U.S. History Textbooks Boundless U.S. History Bush, Clinton, and a Changing World America's Emerging Culture
U.S. History Textbooks Boundless U.S. History Bush, Clinton, and a Changing World
U.S. History Textbooks Boundless U.S. History
U.S. History Textbooks
U.S. History
Concept Version 11
Created by Boundless

The Immigration Act of 1990

The Immigration Act of 1990 increased the number of immigrants permitted to enter the U. S. from 500,000 to 700,000.

Learning Objective

  • Assess the significance of the Immigration Act of 1990

Key Points

    • The Immigration Act of 1990, signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, increased total, overall immigration to allow 700,000 immigrants to come to the U.S. per year for the fiscal years '92–'94, and 675,000 per year after that. 
    • The Act designated that 50,000 of those visas be for people from non-typical emigration countries. It also enabled the removal of AIDS from the list of diseases that barred a person from immigrating.
    • The period between 1991 and 2000 was the period during which the U. S. admitted the most legal immigrants; however, these immigrants represented only 0.3% of the population growth.
    • As of 2010, a quarter of the U.S. population under 18 were either immigrants or children of immigrants.
    • Illegal immigration may be as high as 1.5 million per year, with a net of at least 700,000 illegal immigrants arriving every year. Immigration led to a 57.4% increase in foreign-born population from 1990 to 2000.

Terms

  • immigration act of 1990

    Legislation in the United States which increased the limits on legal immigration, revised all grounds for exclusion and deportation, authorized temporary protected status to aliens of designated countries, revised and established new non-immigrant admission categories, revised and extended the Visa Waiver Pilot Program, and revised naturalization authority and requirements.

  • Diversity Visas

    A United States congressionally-mandated lottery program for receiving a U.S. Permanent Resident Card, which makes 55,000 permanent resident visas available annually to natives of countries deemed to have low rates of immigration to the United States.

  • Naturalization Act of 1906

    An act of the United States Congress signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt that revised the law from 1870 and required immigrants to learn English in order to become naturalized citizens; it was later modified by the Immigration Act of 1990.

Full Text

Overview

The Immigration Act of 1990 was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush on November 29, 1990. The Act increased total, overall immigration to allow 700,000 immigrants to come to the U.S. per year for the fiscal years '92–'94, and 675,000 per year after that. It provided family-based immigration visas, created five distinct employment-based visas categorized by occupation, and began a diversity visa program which created a lottery to admit immigrants from "low admittance" countries, or countries where their citizenry was underrepresented in the United States. The modifications removed homosexuality as grounds for exclusion from immigration, and the law provided for exceptions to the English testing process required for naturalization set forth by the Naturalization Act of 1906.

Significance of the Act

After the Immigration Act became law, the United States would admit 700,000 new immigrants annually, up from 500,000 before the bill's passage. The new system continued to favor people with family members already in the United States, but it added 50,000 "diversity visas" for countries from which few were emigrating, as well as 40,000 permanent job-related visas and 65,000 temporary worker visas. Additional provisions strengthened the U.S. Border Patrol; it also altered language regarding disease restrictions in a way that permitted the Secretary of Health and Human Services to remove AIDS from the list of illnesses making a prospective immigrant ineligible to enter the country.

Demography

The United States admitted more legal immigrants from 1991 to 2000 – between ten to eleven million – than in any previous decade. In that decade, the ten million legal immigrants that settled in the U.S. represented an annual growth of only about 0.3% as the U.S. population grew from 249 million to 281 million. By comparison, the highest previous decade was the 1900s, when 8.8 million people arrived, increasing the total U.S. population by 1% every year. Specifically, nearly 15% of Americans were foreign-born in 1910, while in 1999, only about 10% were foreign-born.

By 1970, immigrants accounted for 4.7% of the U.S. population, rising to 6.2% in 1980. As of 2010, a quarter of the residents of the United States under 18 were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Eight percent of all babies born in the U.S. in 2008 belonged to undocumented immigrant parents, according to a recent analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center.

Legal immigration to the U.S. increased from 250,000 in the 1930s, to 2.5 million in the 1950s, to 4.5 million in the 1970s, and to 7.3 million in the 1980s, before reaching about 10 million in the 1990s. Since 2000, legal immigrants to the United States have numbered approximately 1 million per year, of whom about 600,000 represent "Change of Status" and are already in the United States. Legal immigrants to the United States are now at their highest level ever, at just over 37 million legal immigrants. Illegal immigration may be as high as 1.5 million per year, with a net of at least 700,000 illegal immigrants arriving every year. Immigration led to a 57.4% increase in foreign-born population from 1990 to 2000.

Filipino-Americans in New York

Crowd at the Philippine Independence Day Parade in New York City.

[ edit ]
Edit this content
Prev Concept
Demographic Shifts
The Information Age
Next Concept