Cuban refugees near Key West during the 1980 Mariel BoatliftBetween 1947 and 1991, U.S. immigration policy was shaped by the larger Cold War. In many case special allowances were made for migrants coming from Communist countries. In 1956, President Dwight… View Article
During the 1960s, the foreign-born percentage of the U.S. population hit its lowest levels, hovering around just five percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Still, the decade would lay the seeds of a lasting change in the nature of… View Article
Women make up just over half of the world’s population, but according to the Pew Research Center, they account for a slight minority of migrants worldwide. The situation is much more equal than it used to be: in 1984 women… View Article
June was a blockbuster month for high-profile immigration developments. The Supreme Court made two announcements that could have a major impact on many people’s lives. Yet even those announcements were full of ambiguity—neither was a final decision on a case,… View Article
Jimmy Carter’s presidency provided something of a bridge between the end of the Vietnam War era and the early Reagan years. A little more than a year into his presidency, in August of 1977, Carter asked Congress to make it illegal… View Article
Harry S. Truman became the 33rd President of the United States following the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945. Truman led the country through the final months of World War II and the policies he enacted—many… View Article
Sir Fraser Stoddart shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.” Born in Scotland, he has lived in the United States since taking a professorship at UCLA in 1997.Lars Onsager won the 1968… View Article
The U.S. Constitution gives very few specifics about the way U.S. immigration policy should look, but it provides broad guidelines as to who has authority to make such policy, as well as the legal means for challenges to elements of… View Article
In his Notes on Virginia, written in the early 1780s, Thomas Jefferson expressed skepticism that large numbers of immigrants from culturally different countries would help the U.S. to thrive. “Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into… View Article
The presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower saw two significant initiatives affecting U.S. immigration and immigrants.In 1953 Eisenhower signed the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, welcoming 214,000 more European immigrants to the U.S. than were allowed under the current system of… View Article