The McCarran-Walter Act reformed some of the blatantly discriminatory provisions of immigration law. While the law provided quotas for all nations and ended racial restrictions on citizenship, it expanded immigration law enforcement and aggressively maintained national origin quotas. 1956-1957: The United States admits about 38,000 immigrants from Hungary after a failed uprising against the Soviets. They were among the first refugees of the Cold War. The United States will host more than 3 million refugees during the Cold War. Here are the events that have shaped the turbulent history of immigration to the United States since its birth. Until the end of the 19th century, there was no « illegal » or « legal » immigration to the United States. Because before you can immigrate illegally somewhere, there has to be a law that you have to break. American immigration did not begin until the late 1700s.

This law added further exemptions to immigration restrictions through national quotas by classifying intercountry adoption as a form of family reunification. Recent changes in immigration policy have been an exception to this trend. In 2012, President Obama took executive action to allow young adults who had been illegally brought into the country to apply for deportation facilities and work permits. In 2014, he expanded this program (known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA) and established a new program to provide similar benefits to certain unauthorized immigrant parents of U.S.-born children. The expansion of DACA and the new program (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents or DAPA) are suspended due to a legal challenge by 26 states. Congress has expanded the national immigration authority to improve enforcement of China`s exclusion laws. It abolished one of the emergency statutes, return workers and blocked about 20,000 Chinese with certificates of return outside the United States. From 1900 to 1920, nearly 24 million immigrants arrived during the so-called « Great Wave. » The outbreak of World War I reduced immigration from Europe, but mass immigration resumed after the war ended, and Congress responded with a new immigration policy: the national origin quota system was adopted in 1921 and revised in 1924.

Immigration was limited by assigning each nationality a quota based on its representation in previous U.S. Census counts. This quota particularly favoured immigrants from northwestern Europe. Congress also created the U.S. Border Patrol within the Bureau of Immigrant in 1924. This Supreme Court decision concluded that free slaves and African Americans were not U.S. citizens and were not entitled to the rights and privileges of citizenship, such as the right to sue in federal courts. This legislation opened the door to the immigration of highly skilled workers from countries with low immigration rates and anticipated the emphasis on employment preferences by the Immigration Act of 1965.

In 1990, Congress again reformed immigration laws. The Immigration Act 1990 amended and expanded the 1965 Act; It significantly increased the overall level of immigration to 700,000 and increased available visas by 40%. The law maintained family reunification as the main route of entry, while doubling more than employment-related immigration. The Act also provides for the admission of immigrants from « underrepresented » countries in order to increase the diversity of immigrant flows through the creation of a lottery system. The 1990 Act also commissioned an immigration study, which later became known as the Jordan Commission. Over the next five years, immigration from war-torn parts of Asia, including Vietnam and Cambodia, would more than quadruple. Family reunification has become a driving force behind U.S. immigration. The quota system will be replaced by a seven-category preference system, focusing on family reunification and skilled immigrants.

After signing the new law, President Lyndon B. Johnson called the old immigration system « un-American » and said the new law would correct a « cruel and permanent injustice in the conduct of the American nation. » On the principle that women took citizenship from their husbands, this law stripped U.S.-born women of citizenship if they married men without citizenship. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Alien Contract Labor Acts of 1885 and 1887 prohibited certain workers from immigrating to the United States. The General Immigration Act of 1882 imposed a fifty-cent capitation tax on each immigrant and blocked (or excluded) the entry of idiots, lunatics, convicts, and individuals who might become a public responsibility. This law marked a major shift in U.S. immigration policy toward increasing restriction. The law targeted Chinese immigrants — the first such group to be identified by race and class for severely restricted legal entry and citizenship ineligibility.