My grandmother was an immigrant. She migrated to this great nation with her parents from Russia just after World War I ended. She left something like 10 older brothers and sisters behind. She came to these shores just before the nativist government of her time clamped down on the immigration of eastern and southern European Jews and Catholics who came over in droves between 1880 and 1917.
At that time, the KKK ruled politics in many rural parts of the country, north and south, east and west. Its anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism led to severe national immigration quotas that reflected its bigotry. So what happened to my grandmother's siblings that did not migrate?(more below the fold)
Well-- I believe the plan was for her parents and family tomake some money and send for them to come eventually. After all, this was how she and her parents had been able to come -- with money sent from successful relatives who migrated earlier. But the 1921 & 1924 immigration quotas ended those hopes. It slowed legal immigration to a mere trickle-- a smidgen of what it was before from these regions.
As had happened in the 1790s, 1850s and 1880s, politicians in the 1920s exploited irrational xenophobia, blatant discrimination and religious prejudice to virtually cut off immigration from southern and eastern Europe -- see David Bennett, Party of Fear.
My grandmother's siblings who didn't migrate? They were among the hundreds of thousands of innocents shot en masse by the Nazis in their rampage through western Russia in 1941.