When I hear folks say, “My grandmother wasn’t an illegal – she followed the law, and everyone else should, too,” I yell into my car radio, “There were no numerical limits on immigration when your grandmother immigrated!”

Race-based (principally anti-Chinese) limitations began in 1880 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, and numerical limitations on immigration began in the 1920s. Before the 1920s, there were only qualitative limits on immigration (for non-Chinese), i.e., criminal grounds, health grounds, “moral” grounds, political grounds, and public charge grounds. The numerical limits that stymie our economic growth and thwart a new American renaissance, are a product of the post-great wave of immigration of 1880 to 1920.