WNYC: At Ellis Island, only one percent of immigrants were turned away. (T)here wasn’t a line then.

[pampango]

http://www.wnyc.org/articles/its-free-country/2011/may/27/our-cyclical-history-immigration/

"“You hear this common refrain; when my ancestors came 100 years ago, they did it the right way," Ngai says. "They came legally. They didn’t cut the line. Well, there wasn’t a line then. There wasn’t a restriction for people coming in.”"

Comparing the numbers of immigrants from then to now shows only a slight difference — 25 million people emigrated to the U.S. during the first big wave of immigration, making the percentage of foreign-born people in the U.S. a whopping 15 percent in the 1910s. Today the percentage of foreign-born people is about 12 percent and according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, more than half of this foreign born population is from Latin America.

Legislative Reactions

Chinese Exclusion Act (Passed under a repub president (Arthur) -repealed under FDR)

One of the most restrictive pieces of legislation ever passed, the Chinese Exclusion Act went into effect in 1882 in reaction to a huge wave of Chinese labor immigration to the U.S. during the Gold Rush and railroad expansion of the 1840s and 50s. This Act severely excluded Chinese immigrants from coming to the U.S. to work.

National Origins Act (Passed under a repub president (Coolidge) - replaced under LBJ)

Quantitative regulations were established in 1921 with the National Origins Act, which restricted immigrants from entering the U.S. by national origin through a quota system. This complex law essentially gave preference to immigrants from northern and western Europe but decreased the flow of immigrants from southeastern Europe. This was the standard for the flow of immigration until the mid-1960’s. The act largely excluded the western Hemisphere from the quota system, so Mexicans crossed the border freely for many years — even after the Treaty of Hidalgo gave the U.S. the northern third of Mexico.

Mexican Immigration

In 1924, the U.S. Border Patrol was formally established (by a repub president - Coolidge), a governmental program that has grown immensely over the decades. This significantly affected the lives of Mexicans who traveled back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico for work. Mae Ngai, a history professor at Columbia University, says that this growing legislated definition of “illegality” was a huge barrier for people crossing the border to work, one that Europeans didn't have when they emigrated at the turn of the 20th century. At Ellis Island, only one percent of immigrants were turned away, and today some of the “lines” to emigrate legally are decades long.

http://www.vuvox.com/collage/detail/03fbdc21ae

[emilyg]

1. We went through Ellis Island in

1947 - there were lines.