About 88,000 foreigners arrive in the United States on a typical day. Most are welcomed at airports and borders, and most do not intend to stay in the United States. 82,000 nonimmigrant foreigners per day come to the United States as tourists, business visitors, students, and foreign workers. Another 2,200 arrivals are immigrants and refugees, persons that the United States has invited to join American society as permanent residents. The other 4,100 are unauthorized or illegal foreigners—some enter legally as tourists and then stay in the United States, but most enter the country unlawfully by eluding border patrol agents or using false documents to circumvent border inspectors. U.S. immigration policy has historically passed through three major phases: laissez-faire or few limits on arrivals; qualitative restrictions, which did not limit the number of immigrant arrivals but excluded certain types of persons, such as communists and Chinese; and quantitative restrictions, which included numerical limits as well as qualitative restrictions. World War I virtually stopped transatlantic migration. When immigration revived in 1919 and 1920, the numbers were large, and the immigrants were still from the “wrong” part of Europe, the south and the east, which suggested that the literacy test did not achieve the goals of its proponents, viz., favoring immigration from northern and western Europe. However, the House of Representatives commissioned a study that concluded that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe had more “inborn socially inadequate qualities than northwestern Europe-ans,”
setting the stage for using national origins to select immigrants.
