Here's American immigration in a nutshell: we're basically all immigrants. (Except, of course, for t ...
Here's American immigration in a nutshell: we're basically all immigrants. (Except, of course, for the approximately 1.7% of Americans that are Native American.) (Source) Yeah: pretty much all of our forefathers and foremommys started out somewhere else, thought about the allure of amber waves of grain and purple mountain's majesty and booked a one-way ticket to the US of A. And while we might think about anti-immigrant sentiment as a new thing, it ain't. It was around in WWI. It basically makes up the foundation of the plot of Gangs of New York. And, when the country was only ten years old, people were already making laws about who could live here and how much of their Constitutional rights they could really practice. The Alien and Sedition Acts were a group of four laws—yup, you get four for the price of one— written by a Federalist Congress and signed into law by John Adams, a Federalist president. He's the Founding Father you probably forget about…but he's also the only one whose son was also prez. So what are these acts, exactly? The Naturalization Act. This act made it more difficult for immigrants to become naturalized citizens—hence the name—as well as restricting any immigration to "free white people." (Yeah. They went there.) Incidentally, "naturalization" is the technical name for allowing a foreign-born person to become a citizen. It did this in a variety of ways, but that's the pertinent bit. It was signed into law June 18, 1798. The Alien Friends Act. We know this sounds awesome, like it would govern relations with E.T. and whatever Groot is, but it actually allowed the president to imprison or deport people from other countries ("aliens") he considered dangerous. That's an awful thing hiding under an innocuous name. (You do not want to hear about the Fluffy Kitten Act of 1876.) The Alien Friends Act became law on June 25, 1798. The Alien Enemies Act. No, this had nothing to do with Xenomorphs or the Kree Empire. Basically, anything covered under the Alien Friends Act required some kind of burden of proof. With the Alien Enemies Act, the president could imprison or deport someone from an enemy nation for any reason or no reason at all. Adams signed it into law on July 6, 1798 The Sedition Act. This fourth law clamped down on First Amendment rights, and is in fact entirely unconstitutional. It outlawed assembly, like protests, against the government, and it made it illegal to make a false or scandalous (whatever that means) statement against the government. It became a law on July 14, 1798. Sounds pretty bad, right? Luckily, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison agreed. They fought the Alien and Sedition Acts, and when Jefferson became president a few years later, he allowed them to expire. Well, three of them. The Sedition Act expired in 1800, the Alien Friends Act in 1801, and the Naturalization Act was repealed by the Naturalization Law of 1802. And that last one? The Alien Enemies Act? Oh, that's still around and kicking to this day.
