Immigration Act of 1882 - Wikipedia

On August 3, 1882, the US Congress passed the first law restricting immigration. From the article:

"On August 3, 1882, the forty-seventh United States Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1882. It is considered by many to be "first general immigration law" due to the fact that it created the guidelines of exclusion through the creation of "a new category of inadmissible aliens."[3]

There were two main components of the Immigration Act of 1882. The first was to create a "head tax" that would be imposed upon certain immigrants entering the country. The Act states that "There shall be levied, collected and paid a duty of fifty cents for each and every passenger not a citizen of the United States who shall come by steam or sail vessel from a foreign port to any port within the United States." This money would be paid into the United States Treasury and "shall constitute a fund called the immigration fund." These funds would be used to "defray the expense of regulating immigration under this act." Scholar Roger Daniels commented that the head tax eventually "would rise, in stages, to eight dollars by 1917. In most years the government collected more in head taxes than it spent on administration."[4]

The creation of such administration, and the need to collect and disburse the head taxes throughout the bureaucratic chain, lead to the creation of "the first immigration bureaucracy."[5] It was a significant turning point of immigration policy in terms of relying on federal level legislation and administration. While this was not the first federal immigration law, as others were mentioned previously, states and local levels of immigration ports were mainly in control of immigration policy. The Immigration Act of 1882 was the beginning of the "contours of federal oversight" in immigration policy administration.[6] In addition to the head tax, the Act also stipulated the responsibility of government agents to inspect ports and vessels bringing immigrants into the country.

This then lead to the second historically significant component of the Act. Upon inquiry of the vessels transporting immigrants, immigration officials were given the authority to expel certain immigrants based on criteria laid out within the Act. The legislation dictated that "If on such examination there shall be found among such passengers any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of him or herself without becoming a public charge, they shall report the same in writing to the collector of such port, and such person shall not be permitted to land." Furthermore, if a criminal was found to be on board, it was the fiscal responsibility of the ship that brought the immigrant there to take them back out of the United States. The criminal provision of the act did not include immigrants who were "convicted of political offenses, reflecting the traditional American belief that the United States is a haven for those persecuted by foreign tyrants."