Daniels, Chapter 13

This chapter really showed me the way that the government handled immigrants. America liked to promote the country as a great place that welcomed all people no matter what.  In reality it was so much different from that.  The government had regulations, laws, and acts that kept people from getting into our country.  What I find very interesting is that we had a rough start, and we are still fighting ways to handle immigration to this day.

The immigration act lasted until 1965 and although it marked the end of a racist system it did not, however, end racism in the United States.  This only shows a time where racism was a government action and the denial of certain groups was well known.  Although that stopped, this definitely did not stop racism between the people, sadly in many ways it only deepened it.

The McCarran-Walter Act was passed in 1952.  This was an act that ended total exclusion of racial and ethnic groups from naturalization and immigration.  Essentially this made the laws “color blind”. The passing of this act was a huge deal. I find it very surprising that President Harry S. Truman actually vetoed this bill, but Congress still passed it.  One would like to think that the President would be very supportive of this kind of bill, but unfortunately that was not the case.

As much good that came from this act, it still had some of the discriminatory policies implemented before, but it was a start.  The McCarran-Walter Act was also was a way to keep up the nickname “Free World”, America finally realized that you couldn’t be the “Free World” if you were discriminating against people of certain racial backgrounds.

If we would have kept the immigration act and exclusion acts in power our country would have lost it’s diversity and America would more than likely have a much lower population.

After World War II there were many European refugees that immigrated to our shores.  Most people were against letting these people in because of a fear of being overrun by Europeans who are coming from a devastating and crumbling country.  The first three groups of immigrating peoples, the Siberian Asians, East Asians, and Polynesians mostly came because of exploring and migrating.  The Europeans came to America because they wanted to get away from the monarchy and the way the government was, just like how the very first settlers who came to America.  I think it is strange to resent people coming to America for the exact same reasons that America was founded.

I don’t think that I have ever heard of the term “asylee”.  An asylee is a refugee who applies for entry into the United States while they are already in America.  Some asylees would be in America legally on a student visa or something of that sort, while others would come here illegally. The government tried to control the amount of asylees that came into America but the numbers got so high that the in 1980 an act was passed put a cap of five thousand asylees.