Slate, “Not Who We Are”

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the American industrial order was challenged by militant labor, socialist, and anarchist movements often led by immigrants, policymaking and intellectual elites clamped down, approaching freedom-seeking immigrants not as transnational partners in liberty, but as sources of disorder, revolt, and danger. Continue Reading

Time, “Congress Tightened Immigration Laws 100 Years Ago. Here’s Who They Turned Away”

Excluded from entry in 1917 were not only convicted criminals, chronic alcoholics and people with contagious diseases, but also people with epilepsy, anarchists, most people who couldn’t read and almost everyone from Asia, as well as laborers who were “induced, assisted, encouraged, or solicited to migrate to this country by offers or promises of employment, […]