Rethinking the Last 200 Years of US Immigration Policy By
Aristide Zolberg The New School University June 1, 2006
Conventional histories of US immigration policy generally
present the starting point as laissez-faire, or open door, an
attitude that only shifted to favor increased restriction after
the Civil War. The door began to close with the exclusion of
Chinese in the final decades of the 19th century and the
imposition of annual quotas for Europeans in the 1920s. While
this timeline indeed highlights important aspects of US
immigration policy, it distorts the larger reality. As its title
suggests, my book A Nation by Design argues instead that from
colonial times onward, Americans actively devised policies and
laws that effectively shaped the country's population and hence
its overall makeup. In this perspective, the United States is
distinct from other overseas nations of European origin where
immigration remained largely governed by the imperial
governments or, in the case of the precociously independen