Donald Trump continues pandering to his base by exhorting baseless racist slurs. He either does not know that these Congresswomen are U.S. citizens, duly elected by the people or he does but just likes to stir the pot. Only his minions believe anything this clown has to say. Nevertheless, Trump’s Immigration Bullshit Continues.
American immigration history can be viewed in four epochs: the colonial period, the mid-19th century, the start of the 20th century, and post-1965. Each period brought distinct national groups, races and ethnicity’s to the United States.
During the 17th century, approximately 400,000 English people migrated to Colonial America. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalization to “free white persons”; it was expanded to include blacks in the 1860’s and Asians only in the 1950’s. After an initial wave of immigration from China following the California Gold Rush, Congress passed a series of laws culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, banning virtually all immigration from China until the law’s repeal in 1943. The peak year of European immigration was in 1907, when 1,285,349 persons entered the country. By 1910, 13.5 million immigrants were living in the United States. In 1970, 60% of immigrants were from Europe. Nearly 14 million immigrants entered the United States from 2000 to 2010, and over one million persons were naturalized as U.S. citizens in 2008. Nearly 8 million people immigrated to the United States from 2000 to 2005; 3.7 million of them entered without papers.
As a policy, Americans initially encouraged relatively free and open immigration during the 18th and early 19th centuries, and rarely questioned that policy until the late 1800’s. After certain states passed immigration laws following the Civil War, the Supreme Court in 1875 declared regulation of immigration a federal responsibility. Thus, as the number of immigrants rose in the 1880’s and economic conditions in some areas worsened, Congress began to pass immigration legislation.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Alien Contract Labor laws of 1885 and 1887 prohibited certain laborers from immigrating to the United States. The general Immigration Act of 1882 levied a head tax of fifty cents on each immigrant and blocked (or excluded) the entry of idiots, lunatics, convicts, and persons likely to become a public charge.
These national immigration laws created the need for new federal enforcement authorities. In the 1880’s, state boards or commissions enforced immigration law with direction from U.S. Treasury Department officials. At the Federal level, U.S. Customs Collectors at each port of entry collected the head tax from immigrants while “Chinese Inspectors” enforced the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Congress continued to exert Federal control over immigration with the Act of March 2, 1895, which promoted the Office of Immigration to the Bureau of Immigration and changed the agency head’s title from Superintendent to Commissioner-General of Immigration. The Act of June 6, 1900, consolidated immigration enforcement by assigning enforcement of both Alien Contract Labor laws and Chinese Exclusion laws to the Commissioner-General.
Because most immigration laws of the time sought to protect American workers and wages, an Act of February 14, 1903, transferred the Bureau of Immigration from the Treasury Department to the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor. An “immigrant fund” created from collection of immigrants’ head tax financed the Immigration Service until 1909, when Congress replaced the fund with an annual appropriation.
Prior to 1965, policies such as the national origins formula limited immigration and naturalization opportunities for people from areas outside Western Europe. Exclusion laws enacted as early as the 1880’s generally prohibited or severely restricted immigration from Asia, and quota laws enacted in the 1920’s curtailed Eastern European immigration. The civil rights movement led to the replacement of these ethnic quotas with per-country limits. Since then, the number of first-generation immigrants living in the United States has quadrupled.
The United States was united, by its borders which stretched from coast to coast. Inventions like the telephone, the telegraph, and the railroad had seemed to shrink its vast distances even as the country had spread west. After years of industrialization, America had become wealthier than ever, and because of its naval victory over Spain, was on the way to becoming a new world (or super) power.
But this quick expansion left many poor and working class immigrants by the side, hence there was an evil lurking in the shadows.
America’s cities had grown enormously by 1908, there were more than 100 city’s with populations of over 50,000, and crime grew along with them. These big cities, with their overcrowded tenements filled with the poor, the disillusioned, and with ethnic tensions, became hotbeds where tempers often flared and fostered clashes between striking workers and their factory bosses, often turning increasingly violent.
While no one knew it at the time, but America’s cities and towns were becoming breeding grounds for a future generation of professional criminals. In Brooklyn, a nine-year-old Alphonse “Al” Capone would soon begin a life of crime. In Indianapolis, a five-year-old boy named John Dillinger was growing up on his family farm. And in Chicago, a young child christened Lester Joseph Gillis would grow up to become the vicious killer known as “Baby Face” Nelson.
But violence was just the tip of the criminal iceberg being perpetrated by these immigrants. Corruption was rampant nationwide, especially in local politics, with crooked political machines like Tammany Hall in New York City. Big business also had its share of sleaze, too, from the shoddy, even criminal, conditions in meat packaging plants and factories (as muckrakers like Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell had so artfully exposed), to child labor mills and the illegal monopolies threatening to control entire industries.
From The early 1900’s to the mid 1980’s organized crime in America ruled. These organized criminal entities, with the exception of Stephanie St. Clair aka “Queenie”, “Madam Queen”, “Madam St. Clair”, and “Queen of the Policy Rackets” and her chief enforcer Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson in Harlem, New York, consisted of Caucasian immigrants or their children.
Early American Immigration Policies
I write about this to make Americans, especially it’s young people, aware of what Trump really means by A) lets make America Great (White) again, B) to shed light on immigrant criminals.
The way Mr. Trump explains it (a message he still delivers) is that Hispanic immigrants are criminals, rapist, murderers and drug dealers, and that there may be a few good one’s. But the fact is that during each epoch of immigration their has been increased criminal activity. The longest crime spree as a result of immigration was the period from 1928 to the late 1980’s early 1990’s. This is the period of Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger (who was the first public enemy number one), prohibition which led to the rise of the Italian Mafia and the Irish gangland style shootings in Chicago. This period of American history is often romanticized and many Hollywood Movies have been made of it, but the fact of the matter is that it was one of the bloodiest criminal crime waves in all of America’s history.
