The first naturalization law in the United States was the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted naturalization to "free white persons" of "good moral character" who had resided in the country for two years and had kept their current state of residence for a year.
The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868, protects children born in the United States.
Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 which specifically limited further Chinese immigration.
Congress enacted the Anarchist Exclusion Act in 1901 to exclude known anarchist agitators.
In 1921, the United States Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act,
In 1932 President Roosevelt and the State Department essentially shut down immigration during the Great Depression as immigration went from 236,000 in 1929 to 23,000 in 1933. This was accompanied by voluntary repatriation to Europe and Mexico, and coerced repatriation and deportation of between 500,000 and 2 million Mexican Americans, mostly citizens, in the Mexican Repatriation.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (the McCarran-Walter Act) revised the quotas again, basing them on the 1920 census. For the first time in American history, racial distinctions were omitted from the U.S. Code
The Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 (the Hart-Cellar Act) abolished the system of national-origin quotas.
