Foundation in Racial Animus

U.S. immigration policy has been based on racial expulsion from its very foundations. Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century and lasting into the 1940s, nativism directed against non-white immigrants swept across the nation. More precisely, nativist ire was directed against any immigrants who were not from northern and western Europe. The Chinese were the first to bear the brunt of the nativist backlash with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. But eventually all Asians, as well as immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, were defined as racially inferior to U.S.-born Anglos to help justify subjecting them to stringent restrictions on their entry into the United States. As the decades wore on, similar prejudice was directed against Mexicans and other immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean Basin who were deemed threatening to the cultural and economic interests of native-born people of western European descent. Eventually, once most Europeans began to be considered white, enforcement shifted to primarily target Mexican immigrants. (American Immigration Council. February 2021)