Outlined in the Constitution of the United States, “The Congress shall have the Power to establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization throughout the United States” (Madison 1787, Article I, Section 8, clause 4). This sets the stage for a need to regulate the entrance of non-citizens into the United States and establish a path to citizenship. As the desired objectives of the United States change over time so have the policies that affect immigration. Immigration policy in the United States dates back to its founding. The Naturalization Act of 1790 established the first rules for becoming a citizen of the United States of America.
Immigration policy reform has been used to manage the amount and type of people entering the U.S. It has been used to import agricultural and non-agricultural workers. Also, numeric limits have been set, and were reset multiple times, to manage refugees the U.S. is willing to accept.
Laws have been passed to provide citizenship or residency status to certain classes of people. Current law is being enforced to discourage an influx of aliens. It has never been lawful to come into the U.S. and stay without proper declaration. Registration and evaluation have been the law in some form throughout the history of the United States.
Incremental policy changes have gotten the U.S. to this point by excluding a specific class of people and specific countries while at the same time limiting the annual amount of immigrants who can enter the country. The U.S. is still a protectionist country. The policy makers want the U.S. to be a country of assimilation, not colonization. People with specific education or job skills are shown preference by policy over those who would be a burden to the system.
As administrations come and go and conditions around the world change, immigration policy has been continuously changing. The U.S. has found that as incremental change occurs surrounding immigration, the policy enacted as a result may need monumental reform to achieve its desired objectives. Introduce quotas here; exclude specific people there. Immigration policy is continuously under reconsideration because the two sides want slightly different outcomes. Examples include open borders versus regulated borders, amnesty versus deportation, colonization versus assimilation, and anonymity versus registration. Both sides want to have people be able to enter and leave the country. The task at hand is deciding which set of rules will we follow.