DHS says federal agents have arrested some 4,000 illegal aliens in Minnesota. Us cutting off health care benefits for illegal aliens. They prioritize taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens. I'd like to see something done about the illegal alien problem that would be so sensitive. Sturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice. I'm Hannah McCarthy. And today we are exploring the logistics, politics, linguistic peccadillos involved with a very politically charged term, illegal alien. Now hold on. Hold on, everyone. I have not used that expression since 2009. Since the day I first learned it was not the proper term to use for someone who was not authorized to reside in the United States. Yeah. How did you first learn that? Well, I was learning my very first tour at the Tenement Museum in New York, and I was using that term to describe a Sicilian woman, Rosaria Baldizzi, who came to the U.S. through Canada in the 1920s. And the tremendous, patient, kind man who was training me said, Nick, hold on a second. We prefer not to use that word. Did he give you a specific reason? He most certainly did. And that reason is kind of this whole episode. We are going to dig into our country's history with and laws around immigration. So stick around. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. All right, Nick. So what were like the first laws in the United States that pertain to who could immigrate to this country and who could not? It's an interesting question. I mean, I like to tell people that we had no immigration laws at the federal level in the country till 1880. This is Muzaffar Chishtry. I'm Muzaffar Chishtry. I'm a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. Muzaffar is a lawyer who specializes in immigration. He has testified in front of Congress numerous times. And several years ago, he worked as director of the immigration project for the ILGWU, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Oh, wow. You have told me a lot about them. So just to reiterate, no federal immigration restrictions until 1880. That is correct. Were there state restrictions? Sort of. Like we would, New York State would impose a tax on shipping companies that brought people from Europe to the U.S. It was literally called a head tax, which means we counted the number of heads that were brought to the shore and then charged them for bringing people in. And the second thing I tell people that we had naturalization laws before we had immigration laws. Naturalization, by the way, is just the process of becoming a citizen. When was the first naturalization law passed? Almost at the very beginning of our country. It was the Naturalization Act of 1790, which said to become a citizen of the U.S., you had to be in the country for two years and you had to be in your state for one year. And that was it? There were no other restrictions? Well, there was one, a very big one. And that was basically reserved for free white men. Black men, Native Americans were clearly excluded from that. So in the 1790 statute, for the first time, the word alien was used because it was naturalizing aliens who were present in the United States. And then eight years later, the United States passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which was the first time in federal law that the word alien was used. All right. Now, we have talked about these acts a few times on Civics 101, but can you just go over them real quick? Absolutely. The Alien and Sedition Acts were four acts passed in the John Adams administration on naturalization, becoming a citizen, sedition, which is you're not allowed to say false or malicious stuff about the government. and the Alien Friends, which allowed the president to deport foreigners deemed dangerous, and the Alien Enemies Acts. And all of these acts are expired or were repealed, save for one. Save one, the Alien Enemies Act, which allows a president to detain foreigners in times of war or invasion. This act has been invoked in three wars and one time outside of a war scenario, and it was by Donald Trump in 2025. I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 18.0, of 1798. Think of that. 1798. That's when we had real politicians that said, we're not going to play games. We have to go back to 1798. And just to be more historical about it, the word alien literally comes from the crown. We inherited everything from Britain. Oddly, the birthright citizenship debate that we're having today is a relic of the crown. During the British Empire, you either owed your allegiance to the crown or you're an alien. You're an alien was someone who did not own their allegiance to the king. And therefore, everyone who was born on the territory of the king was accepted as a citizen at birth. And the word illegal alien, I don't think was used in our statute until 1986. Okay, 1986. This was the Immigration Reform and Control Act that Ronald Reagan signed. Exactly. This act basically made it so any unauthorized person residing in the United States prior to 1982 was suddenly authorized. 1986 is the only time in our history where we have legalized illegal aliens. Then there was never any provision, any chapter when we did that. Europeans have done it a number of times. Spain does it every six months. But we had never done it, and we haven't done it since. That was unique. And since that legalized aliens, therefore you had to be an illegal alien to be legalized. Because I actually, one of my favorite cases, I essentially cut my teeth in that act, from the coming of that act in the initial stages to it becoming law. And then I was actually head of the coalition that implemented the law. We ran the International Ladies Government Workers Union one of the largest legalization programs We legalized 3 members But to be legalized under that law you had to be illegal So the first time there was a law that created a designation that there are people here legally and there are people here illegally was 1986. Yeah. But that same law said that you couldn't be here legally until it was proven that you were here illegally first? Yeah. Joseph Heller would have loved it. That's some cash, I cash 22. It's the best there is. Because that was the only way you could get a green card. That if you are here as a student on lawful status or H-1B worker on law, you were not eligible to be legalized. So we found creative ways to find that someone was here in violation of the law. That's why the word illegal alien, by necessity, had to find its way in the statute in 1986. As a quick aside, as we are talking about this word, quote, illegal, do you remember Frank Luntz? Oh, yeah, I do. From your episode on framing. He was the guy who wrote memos to the Republican Party to tell them to use certain phrases and avoid others. Like, say climate change instead of global warming or say death tax, not estate tax. That's the guy. In 2005, he wrote a memo to Republican candidates saying, always use the term illegal immigrants and do not use the term illegals. But Luntz was largely ignored. And those people that hire illegals ought to be penalized. In 2018, a congressman in Texas, Steve McCraw, defended using the term illegal immigrant because he said it was a legal term. It is in state and federal laws. Is it in state and federal laws? Well, no, no, there is no use of the term illegal alien or illegal immigrant in Texas state law. And there's nowhere in federal law that says an unauthorized immigrant living in the United States is here, quote, illegally. And maybe part of the reason for that is, as you noted, Hannah, in your ICE episode, being undocumented in the United States is not a crime. It doesn't mean that the word illegal alien was not used in popular parlance. It was used by journalists quite a bit, especially in the beginning of the 20th century when the country was getting very concerned about immigration for the first time. Early 1900s. So this is like peak Ellis Island era. Absolutely. It is when Salvatore Cappodice came here from Termini, Sicily, when the grand and great grand and great great grandparents of a staggering amount of people listening to this very podcast came to the United States. And this leads me to one of my favorite things to talk about in the world, who came to the United States, when and why, which we're going to get to right after a quick break. I have been dying to say this to our listeners for years. This is a bit of a humble brag. Actually, it's not humble in the slightest. It is a straight up brag. I cook a lot. Like a lot, a lot, a lot. It's a huge part of me. I often wish that I hosted a strange, surreal cooking podcast. You'd listen to that, right? So I cook for my family. I cook for my partner and her family. But when it is just me, on those sad, lonesome nights, I pretty much eat dried apricots and black licorice. And that is just not healthy. So I am thrilled down to my socks to be trying Green Chef. You've listened to podcasts before, so you know how these work. You get a box in the mail full of ingredients. You get exciting recipes. But Green Chef lets you pick from about 40 recipes a week. They deliver organic produce and responsibly sourced meats and seafood. Contrary to my last name, I almost never cook Italian food. So I'm excited to make this change. I was excited to click the little Mediterranean box and just eat a little healthier for the love of Mike. For healthy, low prep, low stress, low mess meals, just head to greenchef.com slash 50civics. That's 5-0-C-I-V-I-C-S. And use code 50Civics to get 50% off your first month and then 20% off for two months with free shipping. That's code 50Civics, 5-0-C-I-V-I-C-S at greenchef.com slash 50Civics. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. You're listening to Civics 101. We are talking about legal and illegal immigration today. And just a reminder, we have several hundred episodes on just about any civics topic you can imagine on our website, civics101podcast.org. All right, Nick, and you were about to tell me about the myriad groups coming to the United States when and why. So let me have it. Absolutely, Hannah. And I think it makes sense to look at it through how we determined who was not allowed to come into the United States, who would have been turned away. Which was, for the first hundred years, nobody whatsoever. Nobody. Literally nobody. Again, Muzaffar Chishti. Anyone who showed up on our shores, it was admitted in. Literally. You became citizen after certain requirements under the 1790 Act, but you were a legal person the moment you entered on the shore. In 1880, for the first time, we said we will exclude some group of people. And the exclusions we put in place were not numerical. I like to say they were not quantitative limits. They were actually qualitative limits. Qualitative, as in there are certain qualities, be they medical or professional or racial qualities, that we keep out of this country. Yeah, and not numerical, like we only allow 10,000 Germans or French or whatever each year. It was if you had this quality, you were not allowed in. And who was coming at that time? We had folks coming from everywhere, Hannah, but a few groups in particular. First off, Irish immigration, the famine in Ireland in the 1840s. That led to a massive influx coming from there. Around the same time Chinese people were actively recruited in huge numbers to fill the labor force specifically in mining and to help construct the Transcontinental Railroad And then from 1870 to 1900 over 12 million immigrants came to the United States mostly from Germany Ireland and England When did Ellis Island open as our immigration processing center? That was 1892. All right. Where did people go before that? The biggest processing center was called Castle Garden. It's on the southern tip of Battery Park in New York City. And again, until 1880, nobody was turned away. All right. So who was on that first list of limited people? The talk in the 80s that certain kind of people we don't like. So the candidates for that were convicts. Candidates for that were people with communicable diseases, tuberculosis, especially of that time. People who are paupers, people who are prostitutes. And we, in 1882, we entered all of Chinese in the Chinese Exclusion Act. All right. Now that was huge. We have a whole episode on Chinese exclusion, which I wholeheartedly encourage everyone listen to. Absolutely agree. So this was America's first racial restriction, and it would not be the last. But then we get to the big wave the Ellis Island years. These gladly face the long ocean voyage. Then immigration gateways like Ellis Island and examination by immigration officials. If we're going to talk about Ellis Island, do you want to start with your thing? My thing? My soapbox? Yeah. Let's hear it. Something I have been known from time to time at parties and social occasions is to get on my own little soapbox to tell anyone who will listen that nobody's name got changed at Ellis Island. And to be fair, Nick, you used to think that people's names were changed. I did, Hannah. I was also a victim of Godfather Part II. Come on, son. What is your name? Tuo nome. Lito Andolini from Corleone. Corleone. Lito Corleone. Nobody's name was changed at Ellis Island because nobody at Ellis Island wrote down names. That's right. And this is a lesson in the inability to break someone's framing. I've told this little tidbit to probably a thousand people before now, and I share articles on it and I encourage people to look it up themselves if they don't believe me. But they usually go, I don't know, kid. But there were inspections at Ellis Island, right? Checking for tuberculosis, trachoma, etc. Yeah, and there was a potential that you could be sent back if you would be considered a, quote, societal burden. And how many people were actually sent back to their country of origin? Very few. About 20% of immigrants who came through were detained for one reason or another. but they were usually let in eventually. Of the 12 million immigrants who came through Ellis Island, less than 2% were sent back. So the debate between the end of the 19th century and 1917 was that too many people are coming and too many wrong kind of people were coming. And the definition of wrong was clearly some Europeans. We don't like some Europeans, one group of Europeans, for both they were intellectually and physically inferior to another group. We like mostly Northern and Western Europeans. The Nordic supremacy was the governing wisdom at that time. We don't like Italians. We don't like Slavs. We don't like Russians. And we certainly don't like Jews. And we definitely don't like Chinese. And then other Asians. That was clearly stated. So that era, this is where theories of eugenics were sold as science by distinguished academics, convincing members of Congress that these people were not at par. Wait, this was in the 19-teens? People were promoting eugenics back then. They were. And contrary to what I had thought, the United States was at the very forefront of it. The seminal work on eugenics, and eugenics, by the way, is the very much not real, not scientific theory that some people from some places have superior genes and others don't. But again, the seminal work is called The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, a New Yorker. Adolf Hitler wrote Madison Grant a letter saying, quote, This book is my Bible, end quote. And, quote, we Germans must emulate what the Americans are doing. Wow. And I bring all this up because this, this is what inspired our first immigration quota system. That became our first attempt to control immigration in quantitative limits. And guess how we decided to put the quantitative limits was by racial quotas. We started putting what we call the national origin quota system in 1917 became final law in 1924, is that we are going to give quantitative limits for each country based on the number of people of the stock of that country in the U.S. in 1910. So Congress takes the 1910 census. They look at it and they decide there are already too many Italians in the United States in 1910. So they push it back. They look at the 1900 census. Well, maybe this is the America I remember. And still too many Italians. So they push the goalpost to 1890. They use the 1890 census as a guide. So it was clearly racist, openly racist by members of Congress speaking language on the floor of the House and Senate, which you would find unprintable today. So when we started putting limits on immigration, they were clearly driven on racist terms. And this, Hannah, this is what Mazafer tries to explain to people who say the well-trotted out line, well, my family came here this way, the legal way. So the first thing they don't understand, and this is the book is, why didn't they come the way my grandparents came? The right way. As we just finished saying till 1924, there was no way of coming illegally. So everyone who came had to come legally. So therefore, the notion that you would even have to wait in the line, there was no line till 1924. So we started, once we started the quantitative limits, therefore there was a line. So if you did not fit that line, then if you came outside that line, you were illegal. And that was the law to 1965. 1965? Yes. There was no significant immigration from places like Italy, Eastern Europe, Hungary, Turkey, China, India, etc. from 1924 to 1965. In 1965, at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act, reversing the 1924 National Origins Act. And this measure that we will sign today will really make us truer to ourselves, both as a country and as a people. It will strengthen us in a hundred unseen ways. We ended the National Origin Code System, and we opened America to the entire world. So therefore history it was a promise that had been made by President Kennedy in his campaign for president John F Kennedy gave a speech to an Italian club in Boston and he asked everybody hey you know what on your mind And they said, these quotas are destroying our families. I can't bring my sister. I can't bring my nephew, etc. And John F. Kennedy promised if elected, he would change the quota system. But he didn't. He didn't. He did nothing to end the national origin quota system. He made three states of union addresses, did not address immigration even in one. It fell to President Johnson to end the national origin courtes. And LBJ was not really known to be a pro-immigration kind of guy. He was a confirmed Southern Democrat anti-immigrant person. History shows that he had never met any immigrant except for a piano tuner of his wife. who was a Czech man. He had no relationship with immigration. And so he, when he became president, he calls all of Kennedy's advisors into the White House. He said, look, I'm an accidental president. Just tell me what had President Kennedy promised in his campaign. They listed immigration. He said, that becomes my cause. I have to do it. And even though, even though this lifting of the national origin system is celebrated by those who, you know, respect the words of Emma Lazarus and the New Colossus. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I still got to say the 1965 Act was not without its own problems. The authors of the 1965 Act made sure that European immigration supremacy remained intact. they wrote the law in a way that would guarantee white european immigrants to come because they expanded the category of brothers and sisters of u.s citizens to get privilege the relatives of u.s citizens get high privilege guess who were the u.s citizens at that time they were all white europeans they said if they want their brothers they will keep on getting just did not work out that way. The Europeans lost interest in coming to the United States. I mean, why would, after the Marshall Plan especially, why would you come to the U.S. when you could live in an Italian villa? And the third world countries got out of the colonial yoke. And they started sending students and then professionals. And 50 years later, the face of America had changed. Muzaffar points out here that this change has stoked a lot of heated feelings in our communities and in our politics, and that those feelings about non-European immigrants were foundational 65 years later to the success of one president's election in particular. They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources. He saw how a country had radically changed in its mix in 50 years. In the history of our country, 50 years is not a long period. In 1965, immigration was 90% European. Today, it's 90% non-European. How that could not affect something in the country, you know, you have to be unmindful of how people think about change. We have talked before about how different people with different classifications from different countries have different wait times when it comes to becoming a U.S. citizen through the legal channels. Because we still use a quota system. So someone immigrating from Norway or New Zealand with family in the U.S. will have a very different wait time than someone coming from Mexico or India in terms of the current quota system. Yeah, I just read a report from the Cato Institute in 2018 where they found that someone trying to immigrate to the U.S. from India with an advanced degree has an estimated wait time of 151 years. And to be clear here, Muzaffar is in no way saying that the recent rise in anti-immigrant sentiment is at all justified. But he is pointing out that we have not amended our immigration policies in a long, long time. And we haven't changed our immigration level since 1990. So no wonder we're having the effect of all this paralysis in Congress to deal with immigration. And the numbers have grown. In from 3 million to 14 million, it's not a small thing to happen. And now because we haven't changed our laws since 1990, and we haven't done a legalization program since 86, we now have a large number of people who may die unauthorized. We have at least probably two generations of unauthorized people. Now, that's telling. So a large number of people have deep roots now who are unauthorized. Therefore, when you see people being snatched from the streets, these are not people who arrived yesterday. these are people who arrived many years ago with deep roots and almost none of them have criminal backgrounds so therefore if you have made this bargain that i'm going to deport a million people a year where are you going to find them that's the difference between the narrative and reality is that to find them you have to go in the inside of our country and people see it see this more as an attack on Americans and more as an attack on American deeply held values, like First Amendment and the Second Amendment, than they see as an attack on illegal immigration. And that's why I think Trump is losing the people on this. This episode was made by me, Nick Capodice, with you, Hannah McCarthy. Thank you. Our staff includes producer Marina Henke and executive producer Rebecca Lavoie. Special thanks here. Special thanks go out to everybody at 97 Orchard Street, specifically Pedro and Annie, Sunday crew, forever. Music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions, Epidemic Sound, and the wondrous Chris Zabriskie. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. Curious about the future of healthcare? Tomorrow's Cure, the chart-topping and Ambie Award finalist podcast from Mayo Clinic, brings it to you today. I'm Kathy Worzer, and in this new season, I sit down with researchers, doctors, and industry experts who are leading the way in medical innovation. From cutting-edge technology to breakthrough treatments, we'll explore how new solutions are improving and even saving lives. Follow Tomorrow's Cure wherever you listen to podcasts. What is healthy spirituality, and how does it help us thrive? We explore these questions on the new season of With and For, hosted by me, Dr. Pam King. With and For bridges psychology and spiritual wisdom to help you thrive, featuring conversations with experts like self-compassion pioneer Kristen Neff and author-activist Parker Palmer. So go ahead, follow With and For, hosted by Dr. Pam King, wherever you get your podcasts.
