What Trump Is Forgetting: American Nations Have a Long History of Open Borders (Daniel Mendiola, 1/27/26, The Guardian)
In the US, open borders were more of a default policy born out of the absence of legal restrictions, but this was still the case for nearly the first 150 years the country’s existence. Immigrants were by default presumed admissible, and the federal government did not implement immigration restrictions at all until until the late 19th century when it singled out Chinese immigrants for exclusion, though borders remained open otherwise, and even many Chinese were able to evade these laws by naturalizing in other countries first, such as Mexico. It was not until the 1920s that federal lawmakers experimented with a fully closed-border system (defined as a system in which any immigrant is presumed inadmissible until they demonstrate that they fit into one of the restricted, previously defined categories that would make one admissible and have that admissibility officially recognized by the state). This was a massive expansion of federal powers, and under this clunky new system, some decades saw heavier enforcement than others – especially for racialized groups such as Mexicans and Haitians – even as late as the 1980s, closed borders were flexible enough that a large-scale amnesty program could pass with relatively little controversy.