Daniels, Chapter 11

Between the years 1920 and 1945 nearly five million immigrants immigrated to the United States. Something that I found very surprising is that a majority of these people are ignored as being immigrants.

The years between 1925 and 1930 are considered to be the “normal” quota years.  People who came to America during this time were, for the most part, not immigrants because they weren’t counted for.  Between these years is approximated that 220,000 immigrants came to the New World. With the access of coming to the New World becoming harder many immigrants had to resort to illegal means in order to get here.  There were different ways that people did this such as coming through with illegal documentation, such as the paper sons, or by coming through the Canadian or Mexican border without a visa, and  in some very extreme cases people even jumped ship and attempted to make it to the New World that way.

The most common way of entering the New World at that time was by acquiring a visitor’s visa and then just staying. During the depression and war, 1931-1945, it was estimated that in the year 1930 the number of people that departed from the United States exceeded the number or people that were entering.  This happened again between the years 1932 and 1935.

World War II had a major impact on Japanese Americans.  There were some who were seen as betrayers and were thus gathered up and shipped off to a total of ten different concentration camps. Chinese Americans were also affected by the war.  Many of them experienced the transformation of their legal position. In 1988, sometime after the war had ended, a bill was passed which contained an apology to the Japanese American people for the injustice done them during the war and approving the payment of twenty thousand dollars in “redress” to each of the survivors. While this was a nice attempt of an apology it still fell short,  deporting someone because of his or her racial identity is wrong.  Reading this book it is amazing to learn of all the horrible things that the American government did over the years.