๐Ÿ›‚ Immigration Trivia You Didnโ€™t Know You Needed

A post about 1882 Immigration Act

Mike Kwon

1/23/20251 min read

๋ฏธ๊ตญ์ด ํ•œ๋•Œ โ€œ๋ฒ”์ฃ„์ž, ์ •์‹  ์ด์ƒ์ž(lunatic), ๋ฐ”๋ณด(idiot), ๋˜๋Š” ์Šค์Šค๋กœ๋ฅผ ๋Œ๋ณผ ์ˆ˜ ์—†๋Š” ์‚ฌ๋žŒโ€์˜ ์ž…๊ตญ์„ ๊ธˆ์ง€ํ–ˆ๋‹ค๋Š” ์‚ฌ์‹ค, ์•Œ๊ณ  ๊ณ„์…จ๋‚˜์š”? ์ด๊ฑด 1882๋…„ ๋ฏธ๊ตญ ์ด๋ฏผ๋ฒ• 2์กฐ์— ๋‚˜์˜ค๋Š” ๋ฌธ๊ตฌ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์˜ค๋Š˜๋‚  Customs์—์„œ โ€œ์ฃ„์†กํ•˜์ง€๋งŒ, ๋‹น์‹ ์€ ๋ฏธ์—ฐ๋ฐฉ๋ฒ• ๊ธฐ์ค€ โ€˜๋ฐ”๋ณดโ€™๋กœ ํŒ์ •๋˜๋‹ˆ ์ž…๊ตญ์ด ์•ˆ๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹คโ€๋ผ๊ณ  ๋งํ•œ๋‹ค๋ฉด ์–ด๋–จ๊นŒ์š”?

์ด๋ฏผ๋ฒ•์€ ๊ทธ๋•Œ๋ณด๋‹ค ๋งŽ์ด ๋ฐœ์ „ํ–ˆ์ง€๋งŒ, ํ‘œํ˜„๋งŒ ์‚ด์ง ๋œ ์ง์„ค์ ์œผ๋กœ ๋ฐ”๋€ ๊ฑธ์ง€๋„ ๋ชจ๋ฅด๊ฒ ๋„ค์š”.

Did you know the U.S. once barred entry to anyone deemed โ€œa convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself or herselfโ€? Thatโ€™s straight from Section 2 of the 1882 Immigration Act. Imagine Customs today: โ€œSorry, sir, weโ€™ve assessed you as an โ€˜idiot' so you're barred from entering the US.โ€

Immigration laws have come a long wayโ€”or at least gotten better at hiding their bluntness.