Sacramento Adult Entertainment: The suns of August on immigration
European immigration to the new world picked up after the wars in Europe in 1820. American immigration laws banned Africans (until 1870) and most East and South Asians (until 1952). Banned in other countries, we were open to Catholics and Jews (Iberians, Middle Easterners and Northern Africans were not white). Ellis Island opened in 1892.
The Supreme Court decided that the federal government had sole control over immigration in 1875. Europeans were welcomed with open arms; the same could not be said for many others. In 1875, Congress banned Chinese immigrant workers, Asian women (might become prostitutes), and convicts (Brits sent their inmates to Australia). A decade-long Chinese Exclusion Act became law in 1882, becoming permanent in 1904. Newly acquired colonial Filipinos in the pages of the New York Times (which included the Guam in the national imagination), in the social Darwinism of the time, were depicted as monkeys swinging on tropical vines.