Aggregated News
Immigrants at Ellis Island undergoing a medical inspection | Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash
In 1924, Congress sent a message to the world: We are no longer ready to take “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.”
Seized by fears around crime, demographics and economic losses, it set quotas that limited immigration from Italy, Poland and Russia. It effectively barred immigration from Asia. It also instituted a cap of 150,000 immigrants allowed into the country in a given year, rejecting the vision laid out by the writer Emma Lazarus in her famous poem.
“It has become necessary that the United States cease to function as an asylum,” Representative Albert Johnson, Republican of Washington, said at the time.
Today, many historians see those dynamics repeating — except this time, President Trump is hardening the country’s borders against the huddled masses largely on his own authority.
Using administrative action, and backed by expansive new powers upheld by the Supreme Court, Mr. Trump has drastically pulled back on all forms of immigration. He has banned asylum at the southern...