Immigration before 1875
After deciding to abandon this project earlier in the year, I reversed myself and, not wanting to throw away the many months of research and writing I have already invested in it, decided instead to at least stop the never-ending research part of the project and just write up what I had for some satisfying closure.
I don’t think I need to spend too much time explaining myself since this website, and this page in particular, only has an audience of one, but for the record, here is the outline as it stands right now and the sections I have previously published:
Introduction [forthcoming]
Think Piece (describing origins of the project)
Context & Convergence: Immigration and Public Health
Immigration before 1875
Eugenics [this and all subsequent sections forthcoming]
Introduction of Immigration Inspection
Implementation and Development of Inspection
Evolution of Inspection
Criticism of Inspection
Immigration Act of 1917 and The Great War
The 1921 and 1924 Laws
Conclusion
*I have changed the organization and expanded the content a bit since I published the piece which previously combined these two sections.
I admit that the following piece is much longer than a typical post should be (more than 3,000 words), but it is part of the compromise with myself to get this project “published.”
Immigration before 1875
This negative attitude towards immigrants expressed by Powderly was not entirely new, but it was more than just an amplification of earlier sentiments. In fact, for the first 250 years of immigration to North America, most complaints came from the immigrants themselves. First and foremost is the fact that up to three-quarters arrived as unfree and in the case of Black people, enslaved.[1] In his review of the literature on indentured servitude, John Donoghue concludes “most American historians have agreed that the prevalence of servitude, in tandem with the growth of slavery, made unfreedom of varying degrees the common denominator of colonial work until the American Revolution.”[2] In Virginia, with the successful introduction of tobacco in 1612, cultivation drove an insatiable need for workers, most of whom arrived as indentured servants. Throughout the Chesapeake in the seventeenth century, about 90,000 of the 120,000 emigrants were English servants.[3] As the number of indentured servants dwindled over the course of the seventeenth century, the economics of importing enslaved Africans grew more attractive for Southern planters. In the Chesapeake from only 300 enslaved people in 1650, their numbers increased to 13,000 in 1700, and 150,000 in 1750, a full 40 percent of the population.[4] By the close of the American Revolution, “roughly every fifth American was either an African immigrant or the descendant of one” and the slave trade was “one of the major means of bringing immigrants to the New World in general and the United States in particular.”[5]
“RUN away from their Master in New-York, two indented Servants.” Supplement to the New-York Journal (December 20, 1766). “The Adverts 250 Project.”
For those that chose to come to one of the British colonies in North America, whether free or subjecting themselves to a term of indenture, most found they were grossly misled by boosters and speculators about the opportunities that awaited them. Disease, an unfamiliar and extreme climate, overwork, violence by masters under the cover of acceptable discipline, or attacks by hostile Indians provoked by the new arrivals meant “harsh but short lives” for many immigrants in the seventeenth century.[6] Virtually all unfree emigrants were subject to corporeal punishment including whipping, might be seized by a sheriff or creditors for payment of a master’s debt, or “lost in a card game.”[7] As Abbot Emerson Smith explains in his careful study of unfree labor in colonial America, “Men and women of menial status were accustomed to obey masters in England, and often to suffer grievous cruelties from them,” but the type and environment of their work cost “many thousands” of lives. The records Smith examines from 1671 for example indicate that “in previous years four out of five servants had died of disease soon after their landing.”[8] A common source used as evidence for the disagreeable conditions many immigrants and enslaved people found themselves in were the ubiquitous runaway ads in colonial newspapers throughout the eighteenth century and suspected runaways were the most common reason servants appeared before judges in colonial courts.[9]
A Fleet of Transports under Convoy, 1781. Learn more about British punishment at London Lives.
Another significant source of “immigration” in the eighteenth century were criminals convicted in English courts following Parliament’s Transportation Act of 1718, which quickly became “Britain’s foremost criminal punishment” and second only to the slave trade as a source of compelled immigration.[10] The “planting of the [English] colonies with convicts” began well before 1718 in a series of legal experiments led by the King and his Privy Council and approximately 4,500 convicts were sentenced to transportation prior to that year.[11] Not all of those sentenced to such a fate were in fact carried overseas as the system was only loosely regulated and it depended on a ship’s captain being able to sell the convicts as indentured servants in the colonies.[12] The two colonies most often to receive convicts, Virginia and Maryland, passed laws in the late seventeenth century prohibiting the import of convicts in response to outbreaks of violence thought to be instigated by them.[13] Writing under the pen name “Americanus,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in his Pennsylvania Gazette in 1751 that colonists, instead of killing rattlesnakes, ought instead to sentence them to transportation to England, distributing them “in the Gardens of all the Nobility and Gentry throughout the nation; but particularly in the Gardens of the Prime Miniƒters, the Lords of Trade and Members of Parliament.”[14] The problem facing concerned colonists was a result of specific developments within the British legal system. Over the course of the seventeenth century, more than three hundred crimes were designated as felonies punishable by death and although a great many of those found guilty escaped such a harsh punishment by several procedural loopholes, the justice system faced a crisis of legitimacy and magnitude. Thus, the Transportation Act in 1718 made it “lawful for the court instead of ordering these [corporeal] punishments to order the convicts sent…to the colonies for seven years.”[15] Smith estimates that at least 30,000 British men and women were transported to the colonies in the eighteenth century.[16] As with other unfree laborers from the time, many transported colonists complained grievously about their situation. Some testified they’d “rather be hanged than transported a second time.”[17] William Green, caught up in youthful indiscretions and sentenced to transportation wrote “A Sorrowful Account” of his “cruel uƒuage.” After being chained together with his fellow passengers “and drove in lots like oxen or ƒheep” to be inspected and questioned by potential buyers, he was provided with only “louƒy rags” for clothes and forced to work six days a week for his master and then expected on the seventh to obtain whatever food was needed for the coming week.[18] Convicts were in the unenviable position of being both subject to the same abuses as indentured servants and despised by other colonists in much the same way as much later immigrants, including repeated attempts to pass prohibitions on their importation.
Besides providing the mechanisms necessary to enforce indenture contracts and slavery, the British government interfered little in the process or regulation of immigration to North America. In contrast to the French and Spanish models of claiming and exploiting lands that tended to limit and regulate who could transplant, the British government encouraged permanent settlement by freeholders and workers. “Colonial officials, investors, wealthy landowners, ship captains, importers, and exporters on both sides of the Atlantic all had a keen interest in bringing over, by whatever means, streams of men and women to the colonies, ensuring that those who arrived worked.” In some places and times those departing England had to receive permission from government officials or clergy and promise to remain loyal subjects, but mostly were unhindered at points of embarkation.[19] In part, the lack of regulation reflected the lack of any corporatized or regular system of immigration. There were not regular passenger lines with fixed schedules and rates and thus no easily identifiable processes that might have required parliamentary intervention.[20] Additionally, each of the various North American colonies acted somewhat independently with their own colonial governments and charters and methods for encouraging immigration.
To the extent colonial residents and their officials discouraged immigration, they worried primarily that newly arrived immigrants, often poor and in search of work, would require public assistance and prove a drain on public coffers. According to Hidetaka Hirota, a large number of immigrants during the eighteenth century “had been generally poor and included a large number of paupers dependent on public charity.”[21] Using distinctions found in the seventeenth-century English Poor Laws, which required local parishes to provide for the poor and expel those who were foreign, colonial legislatures provided relief only to those thought “deserving” and imposed residency requirements.[22] For example, “In Massachusetts, the colonial government passed in 1639 an order that authorized local courts” to determine the proper residency status of a poor person and “each town could remove paupers who sought poor relief from the town but had legal settlement elsewhere.” A similar law was enacted in New York in 1683. New England colonies had a practice of “warning out,” whereby individuals deemed destitute transients and likely to become a public charge would be given a warning to vacate town or face expulsion by local law enforcement.[23]
Although not directly intended to address questions of immigration, King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 which “expressly forbade his subjects in the colonies from settling west of a line drawn along the crest of the Appalachia Mountain range from Nova Scotia in the North to Georgia in the South” raised alarm among those who coveted Indian territory to the west either for settlement or speculation, and significantly reduced the acreage available for future settlement.[24] Following the exhausting and expensive conflict with Native Americans and the French during the Seven Years War, the King hoped to prevent further conflicts with the tribes west of British settlement. Although the directive imagined and proclaimed from many thousands of miles away failed to prevent individual settlers from encroaching on Indian lands, it did prevent incorporated land speculators from conveying a clear title to their lands and thus discouraged large scale settlements in the prohibited lands.[25] Spurred in part by the Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence specifically criticized the King for endeavoring to “prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”[26]
To remedy the King’s attempt to limit settlement and thus immigration, the 1781 Articles of Confederation passed by the newly-united States “acted on [a] vision of integrating outsiders as its representatives contemplated acute labor shortages and the need to populate the land and to neutralize the Indian nations living there.”[27] Under the Articles, states retained their own authority over naturalization and “immigration,” but stipulated that “the free inhabitants of each state had the right to travel freely to any other state, and were entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states.”[28] Legal scholars James E. Pfander and Theresa R. Wardon argue that while it is technically true that Congress did not enact what may be more commonly understood as “immigration legislation” until 1875 in the sense that they delimited who may enter the country, early republic naturalization laws were in no small way practical exercises of immigration policy by stipulating who may be allowed to become Americans through naturalization law. The realities of trans-Atlantic travel and the necessity of becoming naturalized to own property, “combined to make naturalization virtually synonymous with the immigration policy of the early Republic.”[29] Similarly, the 1787 Northwest Ordinance can be said to have encouraged immigration by ensuring “all white Europeans” that moved to federal territories would be accorded the privileges of citizenship, free from slavery, and religious freedom–a contrast to places like Massachusetts with established churches and denominations that viewed outsiders with suspicion and resisted their full inclusion.[30] The eagerness for settlers throughout the colonial and early republic periods suggests that conflicts with the steady stream of new arrivals was minimal. Indeed, as Roger Daniels has noted, “one can make too much of the xenophobia and prejudice of the revolutionary era and the early republic.”[31] National expansion, fulfilling the nation’s destiny as an “empire of liberty” was of first importance. This reality of continental expansion meant that most new immigrants, English and non-English alike, moved to the expanding national boundaries and thus “physical space effectively inhibited interethnic tension” for the nation’s first half century.[32]
That did not mean, of course, there was not xenophobia and prejudice, especially as the early republic gave way to what Daniels has called “The Century of Immigration” beginning in 1820. A group that found itself a frequent target of disparagement and violence, and which carried right through the nineteenth century, were Catholics. Patriot leader Samuel Adams claimed in 1768, “more is to be dreaded from the growth of Popery in America, than from Stamp-Acts or any other Acts destructive of mens [sic] civil rights.”[33] Many believed like Adams that Catholics could never be good American, republican citizens since they took their orders from their priests or the Pope. This hatred of Catholics by American colonists caused the British government immense difficulties and the Quebec Act, which among other provisions permitted support of the Catholic church by a tax on parishioners and granted the colony an enormous tract of land located between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, was cited by colonists in the mid-1770s as evidence that Parliament intended to subject them to Catholic rule.[34]
The Mitred Minuet, 1774. Print shows four Anglican bishops joining hands and dancing around a copy of the "Quebec Bill" which lies at their feet, on the left, Lord Bute, playing the bagpipes, and Lord North stand with another minister as the Devil hovers above them.
The first most notable statutory objection to immigrants came shortly after the new republic found its feet and followed in the wake of the French Revolution. Thomas Jefferson’s well-known affinity for the French raised suspicions about his Democratic-Republican supporters and the fear among Federalists that European immigrants sympathetic to the Revolution and its violence would cause similar troubles in the new republic. In response and again aligned with the notion that naturalization had immigration implications, the Federalist Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1795, which increased the residency requirement for citizenship to five years, and a subsequent act in 1798 extended that even further to fourteen years. (The first Congress passed a naturalization act in 1790 that granted citizenship to any free white persons after only two years.) As part of this legislation, the Federalists also passed three additional laws which are collectively referred to as the Alien and Sedition Acts. Among the several provisions included a requirement for all aliens to register with the federal government and gave the President the authority to deport any alien “whom he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” All of these laws came in a moment of desperation for the Federalist party as they correctly surmised they were about to lose elections to the Jeffersonians, who repealed or allowed them to expire. This episode aside, during the Early Republic, states continued to maintain control over immigration, but the volume of arrivals and the capacity of state bureaucracies mitigated against strict enforcement of existing limitations. For the next couple decades anti-immigrant sentiment remained quieted but then beginning in 1820 and over the next several decades that changed dramatically.[35]
Although immigration was largely encouraged and little meaningful regulation existed to stop it for most of the nineteenth century, Roger Daniels identifies “three discreet phases of anti-immigrant activity, or nativism” during this period, each in response to the specific groups that came ashore. The first was anti-Catholic, primarily felt by the Irish, second was anti-Asian, directed most violently against the Chinese in the western United States, and finally “anti-all immigrants,” which began in the period covered by the bulk of this article below.[36] The trouble, so to speak, began with a revolution of sorts, the transportation revolution. By 1820, railroads had reached deep into several European countries and sailing ships with regular transatlantic schedules and decreased fares rapidly increased immigration. Combined with the lack of restrictions or regulations described above, the barrier of distance and cost came crashing down and as a result more people chose to immigrate between 1820 and the Civil War than had lived in the United States in 1790. The volume of those arriving on American shores, largely from Ireland and Germany, much of it Catholic, transformed “sporadic nativism and xenophobia” into an organized and powerful movement that rhetorically and physically attacked new Americans.[37] The first “phase” targeting Irish and German Catholics, most of whom settled on the east coast, developed during a period of increased migration, often by the very poor, at first fleeing population pressures and then the devastating potato blight.[38] It was during this period that the arguments against immigrants due to their poverty and the burden placed on taxpayers for their support gained renewed traction and nativists began demanding tighter limitations on the arrival of paupers. New York and Massachusetts started to levy head taxes on arriving immigrants to recoup some of those costs, but in 1849, a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Passenger Cases that Congress has sole jurisdiction over matters of immigration, and the taxes were unconstitutional. As Daniels notes, “This ruling only added supporters to an anti-immigrant bloc that was already flourishing in the country.”[39] That “anti-immigrant bloc” was found for example in the American or Know-Nothing Party which advocated harsh laws against immigrants such as increasing the residency requirement for naturalization to twenty-one years and participated in violent anti-immigrant outbursts in Baltimore, Louisville, St. Louis, and elsewhere.[40] The settlement patterns of newly arrived immigrants, especially after the Civil War as the nation rapidly industrialized, tended to concentrate many of them in urban centers. And it was these growing urban areas “with unhealthy slums, the spread of crime, and the increase in public disorder” that contributed to the advent of the Progressive Era.[41]
[1] Aaron S. Fogleman, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the American Revolution.” Journal of American History 85, n. 1 (1998): 43.
[2] John Donoghue, “Indentured Servitude in the 17th Century English Atlantic: A Brief Survey of the Literature,” History Compass 11 (October 2013): 893.
[3] Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001), 142.
[4] Taylor, American Colonies, 154.
[5] Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 53-55.
[6] Taylor, American Colonies, 143.
[7] Abbott E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 233.
[8] Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 254.
[9] Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 264.
[10] A. Roger Ekirch, “Bound for America: A Profile of British Convicts Transported to the Colonies, 1718-1775,” William and Mary Quarterly 42, n. 2 (1985): 184-5.
[11] Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 92-6.
[12] Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 98-9.
[13] Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 104.
[14] Pennsylvania Gazette, May 9, 1751, Library of Congress, accessed September 11, 2026, www.loc.gov/item/sn84026371/1751-05-09/ed-1/.
[15] Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 111.
[16] Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 117; Kenneth Morgan asserts “some 50,000 convicts” were transported between 1718-1775. “English and American Attitudes Towards Convict Transportation 1718-1775,” History 72, n. 236 (October 1987): 416.
[17] Morgan, “English and American Attitudes,” 430.
[18] William Green, The Sufferings of William Green, being A Sorrowful Account (London: J. Long, Whitechapel, 1775), 4-7.
[19] Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner, Immigration: An American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 16-17.
[20] Bon Tempo and Diner, Immigration, 14.
[21] Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 41.
[22] Bon Tempo and Diner, Immigration, 36; Hirota, Expelling the Poor, 42.
[23] Hirota, Expelling the Poor, 43-4.
[24] Eugene M. Del Papa, “The Royal Proclamation of 1763: Its Effect upon Virginia Land Companies,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 83, n. 4 (October 1975): 406.
[25] Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 112-4.
[26] The Declaration of Independence, para. 9 (U.S. 1776).
[27] Bon Tempo and Diner, Immigration, 51.
[28] Articles of Confederation of 1781, art. IV, para. 1.
[29] James E. Pfander and Theresa R. Wardon, “Reclaiming the Immigration Constitution of the Early Republic: Prospectivity, Uniformity, and Transparency,” Virginia Law Review 96, n. 2 (April 2010): 365.
[30] Bon Tempo and Diner, Immigration, 52.
[31] Daniels, Coming to America, 115.
[32] Daniels, Coming to America, 110.
[33] Boston Gazette, April 11, 1768, Massachusetts Historical Society, Annotated Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr, Jr., accessed September 11, 2026, https://www.masshist.org/dorr/volume/2/sequence/89. See also Charles H. Metzger, “Catholics in the Period of the American Revolution,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 59, n. 3 (September 1948): 195-219.
[34] Woody Holton, Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), 140-1.
[35] Hirota, Expelling the Poor, 42; Daniels, Coming to America, 113-5.
[36] Daniels, Coming to America, 265.
[37] Daniels, Coming to America, 117.
[38] Daniels, Coming to America, chapter 5.
[39] Hirota, Expelling the Poor, 42; Bon Tempo and Diner, Immigration, 93; Daniels, Coming to America, 269.
[40] Daniels, Coming to America, 269; Paul A. Gilje, “Riots, Urban,” in The Oxford Companion to United States History, ed. Paul S. Boyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 669.
[41] Bon Tempo and Diner, Immigration, 93.