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The majority of African slaves came to the future United States before it gained independence. The numbers remain less than clear, but it is believed that some 300,000 slaves arrived in the States before Independence, and some 100,000 were imported in the period between the American Revolutionary War and the American Civil War. The slave trade was outlawed in 1808, upon the expiration of a constitutional clause prohibiting such a law (Article 1, section 9).
And while history tends to emphasize the British shipment of convicts to its Australian colony, between 1700 and 1770, some 50,000 European convicts were also crossed the seas to North America in an earlier penal transportation system.
Germans made up almost one-tenth of the population of the country by the end of the 18th century. At least 500,000 Germans immigrated in the first half of the 19th century. 20,000 came in the years 1816-1817, fleeing a famine. Some 60,000 fled to America after the failed Revolutions of 1848.
The 1850 United States census was the first federal U.S. census to query about the "nativity" of citizens—where they were born, either in the United States or outside of it—and is thus the first point at which solid statistics become available.
Between 1850 and 1930 about 5 million Germans immigrated to the United States with a peak in the years between 1881 and 1885, when a million Germans left Germany and settled mostly in the Midwest.
Between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 French Canadians left Canada to emigrate to the United States and settled mainly in New England. Given the French-Canadian population at the time, this was a massive exodus. 13.6 million Americans claimed to have French ancestry in the 1980 census. Indeed, a large proportion of them have ancestors who emigrated from French Canada.
The years 1910 to 1920 were the highpoint of Italian immigration to the United States. Over 2 million Italians immigrated in those few years of a total of 5.3 million who immigrated between 1820 and 1980.
Many Jews who tried to flee Nazi Germany were denied access to the United States, highlighted by the tragedy of the S.S. St. Louis, The Tragedy of the S.S. St. Louis.
The first naturalization law in the United States was the 1795 Naturalization Act which restricted citizenship to "free white persons" who had resided in the country for five years. The next significant change in the law came in 1870, when the law was broadened to allow both Whites and African-Americans, though Asians were still excluded from citizenship. Immigration was otherwise unlimited.
In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act specifically forbid Chinese immigration, overturning the 1868 Burlingame Treaty which had encouraged it. The "temporary" ban was extended repeatedly and made permanent in 1904. It was the culmination of decades of agitation, particularly by Californians, who had passed their own Anti-Coolie Act in 1862. The ban was deeply resented but was not repealed until 1943, and only then to reward a wartime ally. In order to avoid the same humiliation, the Empire of Japan negotiated the Gentlemen's Agreement in 1907, a protocol that required Japan to prevent her citizens from emigrating to the US in exchange for better treatment of those already living there.
Congress also banned persons because of their health, beliefs, or lack of education. An 1882 law banned entry of "lunatics" and infectious disease carriers, and the 1901 Anarchist Exclusion Act kept people out because of their political beliefs. A literacy requirement was added in Immigration Act of 1917 .
On May 19, 1921, the United States Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act establishing national quotas on immigration. The quotas were based on the number of foreign-born residents of each nationality who were living in the United States as of the 1910 census. A more complex quota plan replaced this "emergency" system under the Immigration Act of 1924. One major change was that the reference census used was changed to that of 1890, which greatly reduced the number of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. Immigrants from most of the Western Hemisphere, however, were admitted outside the quota system.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (the McCarran-Walter Act) revised the quotas again. This law based its quotas on the 1920 census. Nevertheless, most of the quota allocation still went to immigrants from Ireland, the United Kingdom and Germany.
The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 (the Hart-Cellar Act) abolished the system of national-origin quotas. There was for the first time a limitation on Western Hemisphere immigration (120,000 per year), with the Eastern Hemisphere limited to 170,000. Most of these numbers were allocated to immigrants who were relatives of United States citizens.
Several pieces of legislation signed into law in 1996 marked a turn towards harsher policies for both legal and undocumented immigrants. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act vastly increased the categories of criminal activity for which immigrants, including green card holders, can be deported and imposed mandatory detention for certain types of deportation cases. As a result, well over 1,000,000 individuals have been deported since 1996.
See also: List of United States Immigration Acts
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