Immigration Act of 1907

The administrations of William McKinley (1897-1901) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901-9) were characterized by an increase in the federal government's monitoring and regulating of immigration. The immigration bureaucracy had grown 4200 percent in 15 years, to deal with the new regulations that were required to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act. Institutions such as Ellis Island, opened in 1892, signaled a new type of United States immigration policy that kept out certain persons that were not deemed fit for entry into the United States, and gave the federal government more control over regulating immigration. The year before that, 1891, immigration continued to grow and new specific restrictions were added to keep out immigrants whom Roger Daniel's describes as "mentally disturbed persons, persons suffering from a 'loathsome or contagious' disease, paupers, persons convicted of a felony or infamous crime or misdemeanor of moral turpitude and polygamists." This political line of question also went along with the movement of the Bureau of Immigration into the Department of Commerce, and in 1906 Congress gave the immigration officials responsibility for naturalization and made knowledge of English a requirement for naturalization. This period before the act was passed signaled that the United States government was interested in restricting those types of immigrants that would be viewed as undesirable. These sorts of policies signaled an increasing centralized policy for United States immigration that lead to further legislation being enacted in a more comprehensive manner in 1907. == Details of the Act ==

As part of a general movement towards limiting the influx of immigrants of the early 20th century, which Roger Daniels has hypothesized to be a "campaign to restrict all immigration", These types of regulations had been first introduced in 1882 alongside the Chinese Exclusion Act to ban all "lunatics, idiot, or any person unable to take care of him or herself without becoming a public charge", making lack of able-bodied status or illness as grounds for turning persons away. The 1907 act, however, changed the language to "likely to become a public charge" which Douglas Baynton argues "considerably lowered the threshold for exclusions and expanded the latitude of immigration officials to deny entry." To prevent disease for entering, section eleven of the act expanded on the ban of infected persons by stipulating that a medical examiner could turn away the person and any other immigrant accompanying them. but was now grounds for exclusion. While these provisions had been put in place earlier, this act refined the definition of those immigrants who could be lawfully turned away. Other measures included a section twelve provision that required that incoming ships detail the age, gender, national origin, occupation, and place of residence of all passengers that were coming into the United States to allow a more through registry of departures that could be used for statistical purposes. Section nine also made it unlawfully for any person to transport such banned classes of "imbeciles." The first section of the act increased the head tax to four dollars a person, to be placed in the "immigration fund" which could be used for departures of any person who entered unlawfully, became a public charge in three years, or "to be used under the direction of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor to defray the expense of regulating the immigration of aliens into the United States under said laws. The act's long-term consequences came from Section 39, which created the United States Congress Joint Immigration Commission. Its goal was to create reports which outlined to Congress the status of immigration, and the need to refine laws. This commission would go on make recommendations which led to the quota system in the Immigration Act of 1924 and more restrictions on Asian and unskilled laborers immigration. == References ==