(PART 1/2)

To answer your question, it is necessary to provide some background to the history of immigration in the United States. In the period directly following the American Revolution, there was little regulation of immigration, and each state was granted the power to regulate the reception of foreign nationals within its borders. By the 1830s, however, the U.S. public began to pressure politicians to address an influx of immigrants fleeing the Irish Potato Famine (Lannert in Bankston, 339). Labor unions worried that this surge in poor immigrants, who would be desperate enough to take any job at any price, would lead to an oversupply in labor, while politicians fomented fears that “undesirable” immigrants such as criminals, paupers, and contract laborers (largely unskilled workers) were entering the country in large numbers (Lannert in Bankston, 339).

Responding to mounting public concern regarding the status of immigration, politicians proposed ways of selecting certain preferable populations. In 1875, Massachusetts Representative Henry Cabot Lodge, a founder of the nativist, anti-immigration organization called the Immigration Restriction League, proposed the first immigration test: a literacy test (not in English, but in any language). He believed that this test would prevent the immigration of undesirable, poorer Italian, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, and Greek nationals, while allowing the immigration of allegedly racially similar, educated, and therefore desirable groups like Germans, Scandinavians, and the French (Bankston 340). In 1896, Lodge’s proposal was included in a Senate bill that passed in the House and the Senate but was vetoed by President Grover Cleveland (the House overrode the veto, but the Senate did not act further) (Lannert in Bankston, 341).

Cleveland’s veto, however, did not halt efforts to reform immigration policy. In 1907, a Joint Commission on Immigration was funded by Congress. Four years later, the commission released a forty-one-volume report that recommended Lodge’s literacy test. Despite vetoes by Presidents William Howard Taft in 1913 and President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 (twice), the Immigration Act of 1917 was passed by Congress. This act specified that all prospective immigrants over the age of 16 would submit to a literacy test. If they failed to read a few dozen words in a language, not necessarily English, they were to be rejected (although there were many exceptions) (Lannert in Bankston 341-2). While the literacy test in general failed to curb immigration (in fact, immigration rates increased, with a rejection rate of less than 0.5 percent), the racist and xenophobic ideologies of the proponents of such immigration laws was to fuel subsequent immigration restriction acts. The next act, the Immigration Act of 1921, set quotas on immigration based on country of origin. (Tischauser in Bankston, 347). This act specifically targeted Japanese and Chinese immigrants, whose quota was set at zero (this was nothing new—Chinese Exclusion Acts had already restricted Asian immigration in 1875 and 1882) (Chen 289-9). U.S. Congress reinforced the 1921 act three years later in what became known as the National Origins Act. This act restricted the annual immigration to the U.S. to 2 percent of a country’s population. While Asian immigration remained prohibited, southern and eastern European immigration was strictly limited (Tischauser in Bankston, 352).

The Immigration Act of 1943 repealed the Asian exclusion laws (Upshur in Bankston, 354). The Immigration Act of 1990 established a “system of preferences” to determine which immigration applicants were admissible, while also capping immigration at 675,000 people. Preferred candidates included those who already had family in the U.S., those who could prove an exceptional ability in certain desired professions, and those from underrepresented nations (labeled “diversity immigrants”) (Bily in Bankston, 357).

As this brief background of the history of U.S. immigration illustrates, naturalization is usually torn between two objectives: first, to maintain easy and accessible immigration as a keystone of American governance; second, to qualm fears regarding the quality and quantity of various immigrant groups (Schneider 2001). Because of the xenophobic nature of immigration legislation, the biggest naturalization test was often simply one’s national background or alleged “race.” Of course, it is possible to immigrate to the U.S. without becoming a citizen. Yet, it is important to understand the background of immigration, the prerequisite to naturalization, before tackling the question of becoming a citizen.