When did immigrants become "illegal?"

The rules about who could and could not come and live in the United States have changed many times over the last 250 years, but exactly when restrictions were first put on immigration might surprise you. Today, walking us through the myriad qualitative and quantitative systems surrounding immigration policy is Muzaffar Chishti, Senior Fellow and Director of the Migration Policy Institute. Here are some links to our episodes on: The Chinese Exclusion Act, ICE, and Becoming a US Citizen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  DHS says federal agents have arrested some 4,000 illegal aliens in Minnesota.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Us cutting off healthcare benefits for illegal aliens. They prioritize taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  I'd like to see something done about the illegal alien problem that would be so sensitive. ... by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.

• 0:24Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.

• 0:26Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 0:27Nick Capodice?

  And today, we are exploring the logistics, politics, linguistic peccadilloes involved with a very politically charged term: illegal alien.

• 0:41Nick Capodice?

  Now, hold on. Hold on, everyone. I have not used that expression since 2009, since the day I first learned it was not the proper term to use for someone who was not authorized to reside in the United States.

• 0:55Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, how did you first learn that?

• 0:57Nick Capodice?

  Well, I was learning my very first tour at the Tenement Museum in New York, and I was using that term to describe a Sicilian woman, Rosaria Baldizzi, who came to the U.S. through Canada in the 1920s. And the tremendous, patient, kind man who was training me said, "Nick, hold on a second. We prefer not to use that word."

• 1:20Hannah McCarthy?

  Did he give you a specific reason?

• 1:22Nick Capodice?

  He most certainly did, and that reason is kind of this whole episode. We are going to dig into our country's history with and laws around immigration. So stick around.

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• 3:05Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, Nick. So what were, like, the first laws in the United States that pertain to who could immigrate to this country and who could not?

• 3:16Speaker 09

  It's an interesting question. I mean, I like to tell people that we had no immigration laws at the federal level in the country till 1880.

• 3:27Nick Capodice?

  This is Muzaffer Chishtri.

• 3:29Speaker 09

  I'm Muzaffer Chishtri. I'm a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.

• 3:33Nick Capodice?

  Muzaffer's a lawyer who specializes in immigration. He has testified in front of Congress numerous times. And several years ago, he worked as Director of the Immigration Project for the ILGWU, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

• 3:48Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, wow. You have told me a lot about them.

• 3:59Hannah McCarthy?

  So just to reiterate, no federal immigration restrictions until 1880.

• 4:07Nick Capodice?

  That is correct.

• 4:08Hannah McCarthy?

  Were there state restrictions?

• 4:10Nick Capodice?

  Sort of.

• 4:11Speaker 09

  Like, we would, New York State would impose a tax on shipping companies that brought people from Europe to the US. It was literally called a head tax, which means we counted the number of heads that were brought to the shore and then charged them for bringing people in. And the second thing I tell people, that we had naturalization laws before we had immigration laws.

• 4:39Nick Capodice?

  Naturalization, by the way, is just the process of becoming a citizen.

• 4:44Hannah McCarthy?

  When was the first naturalization law passed?

• 4:47Nick Capodice?

  Almost at the very beginning of our country. It was the Naturalization Act of 1790, which said to become a citizen of the US, you had to be in the country for two years and you had to be in your state for one year.

• 5:01Hannah McCarthy?

  And that was it? There were no other restrictions?

• 5:03Nick Capodice?

  Well, there was one, a very big one.

• 5:06Speaker 09

  And that was basically reserved for three white men. Black men, Native Americans were clearly excluded from that. So in the 1790 statute, for the first time, the word "alien" was used because it was naturalizing aliens who were present in the United States.

• 5:30Nick Capodice?

  And then, eight years later, the United States passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which was the first time in federal law that the word "alien" was used.

• 5:39Hannah McCarthy?

  All right. Now, we have talked about these acts a few times on Civics 101, but can you just go over them real quick?

• 5:46Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely. The Alien and Sedition Acts were four acts passed in the John Adams administration on naturalization, becoming a citizen, sedition, which is you're not allowed to say false or malicious stuff about the government, and the Alien Friends, which allowed the president to deport foreigners deemed dangerous, and the Alien Enemies Acts.

• 6:08Hannah McCarthy?

  And all of these acts are expired or were repealed?

• 6:13Hannah McCarthy?

  Save for one.

• 6:14Nick Capodice?

  Save one, the Alien Enemies Act, which allows a president to detain foreigners in times of war or invasion. This act has been invoked in three wars and one time outside of a war scenario, and it was by Donald Trump in 2025.

• 6:30Speaker 10

  I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1800, of 1798. Seven, think of that. 1798. That's when we had real politicians that said, we're not going to play games. We have to go back to 1798.

• 6:48Speaker 09

  And just to be more historical about it, the word alien literally comes from the Crown.

• 6:57Speaker 09

  We inherited everything from Britain. Oddly, the birthright citizenship debate that we have in today is a relic of the Crown. During the British Empire, you either owed your allegiance to the Crown or you're an alien. You're an alien was someone who did not own their allegiance to the king. And therefore, everyone who was born on the territory of the king was accepted as a citizen at birth. And the word illegal alien, I don't think was used in our statute till 1986.

• 7:34Hannah McCarthy?

  OK, 1986. This was the Immigration Reform and Control Act that Ronald Reagan signed.

• 7:41Nick Capodice?

  Exactly. This act basically made it so any unauthorized person residing in the United States prior to 1982 was suddenly authorized.

• 7:52Speaker 09

  1986 is the only time in our history where we have legalized illegal aliens. Then there was never any provision, any chapter when we did that. Europeans have done it a number of times. Spain does it every six months. But we had never done it, and we haven't done it since. That was unique. And since that legalized aliens, therefore you had to be an illegal alien to be legalized. Because I actually, one of my favorite cases, I essentially cut my teeth in that act. From the coming of that act in the initial stages to it becoming law.

• 8:35Speaker 09

  And then I was actually head of the coalition that implemented the law. We ran there, the International Ladies Government for Christians, and one of the largest legalization programs. We legalized 3,000 members. But to be legalized under that law, you had to be illegal.

• 8:54Hannah McCarthy?

  So the first time there was a law that created a designation that there are people here legally and there are people here illegally was 1986.

• 9:06Nick Capodice?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Hannah McCarthy?

  But that same law said that you couldn't be here legally until it was proven that you were here illegally first?

• 9:17Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. Joseph Heller would have loved it.

• 9:26Speaker 09

  Because that was the only way you could get a green card. That if you were here as a student on lawful status or H1B worker on law, you were not eligible to be legalized. So we found creative ways to find that someone was here in violation of the law. That's why the word illegal alien, by necessity, had to find its way in the statute in 1986.

• 9:53Nick Capodice?

  As a quick aside, as we are talking about this word, quote, illegal, do you remember Frank Luntz?

• 9:59Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, yeah, I do, from your episode on framing. He was the guy who wrote memos to the Republican Party to tell them to use certain phrases and avoid others. Like, say, climate change instead of global warming, or say, death tax, not estate tax.

• 10:15Nick Capodice?

  That's the guy. In 2005, he wrote a memo to Republican candidates saying, "Always use the term illegal immigrants and do not use the term illegals." But Luntz was largely ignored.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  And those people that hire illegals ought to be penalized.

• 10:33Nick Capodice?

  In 2018, a congressman in Texas, Steve McCraw, defended using the term illegal immigrant because he said it was a legal term. It is in state and federal laws.

• 10:43Hannah McCarthy?

  Is it in state and federal laws?

• 10:46Nick Capodice?

  Well, no, no, there is no use of the term illegal alien or illegal immigrant in Texas state law. And there's nowhere in federal law that says an unauthorized immigrant living in the United States is here, quote, illegally. And maybe part of the reason for that is, as you noted, Hannah, in your ICE episode, being undocumented in the United States is not a crime.

• 11:08Speaker 09

  It doesn't mean the word illegal alien was not used in popular parlance. It was used by journalists quite a bit, especially in the beginning of the 20th century, when the country was getting very concerned about immigration for the first time.

• 11:25Hannah McCarthy?

  Early 1900s, so this is like peak Ellis Island era.

• 11:29Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely. It is when Salvatore Capodicei came here from Termini, Sicily, when the grand and great grand and great, great grandparents of a staggering amount of people listening to this very podcast came to the United States. And this leads me to one of my favorite things to talk about in the world. Who came to the United States, when and why? Which we're going to get to right after a quick break.

• 11:56Nick Capodice?

  Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name? Like actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing, there are companies called data brokers whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over. So your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once and they keep working in the background.

• 12:41Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 13:03Nick Capodice?

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• 15:47Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101. We are talking about legal and illegal immigration today. And just a reminder, we have several hundred episodes on just about any civics topic you can imagine on our website, civics101podcast.org.

• 16:01Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, Nick, and you were about to tell me about the myriad groups coming to the United States, when and why. So let me have it.

• 16:10Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely, Hannah. And I think it makes sense to look at it through how we determined who was not allowed to come into the United States, who would have been turned away, which was, for the first 100 years, nobody whatsoever.

• 16:26Hannah McCarthy?

  Nobody.

• 16:28Nick Capodice?

  Literally nobody.

• 16:32Nick Capodice?

  Again, Muza for Chishti.

• 16:34Speaker 09

  Anyone who showed up on our shores, it was admitted in, literally. You became a citizen after certain requirements under the 1790 Act. But you were a legal person the moment you entered on the shore. In 1880, for the first time, we said, we will exclude some group of people. And the exclusions we put in place were not numerical. I like to say, but they were not quantitative limits. They were actually qualitative limits.

• 17:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Qualitative, as in there are certain qualities, be they medical or professional or racial qualities, that we keep out of this country.

• 17:16Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, and not numerical, like we only allow 10,000 Germans or French or whatever each year. It was if you had this quality, you were not allowed in.

• 17:26Hannah McCarthy?

  And who was coming at that time?

• 17:30Nick Capodice?

  We had folks coming from everywhere, Hannah, but a few groups in particular. All right, first off, Irish immigration, the famine in Ireland in the 1840s. That led to a massive influx coming from there. Around the same time, Chinese people were actively recruited in huge numbers to fill the labor force, specifically in mining and to help construct the transcontinental railroad. And then, from 1870 to 1900, over 12 million immigrants came to the United States, mostly from Germany, Ireland, and England.

• 18:04Hannah McCarthy?

  When did Ellis Island open as our immigration processing center?

• 18:09Nick Capodice?

  That was 1892.

• 18:11Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, where did people go before that?

• 18:13Nick Capodice?

  The biggest processing center was called Castle Garden. It's on the southern tip of Battery Park in New York City. And again, until 1880, nobody was turned away.

• 18:24Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, so who was on that first list of limited people?

• 18:28Speaker 09

  The talk in the 80s that certain kind of people we don't like. So the candidates for that were convicts. Candidates for that were people with communicable diseases, tuberculosis especially of that time, people who were paupers, people who were prostitutes. And we, in 1882, we added all of Chinese.

• 18:54Speaker 09

  In the Chinese Exclusion Act.

• 18:56Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, now that was huge. We have a whole episode on Chinese exclusion, which I wholeheartedly encourage everyone listen to.

• 19:05Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely agree. So this was America's first racial restriction, and it would not be the last. But then we get to the big wave, the Ellis Island years.

• 19:16Speaker 11

  These gladly face the long ocean voyage. Then immigration gateways like Ellis Island and examination by immigration officials.

• 19:26Hannah McCarthy?

  If we're gonna talk about Ellis Island, do you want to start with your thing?

• 19:32Nick Capodice?

  My thing? My soapbox?

• 19:34Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah. Let's hear it.

• 19:38Nick Capodice?

  Something I have been known from time to time at parties and social occasions is to get on my own little soapbox to tell anyone who will listen that nobody's name got changed at Ellis Island.

• 19:50Hannah McCarthy?

  And to be fair, Nick, you used to think that people's names were changed.

• 19:54Nick Capodice?

  I did, Hannah. I was also a victim of Godfather Part Two.

• 19:57Speaker 11

  Come on, son. What is your name?

• 20:00Speaker 12

  Tu nome Vito Andolini from Corleone.

• 20:03Speaker 11

  Corleone. Vito Corleone.

• 20:05Hannah McCarthy?

  Nobody's name was changed at Ellis Island because nobody at Ellis Island wrote down names.

• 20:13Nick Capodice?

  That's right. And this is a lesson in the inability to break someone's framing. I've told this little tidbit to probably 1,000 people before now, and I share articles on it, and I encourage people to look it up themselves if they don't believe me. But they usually go, "Hmm, I don't know, kid."

• 20:31Hannah McCarthy?

  But there were inspections at Ellis Island, right? Checking for tuberculosis, trachoma, et cetera.

• 20:37Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, and there was a potential that you could be sent back if you would be considered a, quote, "societal burden."

• 20:45Hannah McCarthy?

  And how many people were actually sent back to their country of origin?

• 20:50Nick Capodice?

  Very few. About 20% of immigrants who came through were detained for one reason or another, but they were usually let in eventually. Of the 12 million immigrants who came through Ellis Island, less than 2% were sent back.

• 21:06Speaker 09

  So the debate between the end of the 19th century and 1917 was that too many people are coming.

• 21:17Speaker 09

  And too many wrong kind of people were coming. And the definition of wrong was clearly some Europeans. We don't like some Europeans, one group of Europeans, because for both they were intellectually and physically inferior to another group, that we like mostly northern and western Europeans. The Nordic supremacy was the governing wisdom at that time. We don't like Italians. We don't like Slavs. We don't like Russians, and we suddenly don't like Jews. And we definitely don't like Chinese and then other Asians. That was clearly stated.

• 21:57Speaker 09

  So the, the, that era, this is where theories of eugenics were sold as science by distinguished academics convincing members of Congress that these people were not at par.

• 22:10Hannah McCarthy?

  Wait, this was in the 19 teens? People were promoting eugenics back then?

• 22:17Nick Capodice?

  They were. And contrary to what I had thought, the United States was at the very forefront of it. The seminal work on eugenics, and eugenics, by the way, is the very much not real, not scientific theory that some people from some places have superior genes and others don't. But again, the seminal work is called The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, a New Yorker. Adolf Hitler wrote Madison Grant a letter saying, quote, "This book is my Bible," end quote, and quote, "We Germans must emulate what the Americans are doing."

• 22:57Hannah McCarthy?

  Wow.

• 22:58Nick Capodice?

  And I bring all this up because this, this is what inspired our first immigration quota system.

• 23:05Speaker 09

  That became our first, first attempt to control immigration in quantitative limits.

• 23:13Speaker 09

  And guess how we decided to put the quantitative limits was by racial quotas. We started putting what we called the National Origin Quota System. In nineteen seventeen became final law in nineteen twenty four. Is that we are going to give quantitative limits for each country. Based on the number of people of the stock of that country in the US in nineteen ten.

• 23:39Nick Capodice?

  So Congress takes the nineteen ten census. They look at it and they decide there are already too many Italians in the United States in nineteen ten. So they push it back. They look at the nineteen hundred census. Well, maybe this is the America I remember. And still too many Italians. So they pushed the goalpost to eighteen ninety. They use the eighteen ninety census as a guide.

• 24:03Speaker 09

  So it was clearly racist, openly racist by members of Congress speaking language on the floor of the House and Senate, which you will find unprintable today. So when we started putting limits on immigration, they were clearly driven on racist terms.

• 24:21Nick Capodice?

  And this Hannah, this is what Ms. Zoffler tries to explain to people who say the well trotted out line, well, my family came here this way, the legal way.

• 24:30Speaker 09

  So the first thing they don't understand, and this is the book, is they say, why didn't they come the way my grandparents came? The right way. As we just finished saying till nineteen twenty four, there was no way of coming illegally. So everyone who came had to come legally. So therefore the notion that you would even have to wait in the line. There was no line till nineteen twenty four. So we started, once we started the quantitative limits, therefore there was a line. So if you did not fit that line, then if you came outside this line, you were illegal. And that was the law to nineteen sixty five.

• 25:14Hannah McCarthy?

  1965?

• 25:15Nick Capodice?

  Yes. There was no significant immigration from places like Italy, Eastern Europe, Hungary, Turkey, China, India, et cetera, from 1924 to 1965. In 1965, at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Seller Act reversing the 1924 National Origins Act.

• 25:40Speaker 12

  And this measure that we will sign today will really make us truer to ourselves, both as a country and as a people.

• 25:51Speaker 12

  It will strengthen us in a hundred unseen ways.

• 25:57Speaker 09

  We ended the national origin quota system, and we opened the, to America, to the entire world. So therefore, history, it was a promise that had been made by President Kennedy in his campaign for president.

• 26:11Nick Capodice?

  John F. Kennedy gave a speech to an Italian club in Boston, and he asked everybody, "Hey, you know, what's on your mind?" And they said, "These quotas are destroying our families. I can't bring my sister, I can't bring my nephew," et cetera. And John F. Kennedy promised, if elected, he would change the quota system.

• 26:29Hannah McCarthy?

  But he didn't.

• 26:30Nick Capodice?

  He didn't. He did nothing to end the national origin quota system.

• 26:37Speaker 09

  He made three states of union addresses, did not address immigration even in one.

• 26:44Speaker 09

  It fell to President Johnson to end the national origin quotas.

• 26:49Nick Capodice?

  And LBJ was not really known to be a pro-immigration kind of guy.

• 26:55Speaker 09

  He was a confirmed Southern Democrat, anti-immigrant person. History shows that he had never met any immigrant except for a piano tuner of his wife, who was a Czech man. He had no relationship with immigration. And so he, when he became president, he calls all of Kennedy's advisers into the White House. He said, "Look, I'm an accidental president." Just tell me what had President Kennedy promised in his caper. They listed immigration, he said that because of my cause I have to do it.

• 27:31Nick Capodice?

  And even though, even though this lifting of the national origin system is celebrated by those who, you know, respect the words of Emma Lazarus in The New Colossus, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," I still gotta say, the 1965 Act was not without its own problems.

• 27:51Speaker 09

  The authors of the 1965 Act made sure that European immigration supremacy remained intact. They wrote the law in a way that would guarantee white European immigrants to come. Because they expanded the category of brothers and sisters of US citizens to get privileged. The relatives of US citizens get high privilege. Guess who were the US citizens at that time? They were all white Europeans. They said if they were their brothers, they will keep on getting, just did not work out that way. The Europeans lost interest in coming to the United States.

• 28:35Speaker 09

  I mean, why would, after the Marshall Plan especially, why would you come to the US when you could live in an Italian villa? And the Third World countries got out of the colonial yoke. And they started sending students, and then professionals. And 50 years later, the face of America had changed.

• 28:55Nick Capodice?

  Muzaffar points out here that this change has stoked a lot of heated feelings in our communities and in our politics. And that those feelings about non-European immigrants were foundational, 65 years later, to the success of one president's election in particular.

• 29:14Speaker 13

  They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.

• 29:39Speaker 09

  He saw how a country had radically changed in its mix in 50 years. In the history of our country, 50 years is not a long period. In 1965, immigration was 90% European. Today, it's 90% non-European. How that could not affect something in the country, you know, you have to be unmindful of how people think about change.

• 30:11Hannah McCarthy?

  We have talked before about how different people with different classifications from different countries have different wait times when it comes to becoming a US citizen through the legal channels. Because we still use a quota system. So someone immigrating from Norway or New Zealand with family in the US will have a very different wait time than someone coming from Mexico or India in terms of the current quota system.

• 30:41Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, I just read a report from the Cato Institute in 2018 where they found that someone trying to immigrate to the US from India with an advanced degree has an estimated wait time of 151 years. And to be clear here, Muzaffar is in no way saying that the recent rise in anti-immigrant sentiment is at all justified, but he is pointing out that we have not amended our immigration policies in a long, long time.

• 31:11Speaker 09

  We haven't changed our immigration level since 1990. So no wonder we're having the effect of all this paralysis in Congress to deal with immigration. And the numbers have grown. From 3 million to 14 million is not a small thing to happen. And now because we haven't changed our laws since 1990 and we haven't done a legalization program since 86, we now have a large number of people who may die unauthorized. We have at least probably two generations of unauthorized people. Now, that's telling.

• 31:55Speaker 09

  So a large number of people have deep roots now who are unauthorized. Therefore, when you see people being snatched from the streets, these are not people who arrived yesterday. These are people who arrived many years ago with deep roots and almost none of them have criminal backgrounds. So therefore, if you have made this bargain that I'm going to deport a million people a year, where are you going to find them? That's the difference between the narrative and reality, is that to find them, you have to go on the inside of our country and people see it. See this more as an attack on Americans and more as an attack on American deeply held

• 32:39Speaker 09

  values like First Amendment and the Second Amendment than they see as an attack on illegal immigration. And that's why I think Trump is losing the people on this.

• 33:00Nick Capodice?

  This episode is made by me, Nekapadice, with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you. Our staff includes producer Marina Henke and executive producer Rebecca Lavoie. Special thanks here. Special thanks go out to everybody at 97 Orchard Street, specifically Pedro and Annie, Sunday Crew, forever. Music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions, Epidemic Sound, and the wondrous Chris Zabriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 33:32Speaker 14

  What does it really take to start a startup? I'm David Rosenko, entrepreneur, investor, and the host of Leap Forward. In each episode, I go behind the scenes with successful founders and someone who knew them before they were famous: their college roommate, their first employee, or their mom. To hear the sometimes uncomfortable but very real inside stories of how companies actually get built. Companies like Reddit, Airbnb, or Twitch. Listen to the new season of Leap Forward for never-before-heard stories behind the world's most iconic companies.

• 34:03Speaker 04

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• 34:23Speaker 05

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• 34:34Speaker 15

  When you spend enough time around great companies, you notice that the best ones treat trust as a growth strategy, not a box to check. Vanta helps companies build and prove trust from day one. Its Agentic Trust Platform connects compliance, risk, and trust at enterprise scale. Vanta delivers a 526% return on investment over three years and pays for itself in just three months. Learn why over 16,000 of the fastest-growing companies use Vanta at vanta.com.