 to 5 years (Sohi). WHEN: 1917. BIG PICTURE: Bridge between case-by-case screening and 1920s quotas.

"New" immigration

Wave from southern and eastern Europe (Italians, Poles, Slavs, Greeks, Jews) versus 'old' northern/western Europe; supplied labor for steel, meatpacking, mining, garment work. WHEN: c. 1880-1924. BIG PICTURE: Turned European groups into 'races' targeted by nativism and the 1924 quotas.

Progressive Era

Period of industrial and urban growth and reform: regulation, public health, Americanization, but also restriction and eugenics. WHEN: c. 1890s-1920. BIG PICTURE: Tichenor: reforms weakened parties that protected open immigration and trusted expert commissions.

"Americanization from the bottom up"

Barrett: workers Americanized through shop floors, unions and radical parties, not only Ford-style top-down programs (1917 melting-pot pageant); WWI strengthened this and the Red Scare broke it ('enforced Americanization'). WHEN: c. 1880-1930. BIG PICTURE: Immigrants as active shapers of assimilation.

Melting pot

Idea that the US blends peoples into one new American people; popularized by Zangwill's 1908 play; Ford's 1917 pageant staged it. WHEN: 1908 onward. BIG PICTURE: Critics say people were expected to melt into Anglo norms and non-white groups were left out.

Anzia Yezierska

Polish-born Jewish immigrant author; in 'Soap and Water' a dean says 'soap and water are cheap' while ignoring the narrator's laundry work. WHEN: early 1900s New York. BIG PICTURE: Cleanliness as a class and ethnic test of being American, like medicalized nativism.

"Birds of passage"

Immigrants who came temporarily to work and save, then return home (Italians, Greeks, Chinese men, Mexican workers). WHEN: c. 1880-1930. BIG PICTURE: Employers wanted flexible labor; nativists saw them as uncommitted; Mexican workers' temporary status made repatriation easier.

Red Scare

Fear of communists, anarchists and labor radicals after WWI, tied to immigrants. WHEN: 1919-1920. BIG PICTURE: Led to mass arrests and deportations and, per Tichenor, made business groups like the NAM temporarily back restriction.

Palmer Raids

Raids by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer on union halls, radical meeting places and immigrant centers; thousands arrested, hundreds deported (Union of Russian Workers, IWW). WHEN: 1919-1920. BIG PICTURE: Immigration law used as a weapon against labor and political radicals.

Marcus Garvey

Jamaican-born Black nationalist who founded the UNIA; watched by the Bureau of Investigation, convicted of mail fraud in 1923, deported in 1927. WHEN: late 1910s-1927. BIG PICTURE: Deportation used against radical noncitizen leaders of color.

National Origins quotas

Caps by nationality: 1921 used 3% of the 1910 population, 1924 (Johnson-Reed) 2% of 1890; about 84% of slots to northern/western Europe vs 16%; Asians barred; Mexico not under quotas. WHEN: 1921-1965. BIG PICTURE: Wrote a racial hierarchy of nations into law; product of nativism, eugenics, Progressive-era institutions.

Border Patrol

Force created to police the border between ports of entry, mainly the Mexican border; 1917 El Paso health inspections came first; 1929 Blease Act made entry a misdemeanor and re-entry a felony. WHEN: 1924. BIG PICTURE: Quotas skipped the Western Hemisphere, so enforcement shifted to the Mexican border (State Dept cut visas in 1928 after Box bills failed).

Mexican repatriation

Depression-era removal of people of Mexican descent through pressure, raids and 'voluntary' departures; about 1 million, many US citizens (about 60%); local welfare offices, trains, 1932 Progreso ship; LA lost about a third of its Mexican population. WHEN: c. 1929-1939. BIG PICTURE: Boom-and-bust labor pattern; citizenship gave little protection.