A review of past American nativist immigration policies

Sarah Churchwell provides a valuable look back on the not-always-admirable history of US immigration policy in American Immigration: A Century of Racism New York Review of Books 09/26/2019 issue; accessed 09/10/2019).

It includes bits of history like this:

The federal government, however, did not begin restricting immigration until the 1880s. There were local and state laws to control it, but they were rarely enforced. Immigrants who arrived before 1880 for the most part did so in the absence of any meaningful restrictions, or disregarded them and were permitted to stay. Claiming ancestry on the basis of “legal” immigration to the United States before the 1880s and 1890s is to all intents and purposes nonsense; the vast majority of immigrants just came.

By 1882, the threat from Chinese “coolie” labor led Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, placing a ten-year moratorium on the immigration of Chinese laborers. The following year, Emma Lazarus invited the world’s tired and poor, its wretched refuse, to America’s shores. She was raising money for the Statue of Liberty, which arrived in New York harbor in 1885—the same year Congress passed the Alien Contract Labor Law, forbidding the importation of foreign workers.

And I'm always glad to see a good dig at "Silent Cal" Coolidge:

In February 1921 an article appeared in Good Housekeeping called “Whose Country Is This?” written by Vice President Calvin Coolidge, in which he proclaimed, “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides…observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”