The history of US Immigration
The United States is widely referred to as a country that was built by immigrants. With the exception of the Native Americans who make up a small percentage of the population everybody else is the descendant of an immigrant if not one themselves. Over the years there have been quite a few changes to the immigration policy of the United States.
For much of US history immigration has been open to almost anybody who wanted to come to the country. The first immigrants to arrive where the early colonists. As they represented only a very small number of people there was room for many more people to come to the country. In fact there was considerable effort expended to encourage people to move to the United States. Despite this the population remained fairly small and largely limited to the east coast which meant there was lots of space for more immigrants to come to the country.
When the US achieved independence from Britain they continued the policy of allowing anybody who showed up to move immigrate. There was lots of land to the west that they were anxious to populate and for the next hundred years immigrants were encouraged to move the US and settle on the land in the west. In order to encourage immigrants there was free land made available for them to farm. It wasn't until near the end of the nineteenth century that land started to be in short supply and it began to be necessary to put limits on immigration.
The first laws to restrict immigration came about in the early part of the nineteenth century. These were very much racist laws that were intended to keep people from Southern Europe out of the country. A big part of the reason for the restrictions on immigration was that the industrial revolution had changed the country and the economy was not really based on farming any more. Too many immigrants meant that there were more people than jobs so the number of people who were allowed to immigrate was reduced.
Over the years the laws about who can immigrate to the United States have become more and more restrictive. Most of the current policies on immigration came about in the days after the Second World War in order to limit the number of refugees who would be able to move to the country. Given the number of people who would like to move to the US it has remained necessary to strictly limit the number of people who are allowed to immigrate. Unfortunately this has really only succeeded in creating a problem with illegal immigration. Today there is a lot of debate about how to deal with this problem but there seems to be little interest in changing the immigration laws so things are unlikely to change.