Waves 1 and 2 of U.S. Immigration

Vocabulary flashcards on key legal concepts, statutory acts, push/pull factors, Supreme Court rulings, and integration models covered in Waves 1 and 2 of U.S. Immigration.

Jus Soli

The right of the soil; citizenship granted by birth on U.S. territory.

Jus Sanguinis

The right of blood; citizenship inherited from parents.

Pledged Allegiance

Naturalization via consent, viewed by the Founders as the primary method for immigrants to enter political life.

Naturalization Act of 1790

A law offering a path to citizenship for "free white persons" of good character after two years of residency, lacking religious or country-of-origin tests, but excluding non-whites, slaves, and indentured servants.

Naturalization Act of 1795

A statutory law that increased naturalization residency requirements to five years and introduced the "good moral character" requirement.

Alien and Sedition Acts (1798)

Acts passed during a period of potential war with France that increased the naturalization residency period to 14 years and granted the President power to deport noncitizens via decree.

Naturalization Law of 1802

A statute that reverted the U.S. residency requirement for naturalization back to five years.

Steerage Act of 1819

An act that indirectly regulated immigration by limiting ship passengers based on tonnage and requiring ship captains to provide passenger manifests, creating the first official federal records of immigration flows.

Irish Potato Famine (1845)

A catastrophic event that served as a primary push factor driving millions of Irish people to seek survival in the United States.

European Revolutions of 1848

Political instability across German territories that pushed craftworkers and political dissidents to emigrate to the U.S.

The Homestead Act of 1862

A law offering land grants to both citizens and immigrants who were willing to develop land for five years.

The Contract Labor Act of 1864

Legislation that allowed private employers to recruit foreign workers and cover their transportation costs in exchange for contracted labor.

Burlingame-Seward Treaty (1868)

A treaty recognizing the mutual advantage of free migration between the U.S. and China, granting Chinese citizens the legal right to emigrate to the U.S. without securing naturalization rights.

Naturalization Act of 1870

A statutory law that extended naturalization rights to "aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent," while explicitly refusing to extend them to Asians.

Page Act of 1875

The first restrictive federal immigration statute, which barred Chinese contract laborers and many Chinese women under the spurious premise that they were prostitutes.

Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)

A statutory restriction imposing a 10-year ban on Chinese laborers, which was subsequently extended by Congress until 1943.

Know-Nothing Party (American Party)

A 1850s political party driven by anti-Catholic sentiment, fears of wage competition, and fear of "pauperism," seeking to raise naturalization residency requirements to 21 years.

Americanization Movement

A collective set of programs pushing for immigrant assimilation, which led to government-mandated school curricula and WWI-era bans on the German language in public schools.

New York v. Miln (1837)

A Supreme Court decision ruling that persons were not "subjects of commerce," thereby allowing individual states to exclude immigrants.

Passenger Cases (1849)

A Supreme Court decision striking down state laws that restricted immigration because they interfered with federal jurisdiction over commerce.

Henderson v. Mayor of New York (1875)

A Supreme Court ruling striking down New York laws requiring bonds or fees for immigrants, confirming that foreign commerce regulation belongs exclusively to Congress.

Head Money Cases (1884)

A Supreme Court ruling confirming Congress's authority to regulate immigration under foreign commerce power, overriding state policies.

Chae Chan Ping v. US (1889)

A Supreme Court case establishing Congress's "plenary power" over immigration as an "incident of sovereignty," using rhetoric of an "Oriental invasion" to justify exclusion.

United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898)

A Supreme Court ruling confirming that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship to children of Chinese immigrants born on U.S. soil.

Cultural Pluralism

An integration concept introduced by Horace Kallen in 1915 advocating for a "confederation of cultures" rather than a uniform "nation of nations."

Symphony Orchestra Metaphor

A metaphor utilized by Horace Kallen to illustrate that each ethnic group functions like an instrument with a unique timbre, creating the "symphony of civilization" through harmony rather than fusion.

The Dillingham Commission (1910)

A commission that produced a report using cherry-picked data to assert that "new immigrants" were fundamentally inferior and less assimilable than "old immigrants," supplying pseudo-scientific grounding for the Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924.