The Gold Rush immigration laws in California started in 1850 when the new California legislature passed their Foreign Miners License Law This charging all non-U.S. citizens a $20 per month fee. It was repealed a year later, and replaced in 1852 with a similar law charging $2.00 per month.
The 1875 Page Act was the first federal law restricting immigration to the United States. It targeted indentured Chinese labor, particularly women who were assumed to be prostitutes.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The law made exceptions for temporary visitors such as merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplomats. The Immigration Act of 1882 also prohibited entry to the U.S. for convicts, indigent people who could not provide for their own care, prostitutes, and lunatics or idiots.
The 1903 Immigration Act added four more inadmissible classes: anarchists, people with epilepsy, beggars, and importers of prostitutes. This was signed into law by Teddy Roosevelt.
The racist American Madison Grant used his fortune, and political friendships to create the first immigration quotas against the Italians and Polish. (Teddy Roosevelt was his Yale ROOMMATE). Grant's 1905 book "Passing of the Great Race" was translated into German in 1925. Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant thanking for this inspiration.
The Immigration Act of 1907 was a piece of federal United States immigration legislation passed by the 59th Congress and signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt on February 20, 1907.
The Immigration Act of 1917 imposed English literacy tests on immigrants, barred persons suspected of insanity, immorality or disease, and bared all immigration from the Asia-Pacific zone.
The Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 further added numerical limits on immigration. A Congressional subcommittee chaired by Madison Grant led Congress to use the 1890 national census rather than a recent one to increase immigrants from Northern and Western Europe and to decrease those from Eastern and Southern Europe.
The Immigration Act of 1924 was enacted by Calvin Coolidge. It made permanent the earlier limitations on immigration, lowered the numbers of immigrants by nationality. It also added that no alien to be allowed to enter the U.S. without a valid immigration visa issued by an American consular officer abroad. The Act created the Border Patrol that was largely funded by a $10 fee charged at the southern US-Mexican border.
This all remained standard practice until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, and ultimately replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
It is so obvious, but perhaps does need mention that the current GOP election rhetoric falls directly in line with the bigotry over a century ago.
Donald Trump,
Mar 27, 2023, Waco Texas "We’ve been the ones in this fight standing up to the globalists and standing up to the Marxists and communists." ... "But they’re flooding your towns with deadly drugs, selling your jobs to China, mutilating your children." ... "Setting fire to your life savings, releasing violent criminals to prey on innocent people. We have so many people pouring in, and so many of these people are not the people you want coming into our country." ...
"Other countries are emptying out their prisons and sane asylums and mental institutions and sending their most heinous criminals to the United States."
Mar 21, 2024, "Our country’s going downhill very fast, very rapidly. Millions of people coming across the border, coming from jails, from prisons, coming from mental institutions and insane asylums, terrorists." ... "They have to close the borders. Our country is dying. Our country is being overridden. This is an invasion. Our country is being invaded by people nobody even knows who they are, where they come from."
May 29, 2024, Manhatten, N.Y., "For Joe Biden, the worst president in the history of the United States, he’s destroying our country. He’s letting millions of people from jails, from prisons, from insane asylums, from mental institutions, drug dealers, pour in."
July 31, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, "If Harris stays in charge, every single week will bring never-ending streams of illegal aliens, rapists, bloodthirsty killers, and child predators to go after our sons and our daughters and our wives and our husbands."
