Name: What was immigration like before ICE?
Uploaded: 2026-03-08T16:56:14.000Z
Duration: 16 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So I noticed something interesting on the history page of ICE's website right here.

Adverbs of degree

It says, Despite US immigration and custom Enforcement's relatively young age, its functional history predates the modern birth of the agency by more than 200 years.

That phrase functional history stuck out to me, so I decided to do some digging.

They're arguing that there was a functional equivalent, right, to their agency.

Well, now we know that ICE was created by the Homeland security Act in 2003 to defend the United States and protect our citizens against the dangers of a new era.

I reached out to ICE directly asking for their explanation of this functional history, but

To me, that narrative is kind of an effort to make the agency itself seem like it has this deep lineage that it simply does not.

Following breaking news in Minneapolis, where city officials confirm a shooting occurred reportedly involving a federal ICE agent.

It is the second shooting of an American citizen by federal officers in that city in just three weeks.

The did you just do so I decided to do a bit of my own research.

We're going to take a look at three distinct eras in American history, showing how immigration policy slowly transformed from labor management to law enforcement, culminating in the creation of ice.

So on the same page of their site, ICE refers to the remarkable development of the country throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, including the essential role of immigration and the evolving laws and regulations.

Now, in terms of how the US treated immigration enforcement, the 19th and 20th centuries are actually really different from each other.

One of the remarkable things is that the Constitution is actually silent on immigration.

So for the first century of the republic, Congress plays virtually no role in regulating the arrival, admission, exclusion, or deportation of foreigners, with one notable exception, the Alien and Sedition act, which authorized the President to deport non citizens and allowed their arrest and imprisonment during wartime.

There is a panic in the United States over the potential radical ideas that certain immigrants are bringing to the United States, specifically after the French Revolution.

But real immigration restrictions wouldn't happen for almost another hundred years.

And that's because until the Civil War resolved the issue of slavery in the US Regulating immigration at the that fact was incredibly difficult.

The problem throughout the antebellum period is if Congress had muscled in and said, we're going to control the arrival of the Irish poor into Boston or New York, exactly the same authority could have been used to regulate the arrival of free black people in South Carolina.

When you have slavery in the picture, it takes a Civil War to resolve that conflict between the national and the local level.

So then in 1882, after the Civil War, Congress passed two foundational laws restricting immigration in the U.S.

the Immigration act allowed the exclusion of certain vulnerable minorities, such as people carrying contagious diseases.

The Same year, in 1882, Congress passes another law, and that's the Chinese Exclusion Act.

This law discriminates against Chinese people on grounds of race.

It also discriminates on grounds of class because it's targeting not all Chinese people, but

Now, since immigration isn't in the Constitution, this law was put to the courts and the Supreme Court made a decision that would have ripple effects all the way to the modern day.

In effect, what the Court rules is that power over national borders is so fundamental to the definition of any nation that it's extra constitutional.

It's a matter of national security and geopolitics.

This pivotal moment is when the US declares it has the right to turn immigrants away based solely on race or ethnicity.

And in 1891, the first federal immigration agency was established to enforce these laws.

The Office of the Superintendent of Immigration.

The immigrants of old turned their eyes toward America's gateway, Ellis Island.

It's really hard to overstate just how central Ellis island was to immigration at this time time.

About two years after the formation of the first agency, the staff had grown to 180 people and 119 of them were employed at Ellis Island.

And that's because from 1892 to 1924, 20 million immigrants arrived in the US and 12 million of them came through Ellis island and almost none of them were turned away.

In that 40 year period between the 1880s and the 1920s, we would estimate that somewhere between only 1 and 2% of all European immigrants coming to the United States were excluded on arrival.

In an era without passports, without visas, without the administrative capacity to really enforce the law beyond a certain point, the expectation as long as you weren't Chinese coming to the United States, is that you would get in.

And the greatest war the world had known exploded in Europe after World War I.

The United States shifted from welcoming immigrants to restricting them.

Many Americans feared a wave of displaced European refugees and rising xenophobia intensified concerns that these immigrants would threaten national security and the so called American way of life.

These fears culminated in the Immigration act of 1924.

Until 1924, American borders were normatively open and after that they became normatively closed.

You get large scale numerical restriction and this is the start of the third distinct era of US immigration, the Immigration act of 1924, set strict limits on how many immigrants could enter the US from each country.

US Immigration is restricted by law to a selective annual quota from each foreign country.

the goal was to preserve the proportions of each nationality from over 30 years prior, which largely restricted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.

And immigrants were excluded from not only China, but all of Asia as well as Africa.

Upon signing the law, President Calvin Coolidge said, America must be kept American.

So that to me is the turning point, because we totally take it for granted that there is a cap on immigration today.

And just by accepting that right, we are accepting the logic of the restrictionists.

So in 1933, immigration enforcement was merged with naturalization and became the Immigration and Naturalization Services, or the INS.

They would remain the immigration agency until 2003.

Roosevelt moved the INS from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice.

And that's a change that will come to redefine immigration in the US he does that pretty explicitly with the understanding that things are getting dicey in Europe.

The harvest days of 1939 brought a turn of world events whose effect on US economy no man can yet predict.

The threat of World War II added to the growing notion of immigration as a national security issue.

Immigration was no longer just about managing a workforce.

I am convinced that under existing conditions, the immigration and naturalization activities can best contribute to the national well being only if they are closely integrated with the activities of the Department of Justice.

The INS was now tasked with fingerprinting every immigrant in the US and organizing internment camps and detention centers for people they considered to be enemy aliens.

So that is people who do not have citizenship.

People whose political backgrounds has put them on the United States radar.

During World War II, the INS detained almost 32,000 German, Italian and Japanese non US citizens who were also denied lawyers.

In total, the INS operated as many as 65 incarceration camps in this period.

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Now, there's one region we haven't really discussed so far that's central to this era of change in American Latin America.

It's important to note that the quota system implemented in the twenties never affected Latin America.

Agricultural businesses in the Southwest don't want any restriction on the labor supply.

Latin America is exempted from from these laws.

That sentiment continued through to World War II, when there was a massive labor shortage in the U.S.

the 1942 Bracero program allowed millions of Mexican men to enter the US and work legally on short term labor contracts.

Braceros In Spanish, this means a man who works with his arms and hands.

The program, a partnership with the Mexican government, guaranteed fair wages for the workers.

But many employers, especially in Texas, wanted even cheaper labor.

So while millions of Mexicans entered the country through legal means in the 40s and 50s, hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers also crossed the border illegally and found work.

And so it's in this time that the immigration debate in the US really focuses on the southern border.

And in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower implemented Operation Wetback.

Named after a pejorative slur for Mexican immigrants.

The operation used military tactics to pursue its goals.

We led by INS head and US Army Lieutenant General Joseph Swank, the American Border Patrol struggles against a tense, explosive international problem.

Along the sprawling California Mexico border, thousands of Mexican wetbacks or illegal entrants, are sneaking into the United States.

The result was one of the largest deportation efforts in U.S. history.

The INS completed sweeps of factories and farms, shipping undocumented immigrants back to Mexico in boats, borders, buses and planes.