Immigration

Strongly supported by President Gerald R. Ford and opposed by those who feared an influx of Southeast Asian refugees after the end of the conflict in Vietnam

Because of Indiana’s history and geographical location, its population has a higher percentage of people who originated in the American South than any other midwestern state.

During the colonial period of British North America, a high proportion of British working-class immigrants to the American colonies came as indentured servants.

In the Parrott ruling, a U.S. district court in California prohibited the application of a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited the employment of Chinese persons in the state.

With each immigration wave that the United States has experienced, the culture and context of life in the United States have changed considerably.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was designed to balance public concerns about increasing illegal immigration with business’s need for cheap labor and the need to address issues of racial and ethnic discrimination.

As the complexities and restrictions of U.S. immigration law have increased, the legal profession’s subspecialty of immigration lawyers has flourished, extending in some cases to social-cause lawyering.

The gatekeeper of the borders of the United States, federal immigration law determines who may enter the country, how long they may stay, their status, their rights and duties while in the United States, and how they may become resident aliens or American citizens.

As a landmark agreement between two sovereign nations designed to protect the human rights of Japanese immigrants relocating to the kingdom of Hawaii, the Immigration Convention reflected less a lofty humanitarian imperative than a pragmatic economic necessity. . .

The St. Cyr decision held that recent federal legislation did not eliminate the federal courts’ jurisdiction to consider habeas corpus petitions from resident aliens who were deportable because of felony convictions.

The Lopez-Mendoza decision upheld very minimal application of Fourth Amendment rights to deportation proceedings, thereby allowing immigration officials to use some improperly acquired evidence when deciding whether noncitizens should be expelled from the country.

Based on the constitutional principles of separation of powers and bicameralism, the Chadha decision prohibited legislation authorizing one house of Congress fromoverriding a decision made by the executive branch.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service was long the primary federal agency responsible for the protection and enforcement of laws guiding the immigration and naturalization processes.

This first major change in U.S. quota policy greatly altered the ethnic makeup of immigrants entering the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and prompted a massive increase in total immigration.

This federal law upheld the national origins quota system established by the Immigration Act of 1924, which gave preference to individuals of northern and western European lineage.

This legislation has been seen as a return to the pre-1920’s open door immigration policy of the United States.

At the height of World War II, when the United States needed to promote goodwill with China, Congress repealed an 1882 federal immigration statute restricting all Chinese from entering the country and considerably eased the process of naturalization for those Chinese already residing in America.

The act represented the first major attempt to restrict immigration into the United States.

The first federal law in U.S. history to limit the immigration of Europeans, the Immigration Act of 1921 reflected the growing American fear that people from southern and eastern European countries not only did not adapt well into American society but also threatened its very existence.

The Immigration Act of 1917 was the first federal law to impose a general restriction on immigration in the form of a literacy test.

This law created the Dillingham Commission to collect data used in future immigration laws, further narrowed Asian immigration, limited Muslim immigration, and expanded the definition of undesirable women immigrants.

The Immigration Act of 1903 expanded the federal government’s power to regulate immigration.

Beginning in 1882, responsibility for administering U.S. immigration law, excluding the Chinese exclusion law, rested with the individual states.

Setting the basic course of United States immigration law and policy, the Immigration Act of 1882 established categories of foreigners deemed “undesirable” for entry and gave the U.S. secretary of the treasury authority over immigration enforcement.

Immigrant aid organizations played an important role in helping immigrants to establish themselves in the United States.