![]() ![]() The anti-German propaganda campaigns of the World-War-I-era and the rise of the Bolshevik government in Russia fed fears of infiltration by enemy aliens, anarchists, and other subversives and led to further calls for restrictions on immigration. An effort to restrict immigration began in the 1890s as populations from Southern and Eastern Europe became the dominant arrivals on US shores. Although some groups, such as the Irish, met with anti-immigrant hostility, most immigrants found their way into burgeoning American industries with their insatiable demand for cheap labor or they fanned out onto the great American prairies to work on farms and perhaps own one. ![]() (Asian immigrants were another story-they were pretty much excluded late in the century.) Poor health was the major ground for exclusion from entry up to 1917. Waves of immigrants flowed from Europe without many legal barriers. Through most of the nineteenth century, immigration to the United States was largely unrestricted. Trump-falling over each other in proposing draconian solutions to stanch the flow of immigrants.įor the 1920s, the issue was imposing restrictions on legal immigration but the debate has many echoes of today’s arguments. ![]() Reading through the popular magazines of the period-as I have been doing for a major study of them as a reflection of popular thinking in the Jazz Age-offers a compelling counterpoint to the raucous debate today, with the opponents of illegal immigration-spurred by the outspoken Mr. The early 1920s was the decade in which immigration was front and center in American political debate and the decisions made then shaped the course of American policy-for good and ill-for nearly the next half-century. The emergence of immigration as a major issue worldwide and especially in the presidential campaign-thanks to Donald Trump’s vociferous attack on alleged rapists, drug dealers, and other criminals sneaking across the southern border, to say nothing of the threat posed by terrorists hiding among Moslem refugees-is not, of course, the first time Americans have debated the issue of access to American society by aliens. ![]()
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