Hey y'all it's Beth here for a quick primer on immigration.

Hi everyone you know the drill with our primer episodes we're just trying to offer some facts

in anticipation of our full-fledged Tuesday episodes where Sarah and I discuss an issue and our

opinions on it. So I'll try to be as neutral as possible and giving you a little bit of insight

into immigration in the United States today and then we'll dive into what we both think should

happen going forward on Tuesday's episode. So quick history up until the late 19th century we didn't

really have immigration law. We certainly didn't have immigration bureaucracy in the United States

because we needed workers. We were a growing and industrializing nation. So people would show up

at our ports, go through an inspection process and be admitted. We started enacting immigration law

in 1882. In 1891 we established a Bureau of Immigration in the Treasury Department. In 1924 the

Johnson Read Act passed and this set up a consular control system. So you had to obtain a visa from a

US consulant abroad before admission to the United States. This law also established our border

patrol. So when we started enacting restrictive laws on coming into the United States we started

having unauthorized immigrants entering the country. At that time we weren't setting up limits on

the number of people coming into the country but we were excluding categories of people. For example

in 1882 following the California Gold Rush we passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which restricted

Chinese workers from immigrating. That law was not repealed until 1943. We also banned other

groups including most people from Asia, prostitutes, poppers, polygamous, people with quote dangerous

and loathsome contagious disease. And people who we believed would rely on the state including people

with mental health issues and people who could not read. In the early 1920s we started imposing

quotas and our restrictions at that point which included a head tax or a fixed fee for people coming

in and a literacy test strongly favored Western Europeans. And as you will not be surprised to

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