WHO WE’VE HATED (*From Legalize LA)
- 1838 - “Trail of Tears” Cherokee Indians, forced on thousand-mile march to the established Indian Territory. Approximately 4,000 die.
- 1862 - The “Anti-Coolie” Act discourages Chinese immigration to California and institutes special taxes on employers who hire Chinese workers.
- 1870 - The Naturalization Act of 1870 expands citizenship to both whites and African-Americans. Asians are still excluded.
- 1882 - Chinese Exclusion Act is passed in order to prevent an excess of cheap labor in the U.S.
- 1891 - Supreme Court rules in Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” case. This decision allows for legalized segregation.
- 1901 - President William McKinley is shot and killed by a Polish anarchist. Congress enacts the Anarchist Exclusion Act prohibiting the entry into the U.S. of people judged to be anarchists and political extremists.
- 1913 - California’s Alien Land Law prohibits “aliens ineligible for citizenship” (Chinese and Japanese) from owning property in the state.
- 1922 - The Supreme Court rules in Ozawa v. United States that first-generation Japanese are ineligible for citizenship and cannot apply for naturalization.
- 1924 - Immigration Act of 1924 establishes fixed quotas of national origin and eliminates Far East immigration.
- 1940 - The Alien Registration Act requires the registration and fingerprinting of all aliens over the age of 14.
- 1942 - Franklin Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, authorizing the building of “relocation camps” for Japanese Americans.
- 1951 - The Bureau of Indian Affairs begins selling 1.6 million acres of Native American land to developers.
- 1953 - The U.S. Immigration Service executes “Operation Wetback,” deporting more than 3.8 million people of Mexican heritage.
- 1968 - A new law limits 120,000 immigrants annually from the western hemisphere with visas on a first come first serve basis.
- 2001 - Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Form Act provides for more border patrol agents, requires schools report foreign students attending classes, and requires that all foreign nationals in the US carry biometric IDs.
- 2005 - 1,000 volunteers, calling themselves the “Minutemen,” start patrolling the Arizona border.
- 2005 - Real ID Act dispensed with laws that prevented physical barriers from being built at the U.S. borders. It also made it harder for people to apply for asylum, easier to deport aliens for suspected terrorist activity, and funded border-security- related projects.
“Immigration policy should be generous; it should be fair; it should be flexible. With such a policy we can turn to the world, and to our own past, with clean hands and a clear conscience.” - John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants (1958)
