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This article traces the history of immigration to the United States from the colonial era through the present. For broader context, see United States History. For policy debates, see United States Immigration Debate. For scholarly consensus on immigration's economic and demographic effects, see Immigration Economics Consensus.

European settlement of North America began in earnest in the early seventeenth century. English colonists established Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620. The Dutch settled New Amsterdam (later New York) in the 1620s, and Swedish settlers arrived in the Delaware Valley in the 1630s. German migrants, many fleeing religious persecution and the devastation of the Thirty Years' War, began arriving in Pennsylvania in significant numbers after William Penn's promotional campaigns of the 1680s. By 1700, Pennsylvania alone had attracted substantial communities of German Mennonites, Quakers, and Reformed Protestants.

The Scots-Irish - Presbyterian migrants from Ulster - arrived in large numbers beginning in the 1710s, settling predominantly in the backcountry from Pennsylvania south through the Appalachians. By the time of the American Revolution, they constituted a significant fraction of the colonial population.

Forced migration also shaped colonial demographics. The transatlantic slave trade brought enslaved Africans to every colony, with the largest concentrations in the tobacco and rice-growing regions of Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina. By 1775, enslaved people constituted roughly twenty percent of the colonial population.

The Constitution of 1787 gave Congress the power to establish a uniform rule of naturalization. The first Naturalization Act (1790) limited citizenship to “free white persons” of good character who had resided in the United States for two years. Subsequent acts in 1795 and 1798 extended the residency requirement, the latter act passed amid fears of radical French and Irish immigrants during the Quasi-War with France.

Immigration volumes remained modest in the early republic, averaging tens of thousands per year. The new nation received migrants primarily from Britain, Ireland, and German-speaking states. The slave trade, though constitutionally protected from federal prohibition until 1808, was formally closed by Congress in that year, though illegal importation continued for decades.

Industrialization and agricultural crisis in Europe drove the first mass wave of immigration to the United States. Between 1820 and 1880, roughly ten million people arrived, the majority from Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia.

The Irish famine of 1845-1852 accelerated emigration dramatically. An estimated 1.5 to 2 million Irish arrived in the decade following 1845, settling predominantly in northeastern cities - Boston, New York, Philadelphia - where they formed a large urban working class. Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment was widespread; the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s drew significant political support on a nativist platform.

German immigration peaked in the 1850s and again after the failed revolutions of 1848. German migrants settled across a broader geographic range than the Irish, including the Midwest, establishing communities in Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. Chinese immigrants arrived on the West Coast beginning in the late 1840s, drawn by the California Gold Rush and subsequently employed in railroad construction. By 1880, roughly 100,000 Chinese residents lived in the United States, concentrated in California.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 halted nearly all Chinese immigration and barred Chinese residents from naturalization - the first federal law to restrict immigration on the basis of race or nationality.

The character of immigration shifted markedly after 1880. The dominant source regions moved from northwestern Europe to southern and eastern Europe: Italians, Poles, Jews fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Greeks, and others arrived in the tens of millions. Between 1880 and 1920, approximately 20 to 25 million people entered the United States. Ellis Island, opened in 1892, processed the majority of these arrivals.

The newcomers settled disproportionately in industrial cities and mining communities. Jewish immigrants concentrated in New York's Lower East Side and other major urban centers; Italians in New York, Boston, and Chicago; Poles and other Slavic groups in the steel and coal towns of Pennsylvania and the Midwest. These communities built dense networks of mutual aid societies, ethnic churches and synagogues, foreign-language newspapers, and fraternal organizations.

Organized labor and nativist organizations lobbied for restriction throughout this period. The American Protective Association (1887) targeted Catholic immigrants; the Immigration Restriction League (1894), founded by Boston Brahmin reformers, advocated literacy tests as a de facto filter on southern and eastern European immigration. Congress passed literacy test requirements several times; Presidents Cleveland, Taft, and Wilson each vetoed the measures before Wilson's veto was overridden in 1917.

The Dillingham Commission (1907-1911), a joint congressional body, produced a 41-volume report that distinguished between the “old” immigration from northwestern Europe and the “new” immigration from southern and eastern Europe, characterizing the latter as less assimilable. The commission's findings provided intellectual scaffolding for subsequent restriction legislation.

Japanese and Korean immigration to Hawaii and the West Coast grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 curtailed Japanese immigration through a diplomatic arrangement by which Japan agreed to limit passports for laborers.

The Immigration Act of 1921 imposed the first numerical cap on immigration, limiting annual arrivals to three percent of each nationality's population as counted in the 1910 census. The Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) tightened restrictions further, reducing the quota to two percent of the 1890 census - a baseline that heavily favored northwestern Europeans - and effectively banned immigration from Asia entirely through the “barred zone” provisions and the exclusion of aliens ineligible for citizenship. The 1924 act also created the Border Patrol.

Annual immigration fell from over a million per year in the peak years to around 150,000 under the quota system. The Great Depression further suppressed immigration, and in the early 1930s, emigration from the United States briefly exceeded immigration. Mexican workers, including many who were legal residents or citizens, were subject to mass deportations and “repatriation” campaigns during the Depression, with estimates of those removed or pressured to leave ranging from 400,000 to one million - a figure that remains contested in the scholarly literature. ¹⁾

World War II created new categories of immigration policy. The Bracero Program (1942-1964) admitted Mexican agricultural laborers on temporary work contracts to address wartime labor shortages. The War Brides Act of 1945 and subsequent legislation admitted the foreign spouses and children of American servicemen outside normal quota limits. Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, admitting European refugees - many of them Jewish survivors of the Holocaust - through a mortgaging mechanism against future quota allocations.

The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 retained the national-origins quota system but eliminated the racial bar on naturalization, allowing Asian immigrants to become citizens for the first time. It also codified ideological exclusion grounds, barring immigration by members or former members of the Communist Party.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act), passed in the context of the civil rights movement and President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society agenda, abolished the national-origins quota system. The act established a preference system based primarily on family reunification, with secondary categories for employment-based immigration and refugees. Per-country caps were set at 20,000 annually for the Eastern Hemisphere; the Western Hemisphere received an aggregate cap.

The architects and supporters of the act, including Senator Edward Kennedy, predicted it would not substantially alter the ethnic composition of the United States. The demographic effects over subsequent decades differed substantially from projections made at the time. Family reunification preferences produced a phenomenon scholars later called “chain migration,” in which each admitted immigrant could sponsor additional relatives, multiplying admissions over time. Combined with the shift away from European source countries, immigration after 1965 increasingly drew from Latin America, Asia, and eventually Africa and the Caribbean.

Total immigration volumes grew steadily: from roughly 300,000 per year in the late 1960s to over one million annually by the 1990s. The Refugee Act of 1980 codified refugee admissions procedures and incorporated the United Nations definition of refugee status into domestic law, responding partly to large flows from Southeast Asia following the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Unauthorized immigration - primarily from Mexico and Central America - grew substantially through the 1970s and 1980s. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), signed by President Ronald Reagan, combined an amnesty for unauthorized immigrants who had resided continuously in the United States since 1982 - ultimately legalizing roughly 2.7 million people - with employer sanctions and increased border enforcement. Critics across the political spectrum argued that the enforcement provisions were not effectively carried out in practice.

The Immigration Act of 1990 raised overall immigration ceilings, expanded employment-based categories, and created the Diversity Visa Lottery, which allocated visas to nationals of countries with historically low immigration to the United States. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) increased penalties for unauthorized entry, expanded grounds for deportation, and made legal re-entry more difficult for those previously removed.

The September 11, 2001 attacks - carried out by nineteen men, fifteen of them Saudi nationals, who had entered the country on valid visas - prompted a significant restructuring of immigration enforcement. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 dissolved the Immigration and Naturalization Service, distributing its functions among three new agencies within the newly created Department of Homeland Security: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The REAL ID Act of 2005 established federal standards for state-issued identification documents. Enhanced border infrastructure, including fencing and surveillance technology, expanded through the 2000s under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Comprehensive immigration reform - combining expanded legal pathways, enhanced enforcement, and a legalization program for unauthorized residents - was debated but not enacted in 2006-2007 and again in 2013, when the Senate passed a bipartisan bill that did not advance in the House.

President Barack Obama used executive authority to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012, shielding from deportation and granting work authorization to individuals brought to the United States unlawfully as children. The program covered an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 people. A companion program, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), announced in 2014, was blocked by federal courts.

The Trump administration (2017-2021) implemented a series of restrictive measures including a travel ban on nationals of several predominantly Muslim countries (upheld by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii, 2018), reductions in refugee admissions ceilings, a “zero tolerance” family separation policy at the southern border (subsequently reversed under public pressure), expanded deportation priorities, and attempts to rescind DACA. The Biden administration (2021-2025) reversed numerous Trump-era policies, substantially raised refugee admissions ceilings, and proposed comprehensive immigration legislation that did not pass Congress. Unprecedented numbers of migrants were encountered at the southern border during 2021-2023. The Trump administration, returning to office in 2025, moved immediately to reimpose and expand restriction measures through executive action, including deployment of military personnel to the border, mass deportation operations, and efforts to end birthright citizenship by executive order - the last of which faced immediate legal challenge.

Whether the 1965 Hart-Celler Act's drafters understood and minimized its demographic effects or genuinely failed to predict them remains disputed among historians; see United States Immigration Debate.

Some historians argue that the national-origins quota system of the 1920s was primarily a product of eugenicist ideology rather than economic protectionism; others emphasize labor market and nativist political factors as primary causes; see Restrictionist Viewpoint and Open Borders Viewpoint.

The net fiscal and economic effects of both legal and unauthorized immigration - including effects on native wages, public services, entrepreneurship, and long-run growth - are subjects of ongoing empirical dispute; see Immigration Economics Consensus.

Whether DACA and similar deferred-action programs fall within legitimate executive authority or constitute unlawful executive legislation remains contested in both legal scholarship and the courts; see United States Immigration Debate.

The causes of increased unauthorized border crossings in the 2021-2023 period - including the relative contributions of U.S. policy changes, conditions in source countries, and long-term demographic pressures - are disputed; see United States Immigration Debate.

1. Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. 2nd ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
2. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
3. Tichenor, Daniel J. Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
4. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955.
5. Zolberg, Aristide R. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
6. Massey, Douglas S., Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002.
7. Balderrama, Francisco E., and Raymond Rodríguez. Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Revised ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.
8. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Yearbook of Immigration Statistics. Annual series.
9. Dillingham Commission. Reports of the Immigration Commission. 41 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911.
10. Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. ___ (2018).
11. Pub. L. 89-236, Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
12. Pub. L. 99-603, Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.