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Nationality Act
This was the first law to define eligibility for citizenship by naturalization and establish standards and procedure by which immigrants became the United States citizens. -
Alien and Sedition Act
Congress enacted deportation laws targeting persons deemed political threats to the United States in response to conflict in Europe. -
Ban on importation of any negro mulatto
The Haitian revolution led congress to ban immigration by free blacks to contain anti-slavery campaigners. -
Indian Removal Act
During the presidency of Andrew Jackson this law authorized the confiscation of land from Native Americans and provided resources for their forced removal west of the Mississippi River. -
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Formalized the United States annexation of a major portion of Northern Mexico. -
Passenger Cases
The Supreme Court designated the authority to legislate and enforce immigrants restrictions a matter of federal authority rather than a state or local power. -
People Vs Hall
This California supreme court case ruled that the testimony of a Chinese man who witnessed a murder by a white man was in admissible. -
Dred Scott Vs Sanford
This supreme court ruling established that slaves and free African Americans were not citizens of the United States and were not entitled to the rights and privileges of citizenship. -
Act of Prohibit the " Coolie Trade"
During the Civil War, the Republican controlled congress sought to prevent southern plantation owners from replacing their enslaved African Americans workers with unfreeze contract or coolie laborers from China. -
Emancipation Proclamation
President Abraham Lincoln executive orders freeing the slaves held in the confederate states. -
Immigrant Act
Legalized labor recruitment practice similar to indentured servitude in an attempt to encourage immigration to the United States. -
Fourteenth Amendment
Ratified in 1868 to secure equal treatment for African Americans after the Civil War. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed birth right citizenship for all persons born in the United States. -
Naturalization Act
Explicitly extended naturalization rights already enjoyed by White immigrants to aliens of African Nativity and to persons of African descent. -
Chinese Educational Mission
This program sent about 120 Chinese students to stay in New England and is often cited as a pioneering effort in mutually beneficial system of international education. -
Page Law
Prohibited the recruitment of the United States of unfree laborers and women for immoral purposes but was enforced primarily against Chinese. -
Angell Treaty
Burlingame treaty with China, allowing the United States to restrict the migration of certain categories of Chinese workers it moved United States immigration policy close to outright Chinese exclusion. -
Immigration Act
Legislated a few months after the Chinese exclusion law, this immigration legislation expanded the ranks of excludable aliens to include other undesirable persons and attributes such as convicts. -
Elk Vs Wilkins
The Supreme Court ruled that the fourteenth Amendment did not apply to Native Americans who did not automatically gain citizenship by birth and could therefore be denied the right to vote. -
Foran Act
Banned the recruitment of workers bound by contracts. -
The Dawes Allotment Act
Complaints about the reservation system for Native Americans led congress to authorize the president to allot or separate into individual landholdings tribal reservation lands. -
Scott Act
Congress extended domestic authority over immigration to improve enforcement of the Chinese exclusion laws. It abolished one of the exempt statuses, returning laborers, stranding about 20,000 Chinese holding certificates of Return outside the United States. -
Chae Chan Ping vs United States
The Supreme Court decision affirmed the plenary powers of the United States federal authorities over immigrants matters, in this instance even when change in the United States immigration law reversed earlier policy and practice. -
Immigration Act
This 1891 Immigration law clarified and centralized the immigration enforcement authority of the federal government, extended immigration inspection to land borders, and expanded the list of excludable and deportable immigrants. -
Fong Yue Ting Vs United States
This Supreme Court decision ruled as constitutional the 1892 Geary Act's requirement that Chinese residents, and only Chinese residents, carry Certificates of residence to prove their legal entry to the United States, or be subject to detention and deportation. -
Immigration Restriction League
Increasing Immigration, mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe countries, along with a series of economic downturns fueled nativists fears and the founding of the Immigration Restriction League by three influential Harvard graduates. -
Wong Wing Vs United States
This Supreme Court decision that detention by immigration authorities does not constitute a criminal punishment, affirming the lesser rights of excludable aliens. -
United States Vs Wong Kim Ark
This Supreme Court case established the precedent that any person born in the United States is a citizen by birth regardless of race or parent's status. -
Immigration Act
This law identified anarchists as targets for exclusion and made provision for their removal if detained after entry. -
Extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act
Congress extended the Chinese exclusion laws in perpetuity in response to the Chinese government's efforts to leverage better conditions for Chinese travelers to the United States by abrogating earlier treaties. -
Expatriation Act
Under the principle that women assumed the citizenship of their husbands, this act stripped citizenship from United States born women when they married non citizen immigrant men. -
Dillingham Commission Reports
Congress funded this high- level commission to research the causes and impact of recent immigration to build support for significant restrictions on European immigration. -
Alien Land Laws in California
California, along with many other Western states, enacted laws that banned aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning or leasing land. -
Immigration Act (Barred Zone Act)
Although this law is best known for its creation of barred zone extending from the Middle East to Southeast Asia from which no persons were allowed to enter the United States, its main restriction consisted of a literacy test intended to reduce European immigration. -
The Palmer Raids
The United States department of Justice conducted a series of raids to round up, arrest, and deport suspected anarchists and left- wing radicals. -
Ozawa Vs United States
The hardening of United States isolationism set the stage for the Supreme Court to affirm the 1790 Nationality Act's stipulation that Asians and ineligible for naturalization because they are racially not white regardless of their demonstrated acculturation and integration. -
Indian Citizenship Act
This law stipulates that all Native Americans born in the United States were automatically citizens by birth. Native Americans were the last main group to gain this right set forth in the Fourteenth Amendment. -
Mexican Repatriation
During the economic and political crises of the 1920s and 1930s, the Border Patrol launched several campaigns to detain Mexicans, including some United States born Citizens, and expel them across the border. -
Tydings- McDuffie Act
Completing the racial exclusion of Asians, Congress imposed immigration restrictions on Filipinos by granting the Philippines eventual independence. Previously, Filipinos could immigrate freely as United States national from a colony of the United States. -
Bracero Agreement
During World War II, the United States government negotiated with the Mexican government to recruit Mexican workers, all men and without their families, to work in industries. After the War, the program continued in the agriculture unit 1964. -
Repeal of Chinese Exclusion
The importance of China as the United States government's chief ally in the pacific war against Japan led Congress to repeal the Chinese Exclusion laws, placing China under the same immigration restriction as European countries. -
Korematsu Vs United States
This Supreme Court decision upheld the federal government's right to set aside civil rights protections in the name of military necessity in ruling on Fred Korematsu's challenge to Executive Order 9066, which authorized removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. -
War Brides Act
Congress enacted exceptions to the national origins quotas imposed by the immigration Act of 1924 in order to help World War II soldiers and veterans bring back foreign spouses and fiances they had met while serving the military. -
Luce-Celler Act
This law further undermined Asians exclusion by extending naturalization rights and immigration quotas to Filipinos and Indians as wartime allies. -
Displaced Persons Act
In contrast lawmakers' widespread indifference before World War II, after the war, under pressure from the White House and Department of State, Congress authorized admissions for refugees from Europe and permitted asylum seekers already in the United States to regularize their status. -
The 1951 Refugee Convention
The UN Refugee Convention set international standards for refugee rights and resettlement work. It is administered by the United States Nation High Commission on Refugees. Wary of international obligations, President Truman refused to sign the United States government on to the convention. -
Immigration and Nationality Act
The McCaran-Walter Act reformed some of the obvious discriminatory provisions in immigration law. While the law provided quotas for all nations and ended racial restrictions on citizenship, it expanded immigration enforcement and retained offensive national origins quotas. -
Refugee Relief Act
Dissatisfaction with the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act inspired support for this legislation which provided 214,000 visas to refugees, primarily from Europe but with 5,000 designated for the Far East. -
Operation Wetback
Even as the bracero program continued to recruit temporary workers from Mexico, the immigration Bureau led round ups of Mexican nationals. The Bureau claimed to have deported one million Mexicans -
Parole of Hungarians
The parole authority granted the attorney-general in the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act was used three times to aid refugees fleeing communism. To avoid public outcry, each use of parole was accompanied by extensive publicity campaigns to promote acceptance. -
Act of September
This law added more exceptions to immigration restriction by national quotas by categorizing international adoption as a form of family reunification. -
To Facilitate the entry of alien skills specialist and certain relatives of the United States Citizenship and for other purpose
This law opened the door to immigration by highly skilled workers from countries with low immigration quotas, anticipating the Immigration Act of 1965's emphasis on employment preferences. -
Immigration and Nationality Act
This law set the main principles for immigration regulation still enforced today. It applied a system of preferences for family reunification (75 percent), employment (20 percent), and refugees (5 percent) and for the first time capped immigration from the within Americas. -
Cuban Adjustment Act
After Fidel Castro's revolution, anti-communist Cubans received preferential immigration conditions because they came from a historically close U.S. neighbor and ally. This law provided them permanent status and resources to help adjustment to life in the U.S. -
United Nations High Commissioners for Refugees Refugee Protocol
The UNHCR issued this protocol in 1967 to implement the goals of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which set forth the key principle of refoulement, or that persons in flight from persecution and danger cannot be forced to return to places of danger. -
Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistant Act
The United States made provisions to admit about 135,000 Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians in the months following the fall of Saigon, resettle them across the United States with resources to help them establish new lives. -
Immigration and Nationality Act Amendment
The 1976 Amendments extended to the Western Hemisphere a per country ceiling of 20,000 and a modified preference system for arrivals. In 1978, the law was further amended to establish a single worldwide annual ceiling of 290,000. -
Refugee Act
While adhering to the UN standard for defining refugees, this law made U.S. refugee policy more responsive to changing situations through the implementation of annual admissions quotas that could be adjusted annually after consultation between Congress and the White House. -
Plyler Vs Doe
This Supreme Court case ruled that public school districts cannot constitutionally refuse admission to unauthorized immigrant children because the harmful effects to the public outweighed the cost savings. -
Korematsu Vs United States
The courts vacated the 1944 Supreme Court conviction of Fred Korematsu for violating curfew orders imposed on Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. -
Immigration Reform Control Act
To address the problem of unauthorized immigration, Congress implemented through bipartisan agreement a multi-pronged system that provided amnesty for established residents, increased border enforcement, enhanced requirements of employers, and expanded guest worker visa programs. -
Immigration Act
Congress revised the Immigration Act of 1965 by implementing the H-1B visa program for skilled temporary workers, with some provisions for conversion to permanent status, and the diversity visa lottery for populations unable to enter through the preference system. -
American Baptist Church Settlement Agreement
The regular denial of asylum applications from Salvadorans and Guatemalans fleeing violence in their homelands during the 1980s led to this legal challenge which forced changes to U.S. procedures for handling such cases. -
Emergency Quota Law
Fears of increased immigration after the end of World War I and the spread of radicalism propelled Congress to enact this emergency measure imposing drastic quantitative caps on immigration. -
Chinese Student Protection Act
Legislated in response to the brutal Chinese government crackdowns on student protests in Tiananmen in 1989, this law permitted Chinese students living in the United States to gain legal permanent status. -
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act
Building on the steps taken with IRCA in 1986, IIRIRA further empowered federal authorities to enforce immigration restrictions by adding resources for border policing and for verification of employment credentials. -
The Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act
The Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) allowed certain Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans who had fled violence and poverty in their homelands in the 1980s to file for asylum and remain in the United States. -
Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act
Under the Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act (HRIFA), enacted by Congress on Oct. 21, 1998, certain Haitian nationals who had been residing in the United States could become legal permanent residents. -
Zadvydas Vs Davis
This Supreme Court case ruled that immigration authorities cannot indefinitely detain aliens ordered deported, but for whom no destination can be arranged. -
Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act
After the attacks of September 11th, the U.S. government acted to expand the budget, staffing, and powers of the immigration enforcement bureaucracy. -
Secured Fence Act
Passed in October 2006, this law mandated that the Secretary of Homeland Security act quickly to achieve operational control over U.S. international land and maritime borders including an expansion of existing walls, fences, and surveillance. -
Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals
Trying to cope with the long-term residence of millions of unauthorized immigrants, this executive order provided protection from deportation and work authorization to persons who arrived as minor children and had lived in the United States since June 15, 2007. -
Deferred Actions for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents
This executive order issued by the Obama White House sought to defer deportation and some other protections for unauthorized immigrants whose children were either American citizens or lawful permanent residents. -
Muslim Travel Ban
The "Muslim Ban" refers to a series of the Trump administration's executive orders that prohibited travel and refugee resettlement from select predominately Muslim countries. After several legal challenges, the Supreme Court upheld most provisions of a third version of the ban. -
Final Rule on Public Charge Ground of Admissibility
In 2019, the Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security finalized a rule that expanded the list of received benefits and other factors to be considered in determining whether an applicant for admission or adjustment of status is likely to become a public charge.