Amending the MCCARRAN-WALTER IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION ACT (1952), the Immigration Marriage Fraud Amendments of 1986 specified a two-year residency requirement for alien spouses and children before obtaining permanent resident status.
More formally the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, the Welfare Reform Act reflected the anti-immigrant mood of the 1990s and frustration over the mounting costs of providing social services to both citizens and immigrants.
The War Brides Act was the first of several related measures to allow United States soldiers to bring their alien brides and families into the United States following World War II (1941–45).
The Voting Rights Act, passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 6, 1965, suspended literacy tests and nationally prohibited abridgment of the right to vote based on race or color.
The Tydings-McDuffie Act grew out of widespread opposition, particularly in California, to the rapid influx of Filipino agricultural laborers after annexation of the islands following the Spanish-American War in 1898.
In response to growing antagonism toward immigrants generally and Chinese immigrants specifically, Pennsylvania representative William Scott, a Democrat, introduced legislation to extend restrictions embodied in the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882).
Enacted on August 7, 1953, the Refugee Relief Act (RRA) authorized the granting of 205,000 special nonquota visas apportioned to individuals in three classes, along with accompanying members of their immediate family...
The Quebec Act of 1774 was passed by Great Britain on the heels of a constitutional crisis in Massachusetts and the failure of attempts to attract English-speaking immigrants to Quebec, the French culture region they had acquired at the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763).
In 1931, the Canadian cabinet passed Order-in-Council P.C. 695 prohibiting almost all immigration in order to meet the growing challenges of economic depression.
The Oriental Exclusion Act, actually a special provision of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, excluded immigrants who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship from entrance to the United States, even at the new ethnic-based, lower levels.
When Thomas Jefferson became president, there was a relaxation of the hostility toward immigrants that had prevailed during the administration of John Adams (1797–1801).
The McCarran-Walter Act was an attempt to deal systematically with the concurrent cold war threat of communist expansion and the worldwide movement of peoples in the wake of World War II (1939–45).
Usually characterized as a kind of purity legislation against the interstate transportation of women for prostitution or “other immoral purposes,” the Mann Act was equally aimed at the increasing number of immigrants, averaging almost 900,000 per year in the first decade of the 20th century.
The Manifest of Immigrants Act was the first piece of U.S. legislation regulating the transportation of migrants to and from America and the first measure requiring that immigration statistics be kept.
Making permanent the principle of national origin quotas, the Johnson-Reed Act served as the basis for U.S. immigration policy until the MCCARRAN-WALTER IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION ACT (1952).
In the wake of the White Paper on Canadian Immigration Policy of October 1966, the Canadian government announced a new series of immigration regulations in September 1967.
In the wake of massive refugee crises in Southeast Asia and Cuba, in 1981, a Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy recommended to the U.S. Congress that undocumented aliens be granted amnesty and that sanctions be imposed on employers who hired undocumented workers.
Following a broad government reorganization of the immigration bureaucracy in Canada, the Immigration Appeal Board Act was passed, creating the Immigration Appeal Board.
After many years of heated debate and the shock of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, in 2002 the Canadian parliament passed the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), replacing the Immigration Act of 1976.
The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1965 marked a dramatic change in American immigration policy, abandoning the concept of national quotas and establishing the basis for extensive immigration from the developing world.
The Immigration Act of 1990 was the first major revision of U.S. immigration policy since the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), which had been passed in the midst of the cold war.