Modern U.S. immigration history is often told as a sweeping narrative of surging numbers during an “open door” era prior to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, followed by sharp decline after the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, and then sudden renewal after the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. These three landmark pieces of legislation, in other words, have frequently anchored the standard periodization for a history of how the United States became a “nation of immigrants.” Indeed, that concept only became widely popular, in turn boosting exceptionalist notions about American identity, after 1965 supposedly inaugurated a new open door era.Footnote ¹

Yet this narrative is in many ways misleading. U.S. immigration law since its initial federal articulations in the late nineteenth century has always been simultaneously open and closed; exclusion and inclusion have always occurred in tandem. During “restrictive” times, immigration law remained pliable and porous enough for certain classes of immigrants to gain admission to the United States based on economic, familial, and geopolitical considerations. And in times of “liberal” immigration policy, U.S. legislators have continued to exclude and remove immigrants in record numbers. Although several factors have shaped U.S. immigration policy, including foreign policy, economics and labor, and national security, a preoccupation with the racial makeup of the immigrants and U.S. society has remained constant. The question, then, is less about how anti-immigrant sentiment could possibly exist in a nation of immigrants and more about how U.S. immigration law has simultaneously sustained a nation of both nativists and immigrants.Footnote ²

The first restrictive federal immigration law in 1875, which barred the immigration of Asian women who had entered into contracts for “lewd and immoral purposes,” built upon a much longer history of restrictions at the state level as well as international treaties that had regulated the movement of people.Footnote ³ Yet the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act and the more general Immigration Act of 1882 dramatically expanded the federal government's authority over immigration. Responding to economic and racial anxieties, the Chinese Exclusion Act excluded Chinese laborers, whom critics accused of lowering wages and thereby undermining white labor. At the height of their greatest numbers, Chinese persons never constituted more than one-twentieth of the total immigrant stream, but they were the first nationality group Congress targeted for restriction on the basis of race and class. The general Immigration Act, meanwhile, established the first guidelines for the federal oversight of immigration and new criteria for excluding certain categories of immigrants, namely the “convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.”Footnote ⁴

Over the next four decades—even as an unprecedented 23.5 million immigrants were admitted into the country—policy makers built an increasingly draconian regime of immigration restriction. Congress made Chinese exclusion—originally meant to be a temporary measure—permanent; the policy remained in place until 1943, when foreign policy priorities during World War II made it untenable. When the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe skyrocketed at the turn of the twentieth century, Congress expanded the categories of excludable immigrants to encompass new so-called “undesirables.” Soon, U.S. law barred anarchists, polygamists, epileptics, and those deemed physically or mentally unfit. In 1917, Congress introduced a literacy requirement, increased the head tax to $8, and identified additional categories of excludable immigrants, provisions aimed primarily at Southern and Eastern European immigrants. The act also created an “Asiatic barred zone” that used geography as a proxy for race, in effect extending the racialized policies of the Chinese Exclusion Act to almost all other Asian immigrants. The flurry of restrictions culminated in the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, which drastically reduced immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and made “aliens ineligible for citizenship”—a legal category for Asians—also ineligible for immigration.Footnote ⁵ This was a seemingly final restrictive push that shut the gates to the United States. The nation, on the face of the law, now welcomed only immigrants from Western and Northern Europe. The foreign-born population of the United States, which had stood at 13.2 percent in 1920, dropped to under 5 percent by 1965. No wonder, then, that 1882 and 1924 are traditionally upheld as signposts for a uniquely restrictionist era of U.S. immigration policy.

Yet immigration to the United States continued after 1924, for both economic and foreign policy purposes. Pressure from business owners seeking cheap labor prompted the government to negotiate a series of guest worker programs that operated outside the limits imposed by the 1924 Immigration Act, most famously the Bracero Program, which brought temporary farm workers from Mexico north of the border during World War II. That 1942 agreement with the Mexican government set a precedent for additional guest worker programs after the war, which in turn brought migrants from the Caribbean, Mexico, and Japan. Many of those who arrived through these programs, often at the encouragement of their employers, remained in the country past the terms of their visas. Other undocumented immigrants excluded from participating in these programs (namely women and children) soon joined them.

Geopolitical dilemmas during World War II also forced U.S. policy makers to reconsider the nation's draconian immigration system. To cement wartime alliances, they lifted the bans on Chinese, Indian, and Filipino migration and granted nationals of these countries the right to naturalize. In the face of postwar demobilization and then Cold War imperatives, Congress also passed the War Brides Act of 1945, the Alien Fiancées and Fiancés Act of 1946, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 (renewed in 1950), and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 to admit thousands of immigrants and refugees who would have been inadmissible before the war. In many respects, these policies remained token gestures. China, India, and the Philippines, for example, received meager annual quotas of 100. The Displaced Persons Acts also overwhelmingly favored European over non-European refugees, privileged the admission of Protestant and Catholic over Jewish refugees, and counted the admitted displaced persons against the yearly quotas assigned to their countries of origin, creating decades-long waiting periods for future immigrants. Still, cracks in the gate, open to temporary workers, family members of U.S. citizens, and other select few, were not trivial. Subtly, the admission of these immigrants communicated evolving judgments about desirable and undesirable immigrants in the decades after 1924; the role of immigration law in promoting the migration of expendable, temporary, and deportable non-white workers; and the manipulation of immigration policy for foreign policy purposes.

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act built upon, rather than departed from, this earlier practice of simultaneously including and excluding newcomers. At the signing ceremony on Liberty Island, President Lyndon Johnson predicted that it would not be “a revolutionary bill.” But in unanticipated ways it profoundly reshaped the ethnic makeup of the U.S. population. If European immigrants predominated under the national origins system, about 60 percent of today's immigrants hail from Mexico, India, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, South Korea, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala.Footnote ⁶ At the same time, the act led to a steep rise in undocumented immigration, especially from the Americas.Footnote ⁷ Until 1965, immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean had entered and left the United States comparatively freely because of the lack of numerical quotas on most of the Americas. First proposed in the 1920s, Congress repeatedly refused to impose any cap on the Western Hemisphere because many legislators quietly acknowledged the need for unskilled labor in the Southwest or believed the United States should honor its Good Neighbor policy.

In 1965, however, restrictionists in Congress successfully argued that the imposition of a global cap on immigration represented an egalitarian remedy to the discriminatory national origins quotas on the Eastern Hemisphere. The 1965 immigration act thus imposed a yearly cap of 120,000 on the Western Hemisphere, a miniscule number compared to the more than 400,000 immigrants and temporary workers who had been coming to the United States from Mexico in the decade prior to 1965. Once the cap was in place, tens of thousands of immigrants suddenly became “unauthorized.”Footnote ⁸ In some sending countries, the waiting period for a green card skyrocketed to a decade or more, leading migrants either to cross the border illegally or to enter the United States with temporary visas and then remain past their expiration. In other words, while often hailed as opening the doors to immigration again, the act just as importantly instituted new forms of restriction and inequality.

The now exacerbated problem of undocumented immigration sparked a new wave of late-twentieth-century policy making. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), for example, signed by Ronald Reagan and lauded by many, expanded legal immigration to the United States as a way to discourage immigrants from entering the country illegally. IRCA also introduced certain “amnesty” provisions that enabled some three million undocumented workers—nearly 70 percent of them Mexican and more than 20 percent of the rest also from the so-called New World—to legalize their status. Once legal, these immigrants sponsored relatives to join them in the United States. At the same time, however, the new act also penalized employers who recruited and hired undocumented immigrants (a policy which proved to be an ineffective deterrent for those seeking cheaper labor), and, more consequentially, ramped up enforcement by increasing the Border Patrol's budget and staffing.

Responding to widespread calls for reform, especially from Californians who blamed immigrants for social tensions, an uptick in crime, and economic difficulties, the Clinton administration rolled out the follow-up legislation “Operation Hold the Line” in 1993 and “Operation Gatekeeper” in 1994. Between 1994 and 2005, the United States built walls around San Diego-Tijuana, El Paso-Ciudad Juarez, and Brownsville-Matamoros and tripled the number of border agents and funding for more high-tech equipment—stadium lighting, electronic sensors, surveillance cameras, infrared night vision equipment, and aircraft. The strategy shifted the routes of illegal entry away from more populous urban areas, pushing immigrants out into the deserts of eastern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas where border crossings became more dangerous and deadly. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) further strengthened the restrictions targeting immigrants from the Americas by significantly increasing the government's use of detention and deportation. Perhaps most pernicious was the law's criminalization of undocumented immigrants: it expanded the range of immigration offenses that could be punished under criminal law; treated minor, nonviolent crimes (e.g., shoplifting or forgery) as “aggravated felonies” under immigration law, even if those same crimes would not be categorized as such under criminal law; and retroactively exposed immigrants to deportation for minor offenses committed decades before. Like many of the previous policies that had racialized and stigmatized immigrants from south of the border, these developments obscured the nation's dependence on migrant labor and instead led to a pervasive association of Mexican immigration with criminality. During the supposedly liberal era of immigration law and policy, the nation fortified its borders in new and ever more powerful ways.

Thus even before 9/11, the United States had the infrastructure, the policies, and the laws to target, police, and deport each new immigrant threat du jour; indeed officials could draw upon a century-long history of selecting some immigrants over others. The United States is a nation of immigrants to be sure—just not any immigrants.

This is how Donald Trump could win the presidency by running on a platform that attacked Mexicans “as rapists and criminals” and promised to build a wall along the U.S.–Mexico border. This modern nation of immigrants has also always been a nation of borders. So, if Trump's Muslim ban stands; if he pardons more figures such as the infamously anti-immigrant former sheriff Joe Arpaio; if the ending of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is not reversed; if only highly skilled immigrants are admitted, and family relations marginalized and vilified as “chain migration,” the question is not, “how is this possible?” Rather, the questions we should be pushing the American public and politicians to engage are: Who is being included? Who is being excluded? On what basis? And most urgently, what does all of this mean for the future of American democracy?