Introduction: During this period, the U.S. experienced major waves of immigration. During the 1890's America experienced an economic depression. We went through an agricultural crisis that made its way to urban streets which soon lead to a massive worldwide crisis. A quarter of the nation's railroads went bankrupt, and in some cities unemployment among industrial workers increased 20-25 percent. After this depression immigration soon bounced back from having only 3.5 million people moving to America to having 9 million people emigrating here. As usual we still had Europeans coming from Northern and Eastern Europe but their numbers were slowly decreasing. Problems began to rise due to concerns of mass immigration and its effect on the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1903 to regulate immigration. The Immigration Act of 1903 was also known as the Anarchist Exclusion Act prohibiting anarchists, beggars, and importers of prostitutes to come into America.
World War 1 was also a huge cause of reduction in immigration from Europe during this time. In 1917, the Immigration Act was created to require immigrants to know how to read and write in their native languages before becoming citizens. The Immigration Service took the new responsibility of administering millions of literacy tests and in the process wasting their time on tons of people who would end up failing them anyways. In 1918, passport requirements were imposed by a Presidential Proclamation. This increased agency paperwork during immigrant inspection and deportation activities. This passport requirement also interrupted routine traffic flow across the U.S. land borders with Canada and Mexico. This soon lead to the Immigration Service giving out Border Crossing cards to each person.
Primary Source:
This document is a poster or flyer that was being distributed in 1902. This poster was created by an organization known as the British Brothers' League. They were against immigrants or "foreigners" moving into the U.S. and they were going to have a meeting or public demonstration about it. People who had already moved to the U.S. were completely against mass immigration and they wanted to let that be known. They already didn't want Asians over here as you read in the previous period and now they want to start regulating how many Europeans emigrate here. This is significant because it just shows you how people felt about more immigrants entering the U.S. They were all concerned about mass immigration and people like this caused the people of America to rethink their open attitude towards immigration. This affected this era for immigration because it caused laws to be passed which reduced the amount of immigrants we were receiving in the U.S., but due to WW1 we began to see a increase of immigration because people from Europe were trying to escape all of the chaos happening over there. So although events like this took place immigrants still managed to make their way over to our country and strive for a better life.