Immigration Act of 1907

The Immigration Act of 1907 (34 Statute 898) was a piece of federal United States immigration legislation passed on February 20, 1907 by the 59th Congress and signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt. The Act was part of a series of reforms aimed at restricting the increasing number and groups of immigrants coming into the U.S. before and after World War I. The law introduced and reformed a number of restrictions on immigrants who could be admitted into the United States, most notably ones regarding disability and disease.

The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, is considered to be the first United States policy that restricted immigration, which had previously been allowed without constraint. Following that pivotal piece of legislation, the administrations of William McKinley (1897-1901) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901-9) were characterized by an increase in the federal government’s monitoring and regulating of immigration. The immigration bureaucracy had grown 4200 percent in 15 years, to deal with the new regulations that were required to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act. Institutions such as Ellis Island, opened in 1892, signaled a new type of United States immigration policy that kept out certain persons that were not deemed fit for entry into the United States, and gave the federal government more control over regulating immigration. The year before that, 1891, immigration continued to grow and new specific restrictions were added to keep out immigrants whom Roger Daniel’s describes as “mentally disturbed persons, persons suffering from a ‘loathsome or contagious’ disease, paupers, persons convicted of a felony or infamous crime or misdemeanor of moral turpitude and polygamists." The presidency of William McKinley also saw the exclusion of those immigrants who advocated for the overthrow of the United States government, giving more room immigration officials to question and turn immigrants away. This political line of question also went along with the movement of the Bureau of Immigration into the Department of Commerce, and in 1906 Congress gave the immigration officials responsibility for naturalization and made knowledge of English a requirement for naturalization. Additionally, the same year that the Immigration Act of 1907 was passed, Japan and United States entered into a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” in which the United States would not restrict Japanese immigration and the Japanese would not allow emigration. This period before the act was passed signaled that the United States government was interested in restricting those types of immigrants that would be viewed as undesirable. These sorts of policies signaled an increasing centralized policy for United States immigration that lead to further legislation being enacted in a more comprehensive manner in 1907.

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