Immigration to the United States

"It's our right as a sovereign nation to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish and love us."

"Note: While there are no rules prohibiting pregnant visitors from entering the United States, doing so to give birth is prohibited. A CBP officer will consider your pregnancy when deciding on your admission."

"GAO analyzed the outcomes of 595,795 asylum applications completed by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) between fiscal years 1995 and 2014, and identified outcome variation both over time and across immigration courts and judges. From fiscal years 2008 through 2014, annual grant rates for affirmative asylum applications (those filed with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at the initiative of the individual and referred to an EOIR immigration judge) ranged from 21 to 44 percent. In the same period, grant rates for defensive asylum applications (those initiated before an immigration judge) ranged from 15 to 26 percent. Further, EOIR data indicate that asylum grant rates varied by immigration court. For example, from May 2007 through fiscal year 2014, the grant rate was 66 percent (affirmative) and 52 percent (defensive) in the New York, New York, immigration court and less than 5 percent (affirmative and defensive) in the Omaha, Nebraska, and Atlanta, Georgia, immigration courts."

"[N]o one can surely be enough of an optimist to contemplate without dread the fast rising flood of immigration now setting in upon our shores. …[T]he immigration of the present time … is tending to bring to us no longer the more alert and enterprising members of their respective communities, but rather the unlucky, the thriftless, the worthless. … There is no reason why every stagnant pool of European population, representing the utterest failures of civilization, the worst defeats in the struggle for existence, the lowest degradation of human nature, should not be completely drained off into the United States. So long as any difference of economic conditions remains in our favor, so long as the least reason appears for the miserable, the broken, the corrupt, the abject, to think that they might be better off here than there, if not in the workshop, then in the workhouse, these Huns, and Poles, and Bohemians, and Russian Jews, and South Italians will continue to come, and to come by millions."

"The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and previleges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment."

"We are African, and we happened to be in America. We're not American. We are people who formerly were Africans who were kidnapped and brought to America. Our forefathers weren't the Pilgrims. We didn't land on Plymouth Rock. The rock was landed on us. We were brought here against our will. We were not brought here to be made citizens. We were not brought here to enjoy the constitutional gifts that they speak so beautifully about today."

"Reviewing the historical and contemporary evidence side by side yields a number of insights. First, the nature of migration selection appears to have changed over time. Whereas, in the past, migrant selection patterns were mixed, with some migrants positively and others negatively selected from their home countries on the basis of skill, migrants today are primarily positively selected from source country populations, at least on observable characteristics. The rise in income inequality in the US can help explain the increasingly positive selection of immigrants seeking to take advantage of the high returns to skill in the US. But the fact that recent immigrants are not negatively selected – even from destinations that are more unequal than the US, as would be predicted by the classic Roy model of self-selection – may be explained by the growing selectivity of US immigration policy over time, or by rising costs of (often undocumented) entry due to strict immigration restrictions."

"[B]oth in the past and today, the evidence is not consistent with the common perception of the “American dream,” whereby immigrants arrived penniless and eventually caught up with US natives. Long-term immigrants in both periods have experienced occupational or earnings growth at around the same pace as natives. As a result, immigrants who held lower-paid occupations than natives upon arrival to the US did not catch up with natives over a single generation. The major difference between the past and present is that, circa 1900, typical long-term immigrants held occupations similar to the native born, even upon first arrival, whereas today the average immigrant earns less than natives upon arrival to the US. Smaller earnings gaps in the past are consistent with the fact that immigrants primarily hailed from European countries that, though poorer than the US, were not as dissimilar in development to the US as are sending countries like Mexico and China today. However, there was a substantial degree of heterogeneity in immigrants' skills and earnings across sending countries, including some immigrant groups that out-earn natives from the outset. We also argue that, when evaluating the pace of immigrant assimilation, methods matter. Studies based on cross-sectional data, which are less well-suited to studying assimilation than are panel data, often provide an overly-optimistic sense of immigrant convergence."

"Both then and now, immigrants appear to reduce the wages of some natives, but the evidence does not support the view that, on net, immigrants have negative effects on the US economy. Instead, new arrivals creates winners and losers in the native population and among existing immigrant workers, reducing the wages of low-skilled natives, encouraging some native born to move away from immigrant gateway cities, and spurring capital investment; in the past, these investments took the form of new factories geared toward mass production."

"The history of immigration to the United States has been shaped both by changes in the underlying costs and benefits of migration as well as by substantial shifts in immigration policy. The high cost of crossing the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave rise to a long period of indentured immigration (c. 1600-1800). With revolutions in shipping technology and a growing reliance on a network of migrant finance, migration costs declined in the mid-nineteenth century, ushering in a sustained Age of Mass Migration from Europe (1850-1920). This period ended with the imposition of a literacy test for entry in 1917 and strict immigration quotas in 1921, which were modified (although not eliminated) in 1965. Most recently, the relaxation of immigration quotas has allowed for a period of constrained mass migration, primarily from Asia and Latin America. The rise of mass migration was associated with the shift from sail to steam technology in the mid-nineteenth century, and a corresponding decline in the time of trans-Atlantic passage. As travel costs fell and migrant networks expanded from 1800 to 1850, the number of unencumbered immigrants entering the US increased substantially. Annual in-migration rose from less than one per 1,000 residents in 1820 to 15 per 1,000 residents by 1850. Throughout the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1920), about 55 million immigrants left Europe, with the US absorbing nearly 30 million of these arrivals (Hatton and Williamson, 1998, p. 7). As a result, the foreign-born share of the population rose from 10 percent in 1850 to 14 percent in 1870, where it remained until 1920."

"Alongside this growth in migrant numbers, falling migration costs also facilitated a shift in the typical mix of sending countries towards poorer countries on the European periphery. In 1850, over 90 percent of the migrant stock hailed from Northern and Western Europe, particularly from the Great Britain, Ireland and Germany. The share of migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe began to rise in 1890; by 1920, 45 percent of the migrant stock was from the “old” sending countries, while 41 percent was from the “new” regions. Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were, on average, younger, more likely to be male and unmarried, and less likely to settle permanently in the US (Hatton and Williamson, 1998, p.11, 101-102). According to official statistics on return migration, first collected in 1908, around 30 percent of European migrants returned to their home country (Gould, 1980; Wyman, 1996); recent work by Bandiera, Rasul, Viarengo (2013) suggests that the return rates from certain countries may have been much higher."

"Rising migrant numbers and, especially, the shift towards new sending countries contributed to the growing political pressure to restrict immigrant inflows. Congress convened the Dillingham Commission in 1907 to study the effect of immigration on the US economy and society. The Commission's report, published in 1911, advocated for a set of additional regulations, including limits on the number of immigrant arrivals, quotas by county-of-origin, and restrictions against immigrants who were illiterate or penurious. All but the wealth requirement were passed over the next decade and the era of open borders came to an end. A literacy test for entry into the US was passed over President Wilson's veto in 1917. In 1921 (amended in 1924), a set of country-specific immigration quotas were imposed. From over a million annual entrants in the late 1910s, immigrant arrivals were capped at 150,000 by 1924. Allocation of quota slots was based on the size of migrant stocks from each country of origin in 1890 (King, 2000, p. 199-217). This early benchmark favored countries in Northern and Western Europe, especially the UK, over the “new” sending countries from Southern and Eastern Europe. Support for immigration restriction was based on concerns about labor market competition, as well as xenophobia and antipathy toward new immigrant arrivals (Goldin, 1994). A shift in the southern vote away from open immigration was decisive in allowing Congress to override the presidential veto."

"Indeed, as a basic Roy model would predict, historical evidence suggests that migration from Western Europe to the US was neutrally selected. Passenger lists of emigrants leaving the German region of Hesse-Cassel in the 1850s reveal that mid-skill level artisans were overrepresented in the migrant flow, as opposed to poor laborers or rich farmers (Wegge, 2002). British immigrants in the 1860s and 1870s were also more likely to have been raised by a father in a semi-skilled profession, as opposed to by an unskilled or white collar father; Long and Ferrie (2013b) observe this pattern in Census data matched between the US and the UK. In contrast, migrants to the US from countries in the European periphery (including Ireland, Norway and Italy) appear to have been negatively selected. Irish migrants from the pre-famine and famine periods held lower-paid occupations than men who remained at home and were more likely to report a round-numbered age; such age heaping is often used as a proxy for a lack of numeracy (Mokyr and Ó Gráda, 1982; Cohn, 1995). Norwegian migrants in a linked Census sample were more likely than non-migrants to be raised by fathers who did not own land and who held lower-paid occupations (Abramitzky, Boustan and Eriksson, 2012). Abramitzky, et al. also find a higher return to migration within pairs of brothers than in the population as a whole, suggesting that naïve estimates of the return to migration are biased downward by negative selection for men leaving urban areas. Spitzer and Zimran (2014) compare the stature of Italian migrants entering the US – logged in Ellis Island arrival records – with the stature of Italian males conscripted into the armed forces as a proxy for childhood health conditions. Migrants were negatively selected on the basis of height from the overall Italian population, due entirely to higher migration rates from the poorer southern provinces."

"Unlike in the past, recent empirical evidence on migrant selection to the US appears to be at odds with predictions from the basic Roy model. In particular, migrants to the US from many sending countries appear to be positively selected in their education and other observable skills, regardless of the differentials in returns to skill between destination and source (Jasso, et al., 2004; Feliciano, 2005; Kennedy, et al., 2006; Grogger and Hanson, 2011). The case of Mexican immigrants has been analyzed most closely. A high level of income inequality in Mexico suggests that the migrant flow out of Mexico should be negatively selected. Instead, early work found that migrants were drawn from the middle of the educational distribution (Chiquiar and Hanson, 2005; Orrenius and Zavodny, 2005). More recent work based on Mexican panel data finds some evidence of negative selection from Mexico, in the sense that migrants earned less than non-migrants in the period before their trip (see Fernandez-Huertas Moraga, 2011; Ambrosini and Peri, 2012; Kaestner and Malamud, 2013). Differences in the two sets of studies could be due to under-enumeration of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the US Census (Ibarraran and Lubotsky, 2007) or to differential selection patterns by observed skill (education) versus labor market productivity (wages)."

"The role of migration costs in generating positive selection need not imply that the poor are priced out of migration because of a lack of credit or financing for their trip. Both in the past and the present, there is evidence that immigrant networks can alleviate such financial constraints. Wegge (1998) compares “networked” migrants in 1850s Germany who shared a surname with other migrants from their village with their “non-networked” counterparts. Networked migrants held substantially less wealth at departure, suggesting that migrant networks served as an effective substitute for self-financing. In Norway in 1900, where mass migration was already underway, individual wealth was a deterrent to (rather than a facilitator of) migration (Abramitzky, Boustan and Eriksson, 2013). Men who grew up in households with assets, particularly those who could expect to inherit their family's land by virtue of birth order and sibling composition, were less likely than others to migrate. A similar pattern holds today: Mexican migrants from communities with strong migration networks are less wealthy than are migrants from communities with weak migration networks (McKenzie and Rapoport, 2007, 2010)."

"Much of the contemporary literature on immigrant assimilation has been focused on solving methodological issues in order to properly measure changes in immigrant earnings with time spent in the US. In early work on this topic, Chiswick (1978) found that immigrants in the 1970 Census earned less than natives upon first arrival, but rapidly caught up and were able to overtake natives after spending 15-20 years in the US. A declining earnings gap between immigrants and natives with time spent in the US may reflect immigrants' earnings growth, but may also be driven by declining skill levels of immigrants across arrival cohorts and negatively-selected return migration. By following immigrant arrival cohorts across Census waves, Borjas (1985) documents that around half of the convergence observed in a single cross section can be attributed to declining skills across arrival cohorts. The extent of convergence is smaller yet in panel datasets that follow individual immigrants over time, thereby controlling for selective return migration (Lubotsky, 2007)."

"Earnings patterns also vary by immigrant country of origin. Mexican immigrants earned less than natives in every year since 1910 and this disparity has increased over time, reaching a 40 percent earnings disadvantage by 1990 (Feliciano, 2001). Some of the decline in relative earnings for Mexican immigrants can be attributed to a widening gap in educational attainment with the native born. Furthermore, Hispanic immigrants experience slower-than-average rates of earnings convergence with natives, suggesting that the earnings gap is likely to persist over at least one generation (Lubotsky, 2007). In contrast, Chinese and Japanese immigrants enjoyed similar labor market outcomes to natives in the 1970 Census (Chiswick, 1983). More recent evidence suggests that first generation Asian immigrants fare worse than comparable whites but that this difference vanishes in the second generation (Duleep and Sanders, 2012; Arabsheibani and Wang, 2010). Less is known about the earnings assimilation of highly educated immigrants who work in the high-tech industry or pursue graduate degrees and stay in the US upon graduation. Parey, et al. (2015) show that German college graduates who settle in the US relative to other destination areas are positively selected, consistent with predictions from the Roy model. Even among this positively selected pool, the most successful of US-educated foreign PhDs tend to remain in the US (Grogger and Hanson, 2015). Highly-skilled immigrants are more likely to start companies than natives with a similar degree of education, and they tend to earn higher wages, and to patent and publish more (Hunt, 2011), although these outcomes depend on country of origin."

"In the past, immigrant parents appear to have learned English from their children, who are more adept at learning languages, but current immigrants are more likely to rely on their children to navigate the English-speaking world (Kuziemko and Ferrie, 2014; Kuziemko, 2014). School curriculum can influence children's ability to learn English. Some states passed laws in the 1910s and 1920s requiring that public school classes be taught in English only. Lleras-Muney and Shertzer (2015) find that this language policy had modest effects on the literacy of children of non-English speaking parents. Choosing a labor market or a neighborhood with greater access to employment offers another opportunity for immigrants to increase their earnings potential. Upon first arrival, many immigrants settle in ethnic enclaves. Immigrant-native residential segregation remained stable and modest from 1910 to 1950, with a dissimilarity index of around 40; thereafter, segregation between immigrants and natives rose (dissimilarity = 55 in 2000) (Cutler, Glaeser and Vigdor, 2008). In theory, living in an enclave could enhance employment opportunities if immigrants receive job referrals or other assistance from their compatriots (Munshi, 2003; LaFortune and Tessada, 2012). However, immigrant neighborhoods could also limit employment opportunities if residents are isolated from information about the broader labor market. In that case, moving to a more integrated neighborhood could be a form of labor market investment. To our knowledge, economic historians have not studied how residential segregation affected the labor market outcomes of immigrants in the past. Contemporary data suggest that immigrants who choose to live in immigrant neighborhoods have lower earnings capacity but that, correcting for this selection, living in an enclave can improve labor market performance."

"Investments in US-specific skills may have a limited effect on earnings growth if immigrants face discrimination in the labor market. However, in this case, immigrants may be able to mitigate discrimination by changing their self-presentation to de-emphasize their foreign roots. Immigrants change their own names and choose less foreign names for their children as they spend more time in the US (Carneiro, Lee and Reis, 2015; Abramitzky, Boustan and Eriksson, 2016). Biavaschi, Giulietti and Siddique (2013) find that immigrants who changed their names between filing their first and second papers for naturalization in the 1920s experienced more occupational upgrading, perhaps because Americanized names shielded them from discrimination. Likewise, children of immigrants who received less foreign-sounding names enjoyed better labor market outcomes, even after controlling for other aspects of family background (Abramitzky, Boustan and Eriksson, 2016; Goldstein and Stecklov, 2015)."

"A series of early empirical papers found negligible effects of immigration on native wages, in seeming contrast to predictions from a simple model, in which immigration lowers the capital-to-labor ratio in the short run, reducing wages for native workers (Card, 1990; Altonji and Card, 1991; Card, 2001). This unexpectedly small effect of immigration on native wages has generated a long and still unresolved debate in the contemporary literature."

"Early work on the effeodifications to the empirical methodology or adjustments to the underlying economic model. The first studies on this topic relied on variation in the flow of immigrants into metropolitan areas. Geographic variation can understate the true effect of immigration if immigrants choose to settle in areas that experience positive labor demand shocks or if immigrant arrivals encourage similarly-skilled natives to move elsewhere. Borjas (2003) analyzed the effect of immigration on national skill groups instead and found a sizeable negative effect of immigration on native workers. Examples of papers that propose modifications to the standard model include Lewis (2011), which argues that cities with larger inflows of unskilled immigrants were slower to adopt labor-saving technologies, thereby preserving the demand for low-skilled workers; Ottaviano and Peri (NBER version in 2006, published in 2012), which suggests that immigrants and natives are somewhat imperfectly substitutable in production, even within skill categories; and Peri and Sparber (2009), which contends that immigration increases total factor productivity by facilitating specialization across tasks (see also Peri (2012) and Ottaviano, Peri and Wright (2013)). The contemporary literature on the effect of immigration on the US economy is too large for us to cover in full here; for recent surveys, see Hanson (2009) and Kerr and Kerr (2011)."

"Given the greater substitutability between immigrants and natives in the past, we would expect to find larger effects of immigrant arrivals on native wages during the Age of Mass Migration. Indeed, historical immigration flows appear to have a larger effect on the wages and employment opportunities of native workers than those found in contemporary geographic studies (subject to the caveat of differences in outcome variables and research design). Using cross-city variation in migrant flows in the 1910s, Goldin (1994) estimates that a one percentage point increase in the foreign-born share of the population reduced the wages of unskilled laborers and artisans by around 1.5 percent, with larger effects in the tradeable sector (clothing manufacturing and foundries). Boustan, Fishback, and Kantor (2010) find that internal in-migration in the 1930s had no effect on the wages of local workers, but did reduce work opportunities and access to relief jobs, a pattern that is consistent with the presence of sticky wages during the Great Depression. They create an instrument for migrant arrivals that relies on “push factors” from sending labor markets, including New Deal generosity and extreme weather events."

"As in the present, immigration to cities encouraged native out-migration in the past, meriting some caution in the use of geographic variation to identify the effect of immigration on native wages. Hatton and Williamson (1998) estimate that over the 1880-1910 period, 40 natives left their state per each additional 100 immigrants, suggesting that immigrants partially crowded out the native labor force. Collins (1997) shows that cities that absorbed large numbers of European migrants had correspondingly low rates of black in-migration from the rural South, which also implies that native location decisions were responsive to the presence of immigrant workers."

"In the long-run, the effect of immigration on native wages is moderated by the pace of new capital investments. Historical immigration flows contributed to the transformation of American manufacturing from small-scale artisanal shops to large factories engaged in mass production (Hirschman and Mogford, 2009). Unskilled immigrants appear to have been complementary with investments in assembly-line machinery (LaFortune, Tessada and Lewis, 2014). Kim (2007) shows that firms in counties with a higher share foreign born in 1920 were larger, more productive, and more likely to be organized as factories; he uses the settlement pattern of immigrants in 1850, as well as distance from the port of New York, as instruments for the later immigrant share of the population. Yet, Hatton and Williamson (2006) argue that land was a more important input in production in the past and hence capital mobility was less effective in dampening the wage effects of migration. Historical immigration was also associated with higher rates of both trade and innovation, which may have contributed to economic growth. Dunlevy and Hutchinson (1999) find that immigrants increased trade flows between the US and Europe in the early twentieth century, perhaps by providing information about and network connections to their home markets (see also O'Rourke and Williamson, 1999, chapter 13). Moser, Voena and Waldinger (2014) analyze one immigrant flow that would be particularly expected to increase innovation in the US economy: the arrival of Jewish scientists forced to flee from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. US patenting in categories associated with the dismissed scientists increased by 30 percent after 1933."

"US history is characterized by two episodes of mass in-migration, an era of unrestricted migrant arrivals from Europe (1850-1913) and a more recent period of constrained mass migration, primarily from Asia and Latin America (1965-present). Many of the same topics that concern the economics of immigration today – including migrant selection and assimilation and the effect of immigrant arrivals on native workers – were also relevant in the past. We argue that comparing the research findings across these two periods can illuminate contemporary debates. In particular, our reading of the literature suggests that migrant selection, which is primarily positive today, was decidedly mixed in the past, with cases of negative migrant selection from some European sending countries. Changes in migrant selection over time are consistent with rising bureaucratic costs of migration, which may price out the poor, and with growing income inequality in the US, which would attract a higher-skilled set of immigrants. Upon arrival, the average long-term immigrant in the past held a similar set of occupations to the average native worker, and moved up the occupational ladder at the same pace. The pace of economic convergence between immigrants and natives was relatively slow in both the past and the present, with the notable difference that, today, the average immigrant starts out with a larger earnings gap to overcome (although there is substantial variation in initial earnings by sending country). It appears that historical estimates of the effect of immigrant arrivals on native wages are larger than comparable estimates for today, which may be due to the fact that, in the past, immigrants and natives held a similar set of skills. However, comparisons of these magnitudes over time are complicated by methodological differences, and could be improved with a new round of well-identified historical studies on the effect of immigration on labor markets."

"Studies also show that families are not significantly more likely to miss court than individual adults or unaccompanied children. For example, one study of EOIR data revealed that families released from family detention centers between 2001 and 2016 appeared in court 86 percent of the time, compared to 81 percent for all immigrants released from detention centers over that period. Asylum-seeking families who had representation and were released from detention had even higher appearance rates. Studies also show a significant link between representation and appearance in court. Having access to an attorney means immigrants have someone who can help them navigate an unfamiliar system, including helping ensure they appear in court. Once immigrants manage to obtain a lawyer, they show up for all court hearings in the overwhelming majority of cases, with appearance rates of 96 percent or higher for every group."

"Given that studies consistently show a high appearance rate for those in removal proceedings, why does the government insist that there is an epidemic of immigrants skipping court and “disappearing” into the United States? Boiled down, the most basic answer is: the government does not measure the percent of immigrants failing to appear in court. Instead, it uses an alternate, “completion-based” method which significantly overstates the prevalence of in absentia orders of removal for failure to appear in court."

"Given immigrants’ likelihood of appearing in court, there is little evidence for the government’s frequent assertion that detention is necessary to ensure appearance in court. Instead, focus should be on ensuring that immigrants who want to appear in immigration court have the opportunity to do so. This could be achieved through initiatives like the Family Case Management Program, an innovative program which achieved a 99 percent compliance rate with immigration court appearances through the use of community support and supervision. The immigration courts could also adopt simple methods to help ensure that people don’t miss court. Studies have shown that sending text messages or email re-minders can have a significant effect on ensuring appearance in court."

"Asylum is a protection granted to foreign nationals already in the United States or arriving at the border who meet the international law definition of a “refugee.” The United Nations 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol define a refugee as a person who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her home country, and cannot obtain protection in that country, due to past persecution or a well-founded fear of being persecuted in the future “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” Congress incorporated this definition into U.S. immigration law in the Refugee Act of 1980. As a signatory to the 1967 Protocol, and through U.S. immigration law, the United States has legal obligations to provide protection to those who qualify as refugees. The Refugee Act established two paths to obtain refugee status—either from abroad as a resettled refugee or in the United States as an asylum seeker."

"From 2004 through 2019, DHS subjected almost all noncitizens who were encountered by, or presented themselves to, a U.S. official at a port of entry or near the border to expedited removal, an accelerated process which authorizes DHS to perform rapid removal of certain individuals. To help ensure that the United States does not violate international and domestic laws by returning individuals to countries where their life or liberty may be at risk, the credible fear and reasonable fear screening processes are available to asylum seekers in expedited removal processes."

"To demonstrate a reasonable fear, the individual must show that there is a “reasonable possibility” that he or she will be tortured in the country of removal or persecuted on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. While both credible and reasonable fear determinations evaluate the likelihood of an individual’s persecution or torture if removed, the reasonable fear standard is higher. If the asylum officer finds that the person has a reasonable fear of persecution or torture, he or she will be referred to immigration court. The person has the opportunity to prove to an immigration judge that he or she is eligible for "withholding of removal" or "deferral of removal"—protection from future persecution or torture. While withholding of removal is similar to asylum, some of the requirements are more difficult to meet and the relief it provides is narrower. Significantly, and unlike asylum, it does not provide a pathway to lawful permanent residence or citizen-ship."

"Detention exacerbates the challenges asylum seekers already face and can negatively impact a person’s asylum application. Children and families who are detained suffer mental and physical health problems, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and frequent infections. Studies have found that detained individuals in removal proceedings are nearly five times less likely to secure legal counsel than those not in detention. This disparity can significantly affect an individual's case, as those with representation are more likely to apply for protection in the first place and successfully obtain the relief sought."

"People from the north of England, Scotland, and northern Ireland made up much of the migration to the western frontier regions of the early American colonies, especially to the rugged mountainous areas. The northern Irish migrants were mainly Scotch-Irish, descendants of people from Scotland who had moved to Ireland in earlier centuries. Most of the Irish in America before the nineteenth century were actually Scotch-Irish. Northern Irish migration peaked between the 1750’s and the early 1770’s, with an estimated 14,200 people from northern Ireland reaching America from 1750 to 1759, 21,200 from 1760 to 1769, and 13,200 in the half-decade leading up to the American Revolution. Most of the Scots migration took place from 1760 to 1775, when about 25,000 new arrivals came to the colonies. The counties of North England, bordering Scotland, experienced a series of crop failures that were especially severe in 1727, 1740, and 1770. Each of these crop failures resulted in famine that sent successive waves of immigrants to America. Together, the Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and North English immigrants probably made up 90 percent of the settlers in the back country of America. Arriving after the lands along the eastern coast had been taken, these hardy individuals made up the original American frontier folk."

"The most significant groups of European immigrants to the colonies of North America before the revolution came from the northern lands of Holland, Germany, and Sweden. The Dutch attempted to found their first colony during the late 1620’s, when Dutch trading interests established the colony of New Netherland, with New Amsterdam as its capital. During the mid-seventeenth century, officials in Holland began actively encouraging migration to their colony, so that the population of New Netherland grew from about 2,000 people in 1648 to about 10,000 in 1660. Only about half of these were actually Dutch, though, and the rest consisted mainly of Belgians. In 1664, the British seized New Netherland and changed its name to New York. People with Dutch names and ancestry continued to make up a small but important part of the New York population, particularly among the elite of the area."

"Swedes arrived on the northeastern coast in 1637 and founded a colony on Delaware Bay in 1638. Peter Minuit, a former director-general of the Dutch colony of New Netherland who had been born in the German state of Westphalia, led this initial Swedish settlement. New Sweden included areas of the modern states of New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware along the Delaware River. Tensions with New Netherland led to a Dutch takeover of New Sweden in 1654, but the Dutch continued to recognize the colony as a selfgoverning settlement of Swedes. In 1681, following the British takeover of all the northeastern lands, William Penn received a charter for Pennsylvania, ending the distinctly Swedish identity of the region."

"By the time the United States won its independence, Germans made up the largest national origin group in the country, aside from the groups stemming from the British Isles. In the year 1683, Dutch and German people in religious minorities purchased land in Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia, and founded Germantown. One of the largest migration waves from the lands of Germany began when Protestants from the Palatine area of Germany fled political disorder and economic hardship in their homeland in 1709. After making their way to Holland and then England, about 2,100 Palatine Germans reached America in 1710, settling mainly in New York. During the early eighteenth century, other German colonists settled in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Massachusetts. Pennsylvania, though, became the main center of German settlement, in part because the Quaker tradition of the state offered religious tolerance to German Lutherans, Mennonites, Amish, and other religious movements. Probably about half the Germans who arrived in Pennsylvania between 1725 and the American Revolution came as redemptioners, who paid for their passage by working for a certain number of years. In all, an estimated 84,500 Germans reached the thirteen American colonies between 1700 and 1775. After the revolution, an estimated 5,000 German mercenary soldiers, mostly from the state of Hesse, who had been fighting for the British and been taken prisoner by the Americans, remained in the new country."

"African immigration to North America dates back to the time of the first European arrivals. During the entire period of American colonial history, involuntary immigrants arrived as slaves from Africa, mainly West Africa. Between 1700 and 1775, an estimated 278,400 Africans reached the original thirteen colonies that became the United States. Slave importation to the coastal states of the South grew rapidly during the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century because of the growth of the tobacco and rice economies. Imports of slaves to tobacco-growing Virginia reached 7,000 per decade for the 1670’s through the 1720’s and then nearly doubled to 13,500 per decade until the 1750’s. South Carolina, where rice had become an important crop, began importing slaves at about the same level as Virginia during the early eighteenth century and then increased to more than 20,000 during the 1720’s. While slave importation began to slow in Virginia during the later eighteenth century, it continued at about 17,000 per decade in South Carolina from the 1750’s to the 1790’s. By the time of the first U.S. Census in 1790, as a result of involuntary immigration and the increase of native-born slaves, people of African ancestry made up one-fifth of the American population."

"Until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the new federal government was content to leave control over immigration policy to the individual states. The first major federal law to deal specifically with immigration—and not naturalization— was the Steerage Act of 1819."

"Congress did not move to impose federal controls over entry into the country until the second half of the nineteenth century. Several of the earliest federal immigration laws were directed against Chinese immigrants, who had begun arriving in the United States in significant numbers during the 1850’s."

"The first attempt to centralize control of immigration in general in the hands of the federal government came in 1864 with a law that authorized the president to appoint an immigration commissioner under the secretary of state. That law established provisions for contracts in which immigrants could be bound to use their wages to pay off the cost of their transportation to the United States. That law was repealed in 1868."

"In 1875, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws regulating immigration were unconstitutional because they were inconsistent with the exclusive power of the U.S. Congress to regulate foreign commerce. In March of that same year, Congress passed a law prohibiting the entry of classes of undesirable immigrants. Congress also made it illegal to transport Asian workers to the United States without their free consent, forbade contracts to supply Chinese “coolies,” and gave customs officials the duty of inspecting immigrants. This was followed by the Immigration Act of 1882, which set up state boards under the U.S. secretary of the Treasury as a way of controlling immigration. This law also added new categories of excluded undesirable immigrants and set a tax on new arrivals in the United States. The creation of the Office of the Superintendent of Immigration in the Department of the Treasury in 1891 and the designation of New York Harbor’s Ellis Island as the location for the first national immigrant reception center in 1890 began the modern, federally controlled period in American immigration history."

"The earliest decades of the new nation saw relatively little new immigration. During the 1780’s, while the nation was governed under the Articles of Confederation, the loosely joined states went through difficult economic times, and the future of the independent country seemed too insecure to encourage new immigration. However, even as the nation began settling into a more stable form after adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, immigration was still well below the levels it would later reach. Europe’s Napoleonic Wars, which lasted until 1815, and the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States made it difficult for emigrants to leave Europe. During the three-decade period between 1789—when the United States adopted its new Constitution and form of government— and 1820, fewer than 500,000 new immigrants arrived in the United States. During that same period, the same political conditions that made leaving European more difficult also motivated some Europeans to emigrate. For example, during the 1790’s, English radicals and Irish opposed to English rule fled their homelands to America. The Revolution in France brought new French arrivals at the end of the eighteenth century. Other French-speaking immigrants fled slave uprisings in Haiti and other West Indies colonies around the same time. These French-speaking newcomers settled mainly in coastal cities, notably in Charleston, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, as well as in New Orleans, which became part of the United States in 1803 as a result of the Louisiana Purchase. The most numerous non-English-speaking immigrants in the United States at the time of independence were Germans. Germans also constituted one of the significant immigrant groups at the opening of the nineteenth century. Many of those Germans came from what is now the southwestern part of Germany, which was then a poor area. Bad German harvests in 1816-1817 set in motion a flood of emigration out of that region. Although many of the emigrants moved east, to Russia, about 20,000 people from southwestern Germany came to America to escape famine."

"The year 1820 is the first year for which detailed immigration statistics for the United States are available, thanks to the Steerage Act of the previous year. During 1820, 8,385 immigrants arrived in the United States. Most, 43 percent, came from Ireland. The second-largest group, 29 percent, came from Great Britain. Hence, almost three-quarters of all immigrants who arrived in the United States during that year came from the British Isles alone. The next-largest groups came from the German states, France, and Canada. During the 1820’s, French immigrants moved ahead of Germans as the second-largest group after people from the British Isles. The second half of that decade also saw a steep rise in overall immigration, with the numbers of arrivals rising from slightly fewer than 8,000 in 1824 to more than 22,500 in 1829. People from Ireland, who already constituted the greatest single immigrant group during the 1820’s, were drawn to the United States by both continuing poverty in their original homeland and the growing demand for labor in America. For example, New York State’s Erie Canal, which was under construction from 1818 to 1825, drew heavily on immigrant Irish labor. That project began a long history of Irish immigrant labor helping to build the American transportation infrastructure. The rapid commercial success of the Erie Canal stimulated the building of more canals in other parts of the country, increasing the need for immigrant labor."

"The rate of immigration quadrupled during the 1830’s, from a total of 143,439 arrivals between 1821 and 1830 to 599,125 between 1831 and 1840. New immigrants came from a wide variety of European countries, but most of the 1830’s expansion was driven by a dramatic growth in arrivals from Ireland (207,381) and Germany (152,454). New arrivals jumped suddenly from 22,633 in 1831 to 60,482 in 1832 and continued at levels roughly equal to that of 1832 through the rest of the decade. The 1840’s saw yet another surge in the tide from Europe, with 1,713,251 newcomers reaching U.S. shores from 1841 to 1850. This figure was almost triple that of the 1830’s and twelve times that of the 1820’s. Once again, the most important sources of new immigrants were Ireland (780,719 people) and Germany (434,626). Next highest was the United Kingdom, with 267,044 immigrants. This wave of the 1840’s occurred mostly toward the end of the decade, with overall numbers rising from 78,615 in 1844 to 114,371 the following year, and reaching 297,024 in 1849."

"At the approach of the mid-nineteenth century, some immigrants were drawn by the availability of land in the vast reaches of North America. Economic development also offered opportunities beyond agriculture for newcomers. Industrialization created jobs in mills and as manual laborers in cities. The expansion of railroads was another major force attracting immigrant labor. In 1830, the United States had a total of only 23 miles of railroad tracks. Only one decade later, this figure had grown to 2,818 miles. It rose to 9,021 miles in 1850 and 30,626 miles in 1860. Immigrants from Ireland played a particularly significant role in laying new railroad tracks. Economic hardships and political disorders in the sending countries also helped stimulate emigration to the United States. The most significant event was the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1851, which was caused by a devastating potato blight. Irish were already the most numerous immigrants, and the famine drove even more of them to leave their homeland in the hope of finding relief in North America. In the various German states—which would not be united under a single government until 1871—a wave of failed revolutions in 1848 created a flood of political refugees who swelled the ranks of German Americans."

"By the middle of the nineteenth century, first generation immigrants made up one-tenth of the total population of the United States. The 1850 U.S. Census showed that the United States— including Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah, which were not yet states—was home to 2,240,581 foreign-born people. This figure constituted 10 percent of the total U.S. population, including persons held in slavery."

"Immigration continued to climb through much of the third quarter of the century, with people from Germany and Ireland making up most of the new arrivals. For the first time, though, immigrants from China, pushed by political and economic problems in the home country and by opportunities created by the California gold rush and jobs on a railroad that was expanding across the country, began to enter the United States in significant numbers. From 1841 to 1850, only thirty-five newcomers to the United States came from China. During the 1850’s, this figure shot up to 41,397. The numbers of Chinese immigrants reached 64,301 between 1861 to 1870 and then almost doubled to 123,201 between 1871 and 1880. Chinese immigration began to drop following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, decreasing to 61,711 between 1881 and 1890 and continuing to drop in the following decades."

"As the nation faced and entered Civil War, overall immigration dipped, reaching low points of fewer than 92,000 immigrants in both 1861 and 1862. Even during the war, however, immigration began to rise again. Immigrants served on both sides during the war, but far more served in the Union army than the Confederate because the North had a much greater immigrant population. The image of the Irish, who had long been subject to suspicion and prejudice in the United States, suffered when poor immigrant workers from Ireland were the most active and violent participants in riots that broke out in cities such as New York and Boston in July, 1863, in reaction to the military draft. The Civil War was enormously destructive, but it also helped to stimulate the national economy and to push the nation toward more industrialization. In 1869, the railroad tracks connecting the East and West Coasts were finally completed, helping to create a single nation-wide economy. The mining of coal, the primary fuel of the late nineteenth century, drew more workers, as total output of coal in the United States grew from 8.4 million short tons in 1850 to 40 million in 1870. Pennsylvania and Ohio, important areas for coal mining, increased their immigrant communities, notably attracting people from Wales, an area of the United Kingdom with a long mining tradition. By 1870, Ohio had 12,939 inhabitants born in Wales and Pennsylvania had 27,633, so that these two states were home to over half the nation’s Welsh immigrants. The railroads encouraged settlement of the farmlands of the Midwest and made possible the shipment of crops to the spreading cities. Scandinavians were among the immigrant groups that arrived to plow the newly accessible lands. Minnesota held 35,940 people born in Norway, or close to one third of America’s Norwegian immigrants by 1870. Minnesota was also home to the second-largest population of Swedes in America, with 20,987. Another midwestern state, Illinois, had attracted 29,979 Swedes by 1870. Another 10,796 Swedes had settled in Iowa, adjoining Illinois on the northwest and just south of Minnesota. About two-thirds of America’s Swedish-born population could be found in Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa."

"As the nation entered the 1880’s, it entered into a remarkable period of economic expansion that would make the United States into one of the world’s greatest industrial powers by the time of World War I (1914-1918). It also began a dramatic rise in immigration as part of this economic expansion. Numbers of immigrants increased from 2,812,191 in the decade 1871 to 1880 to 5,246,613 from 1881 to 1890, in spite of the exclusion of Chinese immigrants following 1882. Sources of immigration also began to shift, from the northern and western European countries to southern and eastern European countries, so that immigration from Italy grew from 11,725 during the 1860’s to 307,309 during the 1880’s and immigration from Russia and Poland grew from 4,539 to 265,088. The United States was beginning the great immigration wave of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries."

"Until the end of the nineteenth century, immigration to the United States was under the loose control of the individual states. In 1875, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws regulating immigration were unconstitutional because they were inconsistent with the exclusive power of the U.S. Congress to regulate foreign commerce. This recognition of the exclusive power of Congress over immigration opened the way to immigration policy and therefore to the establishment of procedures and locations for federal control of immigration. The construction of the Ellis Island federal immigration facility during 1891 symbolized the beginning of the modern period in American immigration history."