Laws
The Naturalization Law of 1795 reflected a consensus among US political leaders that citizenship criteria would be determined by race and belief as opposed to this?
What is status of birth?
These two predominantly Roman Catholic groups arrived in large numbers in the 1840s and 1850s.
Who are the Irish and Germans?
The need for this shaped the generous British immigration policy and that of the United States toward those considered to be white until the early twentieth century.
What is cheap labor?
German and Irish immigrant men fought in large numbers in both armies, and native-born AngloAmericans perceived their military service as a demonstration of patriotism and loyalty. This undermined prejudice against them by the mid-nineteenth century.
What is the Civil War?
According to the Fourteenth Amendment, a person born within the territorial boundaries of the United States is a legal citizen even if their parents were not considered to be. This clarified the citizenship status of formerly enslaved people.
What is birthright citizenship?
These amendments to the Constitution clarified that the federal, rather than state governments regulated naturalization.
What are the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments?
This group sought farmland in Pacific Coast states, where they became successful fruit and vegetable farmers, prompting backlash from white citizens.
Who were Japanese immigrants?
Targeted largely against Roman Catholics, who were a despised religious minority in the early United States, Congress passed this law to empower law enforcement to deport those considered to be enemy aliens. This law reflected a belief that Roman Catholic immigrants were impoverished, unskilled, diseased criminals who were fundamentally loyal to the Pope in Rome and incapable of self-government.
What is the Alien Enemies Act of 1798?
This group provided essential labor during the California gold rush and on transcontinental railroad lines in the West.
Who were Chinese immigrants?
This is the belief that native-born citizens of the United States were/are superior to foreign-born people and that immigrant populations threaten(ed) the integrity of the nation and should, therefore, be regulated/prohibited.
What is nativism?
This law, passed in 1882 and renewed until made permanent in 1904, prohibited the immigration of Chinese working class men and women. (Merchants and students and members of elite families continued to be able to enter the United States.)
What was the Chinese Exclusion Act?
Who are Mexicans?
In contrast to immigrant groups from Europe, whom AngloAmericans believed to be racially different and culturally inferior by capable of assimilation in time, both native-born and immigrant white Americans considered these groups to be inassimilable.
Who were immigrants from Asia, specifically China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines?
The consolidation of land holding and transition to commercial agriculture pushed these people off the land throughout Europe and Asia, prompting consolidation in urban areas and relocation to areas where land was cheaper. In this sense, migration was a form of resistance.
Who are peasant farmers?
Under the Naturalization Law of 1795, Congress reserved US citizenship for this group of people. During the nineteenth century, courts and state legislatures interpreted this to exclude people from Japan, Indian, and Korea while including people from Syria and Armenia.
What is white?
Under this law, Congress established a Superintendency of Immigration within the Treasury Department that oversaw immigrant inspection at centralized ports of entry, including Angel and Ellis Islands; maintained the records of migration; enforced border security; and tracked and apprehended illegal entrants.
What was the 1891 Immigration Act?
Between 1870 and 1920, the majority of the 25 million immigrants to the United States came from these areas of the world and in response to severe economic depression. They were predominantly Roman Catholic and Jewish. Native-born Americans tended to consider them to be racially and culturally inferior and treated them with hostility.
What are southern, central, and eastern Europe?
This organization reemerged in the 1920s throughout the South and Midwest as a mainstream organization opposed to Roman Catholic and Jewish immigration and civic equality for immigrants and African Americans.
What is the Ku Klux Klan?
Because a woman's legal status was subsumed to that of her father then husband, non-citizen females became citizens when marrying citizen men in the nineteenth century. In 1907, Congress clarified that female US citizens who married non-citizen men surrendered their birthright citizenship if they married non-citizen men -- as had been common custom for the last century. The debate over this was resolved by the Cable Act in 1922 and only after the ratification of the 19th Amendment enfranchising women.
What is derivative citizenship?
This law, passed in 1924 created a quota system that limited immigration from beyond the Western hemisphere. Immigration was limited to 2% of populations based on national origin in the 1890 U.S. census.
What was the Johnson-Reed Act?
A powerful mainstream organization comprised of political, social, and religious leaders, this group used eugenic thinking to argue for the restriction of immigration based on a quota system; the inspection of immigrants and exclusion of those deemed physically and mentally unfit; and and the prohibition of marriage between members of those they classed as "different" racial groups. Their vision became law at the state and federal level between the 1890s and 1930s.
What was the Immigration Restriction League (IRL)?
Most immigrants were men, and most women who immigrated were wives, mothers, and daughters arriving in family groups. This ethnic group was unique in women arriving mostly as single women who obtained work as domestics in AngloAmerican households.
Who are Irish women?
Beginning in the late nineteenth century immigrants often supported families in their home country. Still in practice today, these often are associated with communities from which single men came to the United States for temporary work and with the intention to return home.
What were remittances?