Immigration and International Relations

International relations are a major but often overlooked aspect of immigration policies which are responsible for maintaining convenient traveling conditions for migrants whose travels improve relationships between allied countries.  These kinds of lawful migrations include journeys for legal immigration, diplomacy, business and commerce, education, research, sharing of technology and expertise, tourism, and many other kinds of exchanges for matters such as culture and athletics.  The majority of persons affected by immigration policy are those who regularly circulate for such collaborative purposes even though most public awareness and resources are directed to identifying and managing restricted categories of persons.  Restrictions against excluded persons attract so much attention and generate so much conflict because targets for exclusion are fraught subjects.  Selectively banning or limiting migration may be seen as insults to other countries or as targeting certain populations in ways that signal national disdain and even outright hostility with damaging effects on international relationships and possibly how Americans are treated abroad.

Political threats were the targets of the United States’ earliest immigration restrictions.  These laws responded to specific circumstances and were not systematically enforced.  The 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts sought to limit migrants in anticipation of a war with France and made citizenship by naturalization more difficult to obtain.  An 1803 ban on entry by “negroes” targeted participants in the Haitian Revolution in fears that they would spread anti-slavery campaigns.  During the twentieth century, barring entry to proponents of unwelcome political beliefs led Congress to restrict anarchists (1903) and radicals (1918) by legalizing measures to round up and expel targeted activists in the Palmer Raids.  The Cold War identified leftists and communists as threats to national security and added provisions for their detention and removal in the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act.  In the twenty-first century, in the wake of 9-11, the United States has enacted measures to track and restrict potential terrorists and the use of airplanes as weapons of mass destruction.

The next intersection of foreign relations and immigration and citizenship policy arose with the many foreign populations that became part of the United States through conquest and colonization.  Their statuses were also handled through treaty negotiations.  Such processes began with the claiming of indigenous lands starting with the thirteen colonies and continuing throughout the United States’ westward expansion toward the Pacific.  Legally, Native Americans were considered citizens of their sovereign tribal nations,  not of the United States, through a complicated system of treaties and the reservation lands on which they lived.  Not until 1924 did Native American peoples uniformly receive rights of U.S. citizenship by birth.  Mexicans also became part of the United States through the U.S.-Mexican War and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.  Those choosing to remain resident gained citizenship automatically.  When the United States claimed overseas territories in 1898, the new colonial subjects received varying legal statuses.  That year, the United States formally annexed Hawaii and acquired Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines after the Spanish American War.  Hawaiians and Puerto Ricans gained citizenship and  Cubans eventually gained their independence.  In contrast, the Philippines became an unincorporated U.S. colony so that Filipinos were considered U.S. nationals with rights only to travel to the United States, but not gain citizenship.  Continuing Filipino migrations within the U.S. empire aggravated anti-Asian tensions during the 1920s and 1930s because it continued after the exclusion of all other Asians.  West coast agitations against Filipinos led Congress to enact the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, which granted the Philippines eventual independence so that Filipino immigration could be restricted.

When the United States began actively trying to limit immigration, it did so by race and nationality with the U.S. government taking the precaution of first diplomatically negotiating its rights to restrict immigration with the targeted countries.  Chinese (1882)* and then Japanese (1907-08)* were the earliest targets of U.S. restrictions because they were seen as obviously unsuitable immigrants who were racially distinct, inferior, and therefore unassimilable.  Even so, the United States enacted restrictions only after receiving concurrence from the Chinese and Japanese governments.  The international nature of immigration restriction is also illustrated by the Customs Bureau serving as the first federal agency tasked with enforcing immigration laws because it had the most closely aligned mission, personnel, and office locations through its supervision of international trade.

Despite having gained the Chinese government’s agreement to its right to “restrict” Chinese immigration, in practice the United States interpreted the laws more aggressively than did the Chinese.  As enforcement of the anti-Chinese laws reached for outright exclusion, the Chinese government steadily objected to the accumulation of legal discriminations afflicting Chinese as legally excluded persons.  In the face of this opposition, the U.S. government nonetheless continued to assert and expand its authority over immigration and excludable immigrants in cases specifically involving Chinese [Chae Chan Ping 1889, Fong Yueting 1893, Wong Wing 1896].  By the 1910s, the United States was moving toward enacting immigration laws largely as a matter of domestic, sovereign authority.  This standard of independent national-state authority over immigration was gaining acceptance around the world.  Other international conventions developed concerning practices for the handling migrants including deported or excluded persons, extradition, visa processing and verification, and enforcement of entry restrictions.

Campaigns to limit immigration gained national urgency during the 1890s in response to rising levels of immigration comprised increasingly of southern and eastern Europeans, including more Jews and Catholics.  Seeking to reduce these numbers and maintain a demographic balance closer to that of the early republic with its predominantly western and northern European Protestants, the United States enacted its strictest immigration laws in the 1920s.  It imposed a system of quantitative caps allocated by national origins and banned altogether immigration from Asia.  Following World War I, public support for such isolationism was propelled by many additional factors such as the moral decay of European civilization that the war had revealed and fears of spreading radicalism after the Russian Revolution.  Overall immigration plummeted several-fold for several decades following.  Improved enforcement procedures in which diplomatic offices abroad handled approval of visa and passport applications prevented millions of potential immigrants from even departing for U.S. shores.  In contrast, no immigration limits were imposed on neighboring countries within the American hemisphere in order to maintain friendly relations, acknowledge the realities of trans-border communities, and facilitate long-standing economic partnerships.

Not until World War II did the United States acknowledge international relations that applied pressures to liberalize immigration laws.  The United States sought to exert global leadership which required the strengthening of political alliances, particularly with Asian nations that had previously had their immigration barred altogether.  Immigration reforms started with the repeal of Chinese exclusion in 1943 and then immigration reforms affecting India and the Philippines [Luce Celler] in 1946.  The Cold War required even broader reforms with many new nations in Asia, the Pacific, Caribbean, and Africa emerging from decolonization.  The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act ended racial restrictions on citizenship and provided for each of these new countries to receive immigration quotas even as it maintained clear preferences for immigration from Europe.

World War II had resulted in the redrawing of many national boundaries, while the Cold War propelled the hardening of many political divides, particularly between the communist and democratic world systems.  These divisions produced millions of displaced persons and refugees who required new homes.  International conventions developed that authorized immigration and sanctuary provisions for refugees and asylum seekers.  The United Nations passed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations High Commission on Refugees issued standards in the 1951 Refugee Convention on Human Rights.  Current international policies date to these documents and require consideration for all asylum seekers fleeing persecution so that they might gain sanctuary and not be forced to return to a place in which they face danger.  See the teaching module on refugees and asylum seekers for more information.

The Cold War and the Civil Rights movement applied heavy pressures for the United States to find rationales for restricting immigration to replace offensive policies that prioritized race and national origins as the main criteria for admissibility.  The pathway to more acceptable priorities in immigration restriction could be found even in its earliest, most discriminatory laws.  As early as the 1882 anti-Chinese law, exemptions had been made for persons whose journeys were seen as beneficial or neutral in impact, such as diplomats, merchants and their families, tourists, and students.  In particular, students from around the world found welcome in U.S. university and college campuses because international education programs were believed to spread the influence of the United States by inculcating the leaders of poorer and struggling societies to emulate U.S. civilization, progress, and values.  In the first decades of the 1900s, the U.S. government even provided scholarships for elite Chinese (1909-29) and Filipino students (1903-10) to study in the United States with many graduates returning to their homelands to assume leading roles in government.

Immigration restrictions have always accommodated and protected international students.  After World War II, international education and exchange programs became staple Department of State programs with funding authorized by  the Smith-Mundt and Fulbright Acts.  The numbers of international students coming to the United States has steadily increased, as did the realization that elite students from around the world with established educational credentials and training in practical fields were also promising candidates to become highly productive U.S. citizens.

The 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act incorporated these changing views of immigration and international relations by removing the offensive preferences based on race and national origins and providing permanent admissions for refugees, giving all countries the same immigration quotas, and prioritizing family reunification and employment and educational attainment.  This law enabled dramatic increases in legal immigration from diverse parts of the world even as it generated new problems.

Unexpectedly, the imposition of the same quantitative limits on immigration from all countries produced intractable problems with the U.S.’s neighbors.  Proximity and shared physical spaces fostered much higher levels of regular crossings and circular migrations for employment, family and friendships, business, and other aspects of daily life.  The shortfall between the quantitative limits imposed by U.S. immigration policy and what had been local travel for regular daily life led to restricted border crossings that have produced a sizable population of unauthorized immigrants.  The 1986 Immigration and Reform Control Act sought unsuccessfully to resolve this situation by granting amnesty to long-term residents with no criminal records while strengthening provisions for border controls and enforcement of employment restrictions.  The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act added further enforcement measures targeting employment and border control.  Despite these efforts, unauthorized migrations have continued and constitute severe strains on U.S. relations to its poorer neighboring countries.

The twenty-first century witnessed dramatic expansion of immigration enforcement institutions.  9-11 inflamed concerns about national security related to immigration and border control, leading to the establishing of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002 to consolidate and expand security and policing operations, including the rounding up, detention, and deportation of unauthorized immigrants.  Relations with neighboring American nations have become straitened with the criminalization of migrant circulations that are continuations of historic flows of peoples traveling for economic, familial, and social purposes between interlocking areas.  The changes in immigration enforcement have produced conditions by which about 11 million unauthorized immigrants reside in the United States.  Although these unauthorized immigrants largely do not pose security risks they cannot attain legal status because they have violated U.S. immigration laws and are a permanent group of second-class citizens.  The challenges they pose to the democratic ideals of the United States and its relations to its nearest neighbors highlight serious  failings of current immigration policy and enforcement.  Improved policies and practices would serve more effectively to identify and exclude threats to the United States, while protecting cooperative and benign migrations shared by the United States and its closest neighbors.