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Conventional histories of U.S. immigration policy generally present the starting point as laissez-faire, or open door, an attitude that only shifted to favor increased restriction after the Civil War. The door began to close with the exclusion of Chinese in the final decades of the 19th century and the imposition of annual quotas for Europeans in the 1920s.
While this timeline indeed highlights important aspects of U.S. immigration policy, it distorts the larger reality. As its title suggests, my book A Nation by Design argues instead that from colonial times onward, Americans actively devised policies and laws that effectively shaped the country's population and hence its overall makeup. In this perspective, the United States is distinct from other overseas nations of European origin where immigration remained largely governed by the imperial governments or, in the case of the precociously independent South American states, hardly governed at all.
Since before the Revolutionary War, in which the country successfully gained its independence from England, Americans not only set conditions for membership but decided quite literally who would inhabit the land. They drove out and ultimately eradicated most of the original dwellers. They actively recruited those considered most suitable, kept out undesirables, stimulated new immigration flows from untapped sources, imported labor, and even undertook the removal of some deemed ineligible for membership.
On the positive side, American policy initially extended well beyond laissez-faire to proactive acquisition, reflected in multiple initiatives to obtain immigrants from continental Europe by insisting on their freedom of exit at a time when population was still regarded as a scarce, valuable resource preciously guarded by territorial rulers.
Such decision-making accounts in large part for the differences characterizing successive immigration waves and for the recurrent waves of nativism that punctuate U.S. immigration history. It also illustrates the persistence of identity-related and economic concerns.
From the economic perspective, immigration is viewed essentially as a source of additional labor, which reduces its price, or at least prevents it from rising; in the case of the highly skilled, it also externalizes the costs of training. Therefore, business interests have been generally supportive of immigration. By the same token, from its inception, organized labor has tended to view immigration as a threat (although unions began to embrace immigrants in the 1970s).
Most labor migration brings in people who differ culturally from the bulk of the established population, as signified by language, religion, and ethnicity, often manifested in phenotypical characteristics. Hence, the tapping of new sources of immigration frequently triggers confrontations in what are now termed "culture wars" between those intent upon preserving the nation's established boundaries of identity and those more tolerant of their broadening, who include the new immigrants themselves and their descendants.
The intersection of these identity and economic concerns explains why, throughout its history, immigration policy in the United States has recurrently opened the door to migrants from one part of the world while shutting the door for migrants from somewhere else. "Strange bedfellow" political dynamics, with alliances straddling the usual "liberal/conservative" divide, have also resulted from identity and economic concerns.
Policies, labor-recruitment strategies, and popular sentiment from various time periods in U.S. history reflect the tensions and unexpected political alliances. This article will highlight only some of those policies and strategies
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