As we've discussed, President Trump has signed several executive orders making sweeping changes to the immigration system.

Immigration was one of voters' top issues in the presidential election, with many supporting President Trump's message that the current system is broken.

But how did we get here?

Laura Barone Lopez takes a deep dive into the history of immigration policies and laws that have

led to the complex system we have today.

Since its founding days, the United States had mostly open borders, welcoming immigrants from

across the world to work and build lives here.

In the late 1800s, record numbers of migrants from Italy, Greece, and Central and Eastern

Europe made the journey on newly invented steamships to the United States.

Many, especially in America's now crowded cities, began to question the open-door policy.

There was a huge backlash.

There was substantial anti-Semitism. There

was substantial anti-Catholic discrimination, particularly against Irish immigrants. And so over time,

this political pressure built up and built up and built up. In 1924, Congress passed sweeping

legislation restricting immigration. Congress nearly closes the door, and the part of the door that's open is really just open to Western Europe.

Except for Western Europe, the quotas that existed for individual countries were almost laughably small.

Sometimes it was, this country could have a hundred people a year moved to this country from places like southern Europe.

The law, which favored mostly white Europeans, would dominate U.S. immigration policy until

the 1960s.

I think it is not a burden, but a privilege to make this really, as it was for them, a new

world.

Building on a promise by President John F. Kennedy and making it part of the fight for civil

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