Timeline of US Immigration

This is a timeline of US immigration history from 1776 to present combined with historical demographic data, the history of US territorial expansion, and major political events and cultural turning points. Since the focus is on Asian immigration, the timeline attempts to track Asian Americans in as much granular detail as possible. It also tracks Catholics as a rough indicator of Southern and Eastern European immigration and Jews as an historically endogamous diaspora. There is an emphasis on mass media in the selected cultural turning points.

Inside the base of the Statue of Liberty, there is a bronze plaque with the poem “The New Colossus” on it. (The poem was written for a fundraiser for the statue in 1883 by Emma Lazarus, the fourth of seven children of a wealthy Sephardi Jewish family in New York. Lazarus’ ancestors were originally from Portugal and were among the first twenty-three Portuguese Jews to arrive in New Amsterdam, now New York, from Brazil in 1654 to escape the Inquisition.) The poem contains the famous line: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” In the 20th century, this poem came to symbolize much about how America perceives itself: a tabula rasa that has found a way to outrun history, where new arrivals can shed their baggage of centuries at the door and find light and comfort. What I am trying to show with this timeline is that — beginning in the late 19th century and accelerating through the 20th — this highly idealistic (and perhaps naïve) vision was increasingly overlaid by old-world interests, old-world networks, old-world grievances, old-world realpolitik, and, in many cases, old-world money. To put it a different way: nobody ever really escapes where they come from.

1776 — Declaration of Independence.

1783 — Britain recognizes US independence in the Treaty of Paris, ending the American Revolutionary War.

1790 — Total US population: 3.9M — 80.7% white, 19.3% black. Of the white population, 85% are of British ancestry. Historians estimate that about 9% of the white population is German in this census. Of the black population, 7.9% are free. Less than 1% are Catholic, mostly English, German, French, and some Irish. Maryland has the largest population of Catholics, as it was founded in 1632 by an English Catholic as the only non-denominational colony (the Puritans of Maryland rebelled twice against Catholic toleration before 1700). Before the Revolution, the Catholics in the thirteen colonies were under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the bishop of the Apostolic Vicariate of the London District, England. The Holy See established the Apostolic Prefecture of the United States on November 26, 1784, in response to clergy in the newly independent states. There is a small Jewish population of about 2K (less than .05%, mostly Sephardi Jews who immigrated during the Spanish or Portuguese Inquisition). In 1740, the British Parliament passed the Plantation Act to encourage immigration to the colonies, which explicitly permitted Jews to be naturalized. A significant number of Jews immigrated from Dutch-controlled Brazil during the Dutch-Portuguese War. Sephardi Jew Haym Salomon was one of the primary financiers of the American Revolutionary War; Sephardi plantation owner Francis Salvador, the first Jew to be elected to public office in South Carolina’s Provincial Congress representing the Jewish district known as “Ninety-Six,” was the first Jew killed in the American Revolutionary War. About 75k British loyalists emigrate to Canada following the American Revolution.

1803 — Louisiana Purchase doubles US territory (Florida and Pacific Northwest still Spanish until 1821).

1807 — Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves ends US involvement in the Atlantic slave trade (but does not outlaw slavery in the US). This is the earliest date allowed for the prohibition of the slave trade after an initial twenty-year grace period written into the Constitution.

1812 — War of 1812 between the US and Britain over British-Canadian territory. Fought to a stalemate with no territorial changes; however, the Native Americans in the region — who fought with the British — suffer the heaviest losses and are displaced from their ancestral land.

1830 — Total US population: 12.86M — 81.9% white, 18.1% black (13.7% of blacks free). There are about 195K Catholics, or 1.5% by 1820. Jews at 6K, or .05%.

Large-scale immigration from Britain, Ireland, Germany, Central Europe, and Scandinavia resumes following a period of relatively low immigration (1770–1830). Immigration in the 1830s quadrupled that of the 1820s to 599K. Immigration in the 1840s tripled that of the 1830s to more than 1.7M. Immigration is being driven by the Potato Famine in Ireland (1845–1849, which caused Ireland’s population to fall 20–25% from starvation and flight), and by the mostly failed democratic revolutions of 1848 on the Continent (which were also influenced by potato blight). Up to 1830, ~98% of the population was native-born. By 1859, that number had dropped to ~90%. The first significant Catholic immigration begins in the 1840s, shifting the population from ~95% Protestant to about ~90% Protestant. Before the 1840s, most immigration from Ireland was Protestant. Between 1840–1930, a large number of Canadians, including a large proportion of French Canadians, immigrate to the New England region (Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut). 10–12% of the population in the region today can trace its ancestry back to Canada; a large proportion of Americans with French ancestry actually immigrated via Canada. By 1840, the Jewish population is about 15k.

1840–1890 — 4.34M Germans immigrate, making Germans the largest immigrant group during this period. This coincides roughly with the founding of the German Confederation of 39 independent, German-speaking states in 1815 to the Unification of Germany in 1871. Many were refugees following the Revolutions of 1848. A diverse group, roughly 51% are Protestant (mostly Lutheran), 26% Roman Catholic, and 1% Jewish. Many German immigrants in the late 19th century were communists and played a significant role in the labor union movement. German Jews were typically conservative Reform Jews who established small communities throughout the US, and tended to be clothing merchants, livestock dealers, agricultural commodity traders, and bankers. They spoke German, not Yiddish. German Jew Henry Lehman, the founder of Lehman Brothers investment bank which went bankrupt after the 2008 financial crisis, immigrated in 1844. Germans introduced kindergartens, Christmas trees, and hot dogs and hamburgers to the US.

1846–1848 — Mexican-American War leads to the acquisition of the Southwest (the northern half of Mexico), including California. The war begins with the annexation of Texas in 1845. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo extends US citizenship to ~60K Mexicans in the New Mexico Territory and ~10K Mexicans in California, as well as an additional ~2,500 foreign-born California residents.

1848–1855 — California Gold Rush attracts ~300k prospectors from the Eastern US, Latin America, China, Australia, and Europe. The discovery of gold added the equivalent of tens of billions in today’s dollars to the economy, hastened the decline of the Native American population there, and accelerated California’s move to statehood, which had the unintended effect of destabilizing the balance of power between slave and free states in the East leading up to the Civil War. The Chinese population in the US grows from less than 400 in 1848 to about 25K by 1852. Most come under the “credit-ticket” system through brokers in Hong Kong and other ports, where their travel expenses are loaned out and repaid with wages upon arrival. San Francisco becomes the second-largest Jewish city in the nation due to migration to the West Coast, which includes Levi Strauss (first-generation German Jew), the inventor of blue jeans.

1850 — Total US population: 23.2M — 84.2% white, 15.7% black (11.9% free). Catholics reach 1.6M, or 6.9%, becoming the largest single denomination. The small Jewish population surges to 50K or .22%. The census asks respondents for their place of birth for the first time.

1854 — Anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant party known as the Know Nothings reaches its high point, manage to elect a congressman and several other individuals to office. In 1856, their presidential candidate, Millard Fillmore, receives 21.5% of the popular vote. The Know Nothings believed that a “Romanist” conspiracy directed by the Pope and carried out by Catholic priests and bishops were subverting civil liberties in the US and traditional Protestant values. Progressive on most other issues besides immigration, the Know Nothings decline fairly quickly thereafter as the larger issue of slavery causes most members in the North to join the Republican Party.

1860 — Total US population: 31.4M — 85.6% white, 14.1% black (11% of blacks free). Total black population in 1860 (last US census before the Civil War): 4,441,830. The first significant Asian population is recorded at .1% (34,933 Asian or Pacific Islander). The Jewish population is about 150k at this time or .48%.

1861–1865 — American Civil War. Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring all slaves free in the rebel states. After the war, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution — ratified by 27 of the 36 states on December 6, 1865 — abolishes slavery. Of the ~12M-12.8M Africans who arrived in the Americas in the Atlantic slave trade, less than half a million were sent to North America (most went to Brazil and Latin America, where the survival rate was lower). Out of the small but growing Jewish population, ~3k fight for the Confederacy and ~7k fight for the Union, with several serving as officers or generals. 150K Irish Catholics, 40K German Catholics, and 5K Polish Catholics fight for the Union, including as officers. Germans are the largest immigrant group to fight in the war, with about 176K born in Germany. Several Jewish bankers provide financing for both sides of the war, most notably the Seligman family for the Union and the German-French Emile Erlanger for the South. In 1862, Ulysses S. Grant orders the expulsion of Jews from Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky because they were smuggling cotton. Grant is instructed to rescind the order by Abraham Lincoln, and when Grant becomes president (1869–1877) he goes out of his way to assist Jews, appointing more to public office than any predecessor and extending support to Jews in Eastern Europe. Grant also tries to lobby for a Constitutional amendment that would prohibit the use of public funds for sectarian schools (i.e. Catholic schools). No such amendment ever passed, but “Blaine Amendments” were adopted at the state level in thirty-eight states, with thirty-seven of them still in effect today.

Abraham Lincoln is assassinated On April 14, 1865.

1867 — Alaska purchased from Russia.

1868 — Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution establishes birthright citizenship. Part of the Reconstruction Amendments following the Civil War, it is intended to counter the Dred Scott decision that blacks were not citizens of the US. The amendment has far-reaching implications and is one of the most litigated parts of the Constitution.

1871 — Chinese massacre of 1871 in Los Angeles. A mob of around 500 whites and Hispanics (LA’s population is 5,728 at this time) enter the Chinatown of about 200 persons and beat and rob nearly every Chinese resident and ransack nearly every Chinese-occupied building. 17 to 20 Chinese are hanged by the mob in the center of the downtown business district, most of whom had been shot beforehand. The mob was reacting to news that a police officer, Jesus Bilderrain, had been shot and a rancher, Robert Thompson, had been killed by Chinese in a dispute between rival Chinese tongs that spilled over into the street. Bilderrain responded to the initial fight and Thompson chased one of the feuding Chinese after Bilderrain called for backup and was killed. Ten men are prosecuted for the violence and eight are convicted of manslaughter, but all convictions are later overturned. This massacre is sometimes described as the largest mass lynching in American history.

1875 — Page Act of 1875, the first federal immigration law, marks the end of open borders in the US. The law bans the importation of East Asian forced laborers (coolies), East Asian women who engage in prostitution, and anyone who is considered a convict in their own country. One reason for the act is that the Fourteenth Amendment would automatically grant citizenship to the American-born children of Chinese couples. The Page Act technically violates the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 between the US and the Qing Empire which allowed free migration.

1880 — Total US Population: 50.15M — 86.5% white, 13.1% black. Asians increase to .2%. Jews are about 250k at this time (.51%), predominantly conservative German Jews.

Steamships and railroads greatly increase mobility, leading to an influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans (such as Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles and other Slavic peoples, and Jews). Most arrive in urban centers, forming the labor pool behind the steel, coal, automotive, textile, and garment industries. Immigration from these areas is so great that, by the early 1890s, organizations such as the Immigration Restriction League begin to form. Italian immigration is driven by fallout from the Italian Unification (or Risorgimento, 1848–1871). From 1880 to the Immigration Act of 1924, about 2M Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews come from Eastern Europe (Russia and the Pale of Settlement, i.e. Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova) where they faced frequent antisemitic violence (pogroms), with an additional ~800k coming from other parts of Europe. This wave outstrips all previous waves of Jewish immigration. Many of these new Jewish immigrants are socialists or anarchists in Eastern Europe, including members of the secular Jewish socialist party referred to as the Bund (Yiddish for “federation” or “union,” active between 1897 and 1920).

1882 — Chinese Exclusion Act becomes the first and only law in the US explicitly barring immigration from a specific ethnicity or nationality. Expanding on the Page Act, the new law bans all Chinese laborers for ten years. Exceptions are made for diplomats, teachers, students, merchants, and travelers. The Exclusion Act followed numerous attempts to restrict Chinese at the state level, which were often overturned in court. There are about 110k Chinese in the US at this time. Because only adult men were allowed, the Chinese did not use any government resources (schools, hospitals) and were willing to work for less money than whites. But this also meant that Chinese were sometimes used to break strikes; one such example in Pennsylvania may have contributed to the passage of the act. Amendments are made in 1884 that make it more difficult for Chinese to reenter the country after leaving and clarifies that the law applies to ethnic Chinese regardless of their country of origin. The Scott Act in 1888 prohibits reentry of Chinese entirely. The Exclusion Act is renewed for an additional ten years with the Geary Act in 1892, which also requires all Chinese in the US to apply for and carry a resident permit and forbids Chinese from bearing witness in court. The law is challenged by several Chinese organizations. Only about 14% of Chinese in the country register for a permit. Since the Geary Act only authorized $60K in funding (deporting all unregistered Chinese would have cost an estimated $7M) and did not provide a mechanism for deportation, the law requiring permits was essentially toothless. The Exclusion Act is made permanent in 1902 until the Magnuson Act in 1943 (when China was an ally against Japan in WWII), which allowed 105 Chinese to enter per year and allowed naturalization of Chinese residing in the US but not the ownership of property.

After Chinese exclusion, Japanese become the largest East Asian immigrant group, with some Koreans. The 1880 census records 105,465 Chinese and 145 Japanese, but by the Immigration Act of 1924 Japanese numbered approximately 180K (with the number of Chinese frozen at their 1880 levels). Large numbers of Japanese had already begun migrating to Hawaii due to the upheaval of the Meiji Restoration prior to 1882. Filipinos also begin to migrate in significant numbers.

1885 — Rock Springs massacre. Between 28–50 Chinese are killed and 78 Chinese homes burned by mostly Irish Catholic immigrant miners on September 2 in Wyoming. Most of the miners were members of the Knights of Labor, an early multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and possibly majority-Catholic national labor federation, founded in 1869. Only Asians were excluded. Membership in the Knights of Labor peaked around this time at about 800K. The Knights of Labor were important in the development of the eight-hour workday, child labor laws, and strongly supported the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese had originally been brought in by the Union Pacific Coal Department to break a strike in 1875; by 1885 Chinese workers outnumbered whites 330 to 150. White and Chinese were paid equally. White workers had asked the Chinese to participate in a strike for higher wages but the Chinese refused. The massacre begins in the morning when ten white miners declare that the Chinese miners have no right to work a particularly desirable room (the miners were paid by the ton, not by the hour). A fight breaks out, and two Chinese workers are badly beaten, one later dying of his injuries. The white miners return to the town and gather with others, eventually numbering about 150 with rifles, and march together towards the Chinatown. The mob breaks into two groups and enter the town from separate bridges, then break into squads. A warning party is sent into the town telling the Chinese they have one hour to pack up and leave. The first Chinese is shot about thirty minutes later. The mob then enters the town from multiple directions and beat, rob, and kill Chinese at will. One squad stays behind at a bridge to prevent Chinese from escaping. This group includes women, who also fire shots at Chinese. Later in the evening, the mob begins setting fire to the Chinese camp houses, burning to death several Chinese who had decided to hide instead of run. The massacre is extraordinarily violent, and included scalping, branding, mutilation, decapitation, and dismemberment. The surviving Chinese mostly flee to nearby Evanston, Wyoming, where anti-Chinese sentiment was also high. The territorial governor makes a personal trip to Rock Springs and sends a telegram to President Grover Cleveland asking for federal troops. Two companies are sent, one stationed in Evanston and one in Rock Springs. A week later six more are sent, and four companies escort the surviving Chinese back to Rock Springs. Later in the month, a group of Finnish immigrant members of the Knights of Labor in Carbon County, Wyoming go on strike to protest Union Pacific’s continued use of Chinese labor; the white miners in Rock Springs had still not returned to work. The national Knights of Labor organization refused to support the strike because they did not want to be seen as condoning the massacre, and the workers eventually return to work unsuccessful. When the Rock Springs mine reopens, Union Pacific fires 45 white miners connected with the violence. Sixteen men are arrested, but since no one would testify against them they are released about a month later with no charges and greeted by a cheering crowd. The American envoy to China, Charles Harvey Denby, asks the US Secretary of State Thomas Bayard to obtain compensation for the victims of the massacre, news of which had reached Guangdong. Congress eventually approves $147,748.74 as compensation without legally admitting responsibility. The Rock Springs massacre touches off a wave of anti-Chinese violence in the Puget Sound area, including Tacoma, Seattle, Newcastle, and Issaquah. Other states such as Oregon and Georgia also report incidents. In all, approximately 200 towns in California and the Pacific Northwest purge their Chinese populations by force and by threat of force in the mid-1880s.

1886 — The Statue of Liberty is dedicated on October 28.

1890 — The Pope issues an encyclical denouncing the growing threat of “Americanism”: primarily Irish Catholic leaders in America too accepting of the American principal of separation of church and state and cultural individualism. The Vatican feared that American Catholics were beginning to export these values to the rest of the Church, especially in Germany and France. After Pope Leo XIII issues his warning, American clergy fall in line and the movement ends.

1895 — Babe Ruth (George Herman Ruth Jr.) is born on February 6 in Baltimore. Parents are second-generation German Catholics. Ruth speaks German as a child; at seven he is placed in a strict Catholic reformatory and orphanage due to behavioral problems and is mentored there by a prefect named Brother Matthias Boutlier, a competent baseball player. Ruth establishes several records in Major League Baseball throughout his career (1914–1935), some of which still stand today, and is considered by many to be the greatest baseball player of all time. He becomes a lifelong member of the Catholic fraternal order the Knights of Columbus, which was founded in the US in 1882 as a mutual benefit society for working-class and immigrant Catholics.

Richard Sears (of English descent) sells his partner’s (Alvah C. Roebuck) share in his company to Aaron Nusbaum and Julius Rosenwald (second-generation German Jew from Springfield, IL) for $75K. Sears, Roebuck and Co. is reincorporated in Illinois and Rosenwald overseas an increase in annual sales from $750K to $50M from 1895 to 1907. Nusbaum (also Jewish) is forced out in a bitter separation in 1903. Sears and Rosenwald take the company public in 1906, raising $40M in an IPO brokered by Rosenwald’s friend Henry Goldman (second-generation German Jew), senior partner at Goldman Sachs. Sears resigns from the presidency in 1908 and Rosenwald takes his place. Sears, Roebuck and Co. becomes the largest retailer in the US until 1990. Rosenwald worked with Booker T. Washington to build schools for African-American children and donated over $70M over his life to various public schools, colleges, universities, museums, hospitals, and Jewish charities. He helped fund the construction of twenty-five YMCAs in twenty-four different cities across the US and was a major contributor to the NAACP, the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.

1898 — Spanish-American War leads to the acquisition of Guam (still an important US military base), Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. (The US fights Filipino independence after the War, resulting in the death of ~1M Filipinos, mostly due to famine and disease, and continues to suppress various native proto-states from developing, in some cases brutally.)

Annexation of Hawaii with the Newlands Resolution. When Hawaii becomes US territory, it contains a large population of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans who had migrated there as contract workers through the 19th century. Filipinos also migrate to Hawaii in large numbers after the Philippines becomes US territory.

In United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court rules that a person born in the US to Chinese parents is a US citizen at birth according to the Fourteenth Amendment.

1900 — Total US Population: 76M — 87.9% white, 11.6% black. Asians and Pacific Islanders drop to .15%. Hispanic share is .66%. Catholics are about 15.8% or 12M. Jews are 1.39% or 1.5M.

American Samoa acquired after Second Samoan Civil War.

1904 — The Panama Canal acquired as unincorporated US territory (only formally returned in 1999).

1907 — Pacific Coast race riots in San Francisco; Bellingham, WA; and Vancouver, Canada. After the riots, segregated schools for Japanese are established in San Francisco, and Japan and the US form the Gentleman’s Agreement, where the Japanese restricted new emigration to the US as long as the US did not pass any more laws against Japanese immigration. Indian and South Asian immigration is severely restricted in Vancouver.

1910s — The high point for Italian immigration. ~2M Italians immigrated in the 1910s with a total of ~5.3M from 1880–1920. About half of these immigrants return to Italy after working an average of five years in the US.

1911 — Torreon massacre in Mexico. 300 Chinese are killed by a local mob with revolutionary forces of Francisco Madero in Torreon, Coahuila.

1913 — The Anti-Defamation League is founded by Sigmund Livingston (first-generation German Jewish attorney working out of Chicago) and the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith. (Hebrew for “Children of the Covenant.” Based in German-Jewish fraternal lodges where German was the language of choice, B’nai B’rith was founded in 1843 in New York City and was originally called Bundes Brüder, German for “League of Brothers.” The organization quickly expanded internationally and is also the parent organization of Hillel, the Jewish student advocacy group.) Earlier in the year, a Jewish factory supervisor at the National Pencil Company in Atlanta named Leo Frank was convicted of murdering 13-year old Christian employee of the factory Mary Phagan. Frank was president of the Atlanta chapter of B’nai B’rith. The conviction is appealed multiple times and the trial and appeals closely followed in the press. When Frank’s final appeal to the Supreme Court fails in 1915, the Governor of Georgia commutes Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment. The general consensus is that Frank was innocent and that the factory’s janitor, African American James Conley, was the actual murderer. After the sentence is commuted, Frank is kidnapped from prison by a group of armed men and lynched the next morning, with mobs coming to view the body and to take souvenirs. Photographs of the lynching are sold in local stores as postcards.

1915 — The Edison Trust, or Motion Picture Patents Company, is broken up by a federal antitrust lawsuit. MPPC was an expansion of Thomas Edison’s efforts in the 1890s to use his US patents on motion picture camera technology to monopolize film production and distribution in the US. It eventually included all the foreign and domestic companies holding the technology to make motion pictures. Founded in 1908 and based in New Jersey, the creation of the MPPC spurred the move of independent filmmakers to Southern California, where MPPC’s patents were more difficult to enforce. The independents at this time (who controlled about one-quarter to one-third of the market) were typically Ashkenazi Jewish theater proprietors in the big cities who had become successful enough to venture into making their own films. This and the outbreak of WWI, which halted the importation of films from Europe, allows the independent filmmakers who would go on to become Hollywood to break into the mainstream and increases the quality of the narrative film genre through competition.

D.W. Griffith’s nativist film Birth of a Nation is released, which revolutionizes narrative film technique.

1917 — The Virgin Islands purchased from Denmark.

1920 — Total US population: 105.7M — 89.7% white, 9.9% black. Asians rebound slightly to .17%. Hispanic share rises to 1.2%. Jews at 3.2% or 3.39M.

Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution is certified on August 26, which prohibits state or federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the US on the basis of sex. Prior to the amendment women’s suffrage varied by state, with most Western states already allowing women to vote while most Eastern states did not. The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment did not immediately have an impact on the electorate, as very few eligible women voted and minority women, especially African-American women, were denied the right to vote in other ways, such as with poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, intimidation and other threats of reprisal. In the 1920 presidential election, only 36% of eligible women voted. But by the 1960s, turnout among women overtook that of men, and around 1980 a gender gap emerged with women favoring the liberal candidate in presidential elections.

1924 — Immigration Act of 1924 or Johnson-Reed Act (includes the Asian Exclusion Act and the National Origins Act) bans immigration from the entire Asian region, establishes the National Origins Formula that pegs immigration to 2% of the 1890 census with the intention of preserving America’s ethnic composition, provides funding and an enforcement mechanism for deportation of illegals, and establishes the US Border Patrol. Since Chinese were already banned in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, this law was called the “Japanese Exclusion Act” by Japanese, and reversed the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907 between the US and the Empire of Japan in which the US agreed not to restrict immigration from Japan and Japan agreed not to allow further emigration to the US. Since the Philippines was a US colony at the time, Filipinos were considered US nationals (but not citizens) and could travel freely. Asian immigration to Hawaii continues as Hawaii is a territory not subject to the act until statehood in 1959. The act expands upon the Immigration Act of 1917, which imposed a literacy test on all immigrants (for the first time imposing a restriction on European immigrants), created new categories of inadmissible persons, and barred immigration from the Asian-Pacific zone, including India and parts of the Soviet Union but excluding Japan and the Philippines. The 1917 Act was an expansion of the Immigration Act of 1907.

The 1924 Act remains law until the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965; however, during this period the US begins admitting political refugees outside of the quota system, such as small numbers of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, Holocaust survivors after WWII, others fleeing communist rule in Central Europe and the Soviet Union, and Cubans after the 1959 Revolution.

Another reaction to the influx of new immigrants since 1880 is the increasing restrictions on Jews in elite universities, certain professions (law, medicine, Academia), and high-end housing communities. Mostly informal, these restrictions begin in the 1920s and take hold in the 1930s. Jewish enrollment at Harvard grew from 7% in 1900 to 21% in 1922, when President A. Lawrence Lowell first proposed a 15% cap. The idea for a rigid quota evolved into a “holistic” approach, which effectively lowered Jewish enrollment to 15% by 1931. This is the same “holistic” approach that Harvard and other Ivy League schools start using in the 1990s to limit Asian enrollment.

1927 — The Jazz Singer, the first “talkie” (i.e. film with a synchronized soundtrack, in this case only for the musical numbers), is released, generally considered the beginning of the golden age of Hollywood cinema or Hollywood studio system (1927 to 1948), in which a handful of studios — the “big five” and “little three” — dominate film production and distribution as vertically integrated companies that hold creative talent under long-term exclusive contracts. All of these studios except United Artists were founded by Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants (The Jazz Singer is about a young Jewish cantor who becomes a jazz singer and struggles with his desire to assimilate to American culture while retaining his cultural identity). Big Five: Fox Film Corporation (now 20th Century Fox) by William Fox (born Fuchs, second-generation Hungarian Jew); Loew’s Incorporated (parent company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) by Marcus Loew (second-generation Austrian and German Jew); Paramount Pictures by Adolph Zukar (first-generation Austro-Hungarian Jew); RKO Radio Pictures by David Sarnoff (first-generation Russian Jew from Uzlyany, now part of Belarus); Warner Brothers by Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack Warner (first-generation Polish Jews, originally Wonskolaser, immigrated to Canada, youngest brother born in Ontario). Little Three: Universal Pictures by a consortium of nine industry players, including Carl Laemmle (first-generation German Jew) and Charles Baumann (second-generation Polish Jew); Columbia Pictures by Harry and Jack Cohn (second-generation German and Russian Jews) and Joe Brandt (New York Jew); United Artists by D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks. From 1930 to 1945, the studio system produces more than 7,500 feature films in this way: https://www.britannica.com/art/history-of-the-motion-picture/The-Hollywood-studio-system. The Hollywood studio system is broken up in 1948 by the antitrust case United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. The Department of Justice initially sues the major studios (Paramount is the primary defendant, but all Big Five and Little Three are named) in 1938, which results in a consent decree in 1940 that limits “block-booking” (selling films together as a package to theaters) to five films, bans block-booking of short films, bans “blind buying” (in which theaters would buy films without viewing them), and creates an enforcement agency. The studios do not fully comply with the decree, instead creating an alternative “Unity Plan,” forming the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers, and filing a lawsuit against exhibitor Paramount Detroit Theaters. The Department of Justice resumes litigation in 1943, going to trial one month after the end of WWII in October of 1945. The case is appealed to the Supreme Court in 1948 and the studios are ordered to divest themselves of their theater chains.

1928 — Al Smith (third-generation Irish on his mother’s side and third-generation German-Italian on his father’s) becomes the first Roman Catholic to win a major party’s nomination for president as a Democrat.

1932 — Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a child of wealthy New York families who had immigrated in the 17th century) is elected president in a landslide, ushering in the New Deal era of Democratic Party dominance until the late 1960s. From 1932 to 1964, the Democratic Party wins seven of nine presidential elections (the exception was Eisenhower, a pro-New Deal Republican, in 1952 and 1956) and holds both houses of Congress for all but four years from 1932–1980. The New Deal Democrats were a coalition of labor unions, socialists, liberals, religious and ethnic minorities (Catholics, Jews, and blacks), and Southern whites that relied heavily on the political machines in the large urban centers (which were composed of many of the same constituents). In turn, these big-city machines were rewarded with billions of dollars in federal discretionary spending through agencies like the Works Progress Administration (1935–1942). (However, Manhattan’s machine, the Irish-led Tammany Hall, fought Roosevelt and other reformers and lost most of their patronage in the 1930’s, especially during the mayoralty of Fiorello La Guardia, 1934–1945, who had an Italian immigrant father and a Jewish-Italian mother from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, raised Episcopalian.) The New Deal era is called the “Fifth Party System” by political scientists and begins to fracture shortly after the legislation of the Civil Rights Movement, the crowning achievement of the New Deal coalition and its most radical set of policies. While many New Deal Democrats support the Civil Rights Movement initially, many by the 60’s feel it has gone too far — the Southern States consider the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to be a direct affront. The influence of the labor unions also fades, as companies move production to non-union states and the economy as a whole becomes more service oriented. Additionally, many blue-collar immigrants become more affluent and grow weary of urban crime and 60’s counterculture, and Catholics react to the push for abortion rights and the breakdown of traditional family values.

1934 — Tydings-McDuffie Act establishes a ten-year process for the American colony of the Philippines to become an independent country, including the drafting of the constitution. The act reclassifies Filipinos as aliens instead of US nationals for the purposes of immigration and establishes a quota of 50 Filipino immigrants per year. While Filipinos living in the US were allowed to move relatively freely before the act, they were not allowed to become citizens unless born in the country. The act permits a small but significant population of Filipinos to become US citizens, which becomes the basis for Filipino immigration after the 1965 Immigration Act does away with national origin quotas in favor of familial ties.

1938 — Cartoonists Jerome Siegel (second-generation Lithuanian Jew) and Joe Shuster (second-generation Dutch and Ukrainian Jew via Toronto) sell their character Superman to National Allied Publications (now Detective Comics) for $130. National Allied Publications was founded by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson in 1934, but is bought out through bankruptcy in 1938 by its distributor, Independent News Company, which was founded by Jacob Liebowitz (Ukrainian Jew, immigrated to the US at the age of ten with his family) and Harry Donenfeld (Romanian Jew, immigrated at the age of five with his family), both from New York. The next year, to capitalize on the success of Superman, Bob Kane (second-generation Eastern European Jew, born Robert Kahn) and Bill Finger (second-and-a-half generation Jew, father immigrated from Austria-Hungary and mother was born in New York) create Batman, who debuts on March 30, 1939.

1939 — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer releases The Wizard of Oz, the first successful “natural”-color film and the biggest budget film ever for MGM at the time. It was chosen as one of the first 25 films to be preserved in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, according to whom it is the most viewed movie of all time. The film actually lost money until it was re-released in 1949.

1940 — Total US population: 131.67M — 89.8% white, 9.8% black. Asians at .19%. Hispanics at 1.53%. Jews reach a high point as a percentage of total at 3.61% or 4.77M. About 500k Jews comprising roughly half of all Jewish males between 18 and 50 enlist in the army to fight in WWII. Because of domestic economic pressure, a high unemployment rate, and a general anti-immigrant sentiment, the US only accepts a very small number of Jewish refugees from Europe during the rise of fascism there (less than 30k per year during the War), far fewer per capita than many neutral European countries. In a famous case, Roosevelt refuses to grant permission to the SS St. Louis carrying 936 Jewish refugees to unload in 1939. The ship returns to Europe, where several hundred of the passengers would not survive the Holocaust. Arthur Hays Sulzberger (of mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish ancestry who traces his lineage back to the American Revolution), a classical reform Jew and anti-Zionist and publisher of The New York Times, insisted that the plight of European Jews was part of a larger refugee problem and suppressed news about the Holocaust, even after the scope and nature of the events were understood.

1942–1946 — Japanese Internment Camps. Franklin D. Roosevelt signs an executive order on February 19, 1942 allowing military commanders to designate military “exclusion zones” at their discretion, which would eventually cover the East and West Coasts and Alaska. The law is first applied to German and Italian Americans but does not include forced relocation and camps. Eventually, about 120K Japanese — 112K on the West Coast — are forcibly relocated to camps in the interior of the country. A smaller number (more than 10K) of German and Italian Americans are also relocated to camps. About 62% were US citizens. The US Census Bureau assists the internment effort with individual census data on Japanese Americans, which the bureau denies until the 21st century. Although internment is authorized by Roosevelt’s executive order, the architects of the program are Karl Bendetsen (second-generation Lithuanian Jew) and John DeWitt (of Dutch ancestry), the head of the Western Defense Command during WWII. It is Bendetsen who pressures DeWitt to take a harder line, stating, “I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp.” This includes infants, orphans, and hospital patients, some of whom die when they are removed from care. In 1988, Ronald Reagan signs the Civil Liberties Act based on a commission appointed by Jimmy Carter, which authorizes $20K (equivalent to $43K in 2019) in reparations to each former internee still alive when the act was passed. The US government eventually disburses more than $1.6 billion in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been interned. Bendetsen (who died in 1989) opposes both the commission and reparations.

1945–1948 — War Brides Act allows spouses, biological children, and adopted children of the US military to enter the US as non-quota immigrants. Because the ban on Chinese immigration was repealed by the Magnuson Act in 1943, Chinese women were the Asian group that benefited the most from the law. The Alien Fiancés Act of 1946 allowed for Filipino and Indian fiancés of veterans. An amendment in 1947 removed the term “if admissible” (under previous immigration law), which made it possible for Korean and Japanese brides to immigrate. More than 100K enter the US under these laws until their expiration in December of 1948.

The war years and their aftermath lead to a flow of immigration under the national origins quota system. More than 1M people from Europe, Canada, and Mexico immigrated in the 1940s and more than 2.5M immigrated in the 1950s.

1946 — The Philippines becomes independent with US approval after the US liberates the Philippines from the Japanese puppet state (1943–1945) in WWII. The Luce-Celler Act establishes a quota of 100 Filipinos and 100 Indians to immigrate per year and allows naturalization for these groups for the first time. Without the act, Filipinos who were previously considered US nationals would have technically been barred from immigrating once the Philippines became independent. The act is signed two days before the Treaty of Manila (July 4).

1952 — Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 or McCarran-Walter Act eliminates racial restrictions on citizenship (which only applied to Asian ethnicities) but reinforces the national quota system, which for Asian countries is 100 per country and 2000 total for the “Asiatic barred zone.” Additionally, people of Asian descent count towards their quota regardless of their nationality (i.e. a Chinese counted towards the Chinese quota even if he is a citizen of France). The act is strongly supported by Asian-American advocacy organizations, even though they ultimately wanted to eliminate national-origin quotas entirely. Because limited Chinese immigration and naturalization had been allowed under the Magnuson Act in 1943 (as a result of the alliance between the US and China during WWII), it is the McCarran-Walter Act that allows Japanese Americans and Korean Americans to naturalize for the first time.

1954 — Operation Wetback, a highly controversial quasi-military-style INS operation to force or compel legal and illegal Mexican migrant workers back to Mexico (in cooperation with the Mexican government), claims 1.3 million “returns” but is ultimately ended due to its inability to stop illegals from entering the country and public disapproval over its tactics. Long term, the program results in a stronger US presence along the US-Mexico border.

1960 — Total US Population: 179.3M — 88.6% white, 10.5% black. Asian population expands quickly to .55%. Hispanics also expand to 3.2%. Jews at 2.99% or 5.3M.

1961 — Stan Lee (second-generation Romanian Jew, born Stanley Lieber) and Jack Kirby (second-generation Austrian Jew, born Jacob Kurtzberg) create and publish the first issue of The Fantastic Four based on information their boss, Martin Goodman (second-generation Lithuanian Jew, born Moe Goodman) had acquired about the success of their competitor National Periodical’s (now DC) new title Justice League of America. The instant success of The Fantastic Four would lead Lee and Kirby to create some of the most successful superhero characters in history, including Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, X-Men, Daredevil, and Spider-Man. Lee had worked for Goodman at Timely Comics, a precursor of Marvel, since graduating high school at the age of sixteen in 1939 (initially performing mundane tasks), and aspired to become a great novelist (he changed his name to “Stan Lee” in part because he did not want his real name to be associated with low-brow comics). Goodman was married to Lee’s cousin, and Lee was formally hired by editor Joe Simon (born Hymie Simon, father was an English Jewish immigrant, mother was an American Jew).

1963 — On August 28, the March on Washington (or March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom), in which Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, is organized by labor and civil rights activists A. Philip Randoph (son of an African-American minister from Florida) and Bayard Rustin (raised by maternal grandparents in a wealthy Pennsylvania home that regularly hosted NAACP leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson). Historians estimate the number of participants to be ~250,000, approximately 75–80% black. It was joined by Walter Reuther (second-generation German whose father was a union organizer in the Socialist Party of America), the fourth president of the UAW from 1946–1970, who is credited with expanding the scope of the UAW’s politics to include “social justice” issues.

John F. Kennedy, the first and only Catholic president (Joe Biden would be the second), is assassinated on November 22. The first Kennadys (originally O’Kennady) arrived in East Boston from Ireland in 1849.

1965 — Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 or Hart-Celler Act abolishes the National Origins Formula established in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, emphasizes skills-based immigration and introduces the H1-B visa, allows immigration outside of the quota system based on family ties by exempting immediate relatives of US citizens from immigration limits, and sets immigration limits for Western Europe for the first time. The act is expected to marginally increase immigration from underrepresented “ethnic” white states in Southern and Eastern Europe and is promoted by proponents as a minor tweak of immigration law that would reflect American values. President Johnson introduces the law by saying it “is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions . . . It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power.” By 1970, however, after an initial wave of new Europeans, immigration is increasingly led by new arrivals from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In the 1950s, 68% of legal immigration came from Europe or Canada. From 1971–1991, immigration from Latin America makes up 47.9% of the total and immigration from Asia 35.2%. Family reunification also increases the total overall number of immigrants. Immigration accounts for 11% of total population growth in the 60s, 33% in the 70s, and 39% in the 80s. The percentage of foreign-born in the US increases from 5 percent in 1965 to 14 percent in 2016.

The first wave of Chinese immigration after the 1965 Act (which went into effect on June 30, 1968) was almost exclusively Taiwanese until about 1977, when the PRC removed emigration restrictions. The US did not recognize the PRC until 1979, viewing the ROC as the sole legitimate government of China. When the US switched recognition, the Taiwan Relations Act set a separate Taiwanese immigration quota. The US also maintains a separate quota for Hong Kong (a British colony until 1997).

Bob Dylan (third-generation Odessan and Lithuanian Jew, born Robert Allen Zimmerman; his grandparents arrived in the US in the first decade of 1900s) releases Bringing It All Back Home, the first half recorded with an electric band. On July 25, he performs at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric band and is famously booed by the audience for betraying his earlier acoustic folk aesthetic, including one member of the audience shouting “Judas!”

1967 — On July 23, a five-day race riot begins in Detroit, resulting in 43 dead; 1,189 injured; 7,200 arrested; and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed. The riot (the worst in US history until the LA riots) ends the career of the pro-black reformist mayor Jerome Cavanaugh (Roman Catholic with an Irish surname) who had marched arm-in-arm with MLK in Detroit. In 1974, Detroit elects its first black mayor, the radical Tuskeegee Airman Coleman Young, who would go on to serve a record five terms in office until 1994, when he declined to run for reelection due to failing health. Young implements many policies designed to monopolize city resources for its black residents, alienating whites and encouraging white flight to the suburbs. Detroit peaked in population in 1950 at 1.85M; 83.6% was white and 16.2% black. By 2010, the population of the city falls to 713K (and still shrinking), with 10.6% white and 82.7% black. In 2013, Detroit becomes the largest city in US history to file for bankruptcy.

1970 — Japanese Americans are the largest Asian ethnicity in the US at almost 600K, but very few are recent arrivals. Low birth rates and low immigration rates going forward lead to a relatively stagnant Japanese American presence, who drop to the sixth-largest Asian-American sub-group by the 2000s.

1971–1972 — Rural Purge in network television (i.e. the beginning of multiculturalism in mainstream culture). Within a few years, rural-themed shows (i.e. Andy Griffith Show, Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw); variety shows (i.e. Ed Sullivan Show, Red Skelton Show), and westerns are cancelled in favor of shows with urban and suburban themes and diverse casts (i.e. All in the Family, The Jeffersons, MASH). Although the purge affected all three major television networks at the time (ABC, CBS, and NBC), the purge begins at CBS when executive Robert Wood chooses Fred Silverman (Jewish father, Roman Catholic mother from New York) to replace Michael Dann as head of programming in 1970. Silverman would go on to work as an executive at all three networks until he formed his own production company in 1981 and had an enormous influence on television programming through the 90s.

1972 — The Godfather is released, directed by Francis Ford Coppola (third-generation Italian Roman Catholic from a musical family) for Paramount, launching the film career of Al Pacino (second-and-a-half generation Italian), John Cazale (Irish-American mother, Italian-American father), Diane Keaton, James Caan (second-generation German Jew), and others. (Marlon Brando is not Italian; he traces his lineage to Germany and to a French Huguenot or French Protestant in the 1660s and early 1700s and was raised a Christian Scientist.) After a degree in theater from Hofstra in 1960, Coppola worked on “nudie” films to support himself. Later enrolled in UCLA film school, he was eventually hired as an assistant by Roger Corman (Jewish father, German Catholic mother, raised Catholic), who funded Coppola’s first low-budget (a Corman specialty) horror film Dementia 13 (1963). After winning a UCLA contest for best screenplay, he worked as a scriptwriter for Seven Arts. In 1966, he made You’re a Big Boy Now (which was also his MFA thesis), which received a theatrical release via Warner Bros. and was well-received. He then directed the musical Finian’s Rainbow (1968, when he would meet George Lucas as a student); wrote, directed, and produced The Rain People (1969); and co-wrote Patton (1970). Coppola was Paramount’s third choice to direct The Godfather, and he initially turned the project down because he did not want to direct something that would make Italians look bad. The production was fraught throughout, with Coppola and the studio disagreeing on almost every aspect, including the casting of Brando as Vito Corleone and Pacino as Michael Corleone. The Godfather would go on to win Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay and is considered by many to be one of the greatest films ever made. Coppola would become a key figure in the New Hollywood movement, alongside Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, among others.

1975 — After two critically acclaimed but poor-selling albums, Bruce Springsteen releases Born to Run, the album that launched his career. Springsteen is third-generation Italian Roman Catholic on his mother’s side and was raised primarily by his mother’s side of the family, as his Dutch-Irish father suffered from mental illness that worsened through his life (the name Springsteen is of Dutch origin). Springsteen was signed to Columbia Records by President Clive Davis, a Brooklyn Jew, upon the recommendation of John Hammond, the famed talent scout who traces his lineage to the Vanderbilts on his mother’s side and a Civil War general on his father’s. His manager through Born to Run was Mike Appel, a ¾ Irish and ¼ Jewish Roman Catholic from Queens. John Landau, a Boston Jew, co-produced the album, helped focus Springsteen’s songwriting, and took over as Springsteen’s manager after the album was finished. Springsteen’s band includes Steve van Zandt (third-generation Italian, born Lento; Van Zandt is his stepfather’s name), Max Weinberg (Newark Jew, father of Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg), and Clarence Clemmons (African American from Virginia). After settling a legal battle with former manager Appel, Springsteen’s next album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, is a stripped-down, brutally honest depiction of working-class life in America and is considered by many as Springsteen’s best album artistically.

After strong work in TV, Steven Spielberg (Orthodox Jew from Cincinnati, Ohio, mother was a concert pianist and father was an electrician, paternal grandparents immigrated from Ukraine) becomes a household name for directing Jaws for Universal Pictures. Jaws becomes the template for the “summer blockbuster” — high-concept action/adventure films released simultaneously to thousands of theaters at once with heavy promotion and merchandising. Jaws becomes the highest-grossing film until Star Wars in 1977.

1977 — Star Wars is released. George Lucas — of mostly German, English, and Scottish descent — originally wanted to be a racecar driver, but a crash during an underground race a few days before his high school graduation in which he was almost killed made him give up racing. Lucas would eventually enroll in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, one of the first dedicated film schools in the country, graduating with a BFA in film in 1967. After trying to join the air force and being drafted for Vietnam but receiving a medical exemption (diabetes), he re-enrolled at USC in film production. He began working for the United States Information Agency (1953–1999), where he gained access to military and other locations that enabled him to film the short that would become his 1971 film THX 1138. The short won first prize at the 1967–68 National Student Film Festival, for which he was awarded a student scholarship by Warner Bros. to intern on a film of his choosing. Because Francis Ford Coppola was revered as a film student who had “made it,” Lucas chose Coppola’s early film Finian’s Rainbow (1968). Lucas and Coppola would go on to found the studio American Zoetrope, attempting to give filmmakers an option outside of the Hollywood studio system. After directing the successful American Graffiti (1973), Lucas attempted to secure the rights to the Flash Gordon serial from his childhood to do a modern remake, but they were already owned by someone else, so Lucas began to create his own space adventure narrative which would eventually become Star Wars. Despite his earlier success, Lucas’ idea was turned down by every studio except 20th Century Fox. It would go on to become the highest-grossing film of all time until Spielberg’s E.T. (1982) and is today the second-highest grossing film of all time adjusted for inflation (after Gone with the Wind). It receives ten Oscar nominations and wins seven. It is chosen in 1989 as one of the first 25 films to be entered into the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. The Star Wars franchise is currently the second-highest-grossing film franchise of all time and the fifth-highest-grossing media franchise of all time. Like Jaws, Star Wars moves Hollywood towards action and spectacle aimed at a younger audience, revolutionizes filmmaking technique (especially special effects), and shows that merchandising can generate more revenue than the film itself. Bob Iger-led Disney purchases Lucasfilm (including the rights to Star Wars) on October 30, 2012 for $4.05B and proceeds to strangle the lifeblood out of the greatest mythology that will ever be created by an American like a big, dumb, corporate boa constrictor that understands nothing except that there is a meal to be had.

1980 — Total US Population: 226.5M — 83.1% white, 11.7% black. Asians now at 1.5%. Hispanics continue to grow at 6.4%. Jews at 2.51% or 5.5M. In the late 1980’s, Mikhail Gorbechev allows Soviet Jews to emigrate freely after a period of restriction (beginning in 1968), which results in a wave of Jewish immigration to New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and South Florida.

Refugee Act of 1980 codifies US policy on refugee resettlement. This act coincides with the second wave of Vietnamese immigration: largely poorer farmers or fisherman, merchants, or former military officials who suffered as a result of the policies of the new communist government in Vietnam following the war. Using small fishing boats to flee the country, these refugees were referred to as “boat people.” Between 1978 to 1982, 280.5K Vietnamese refugees were admitted. Between 1981 and 2000, 531.3K Vietnamese refugees were admitted. The first wave of Vietnamese refugees fled immediately before or after the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, and tended to be more affluent urban professionals: 15K left on scheduled flights and 80K were evacuated by air the week prior; 125K were carried on US Navy ships after. These refugees were allowed to immigrate according to the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act in 1975, against public sentiment. $405M in aid was secured and the refugees were spread out across the country to avoid enclaves from forming; however, most resettled in California and Texas within a few years in the US.

Another result of the Refugee Act is that a large number of Hmong are allowed to immigrate following the roughly 30k who had immigrated between 1975 and 1978. Hmong are an ethnic minority who lived in Laos during the Vietnam War. A Hmong secret army led by General Vang Pao assisted and was funded by the CIA to disrupt supply lines to VietCong forces in South Vietnam. The first wave of Hmong immigrants were directly associated with Vang (including Vang himself) and evacuated by the US after the fall of Saigon. About half of the Hmong population in Laos fled to refugee camps in Thailand after the war and remained there despite calls to allow them to return to Laos. After an initial wave of resettlements, a global debate ensued over these refugees, with Bill Clinton and the UN advocating repatriation (to Laos). By the mid-90s, however, conservatives and human rights activists strongly oppose Clinton’s stand on the issue, and Republicans in Congress pass legislation to appropriate the funds to resettle the Hmong, which Clinton vowed to veto. Finally, in 1997, the remaining Hmong refugees are allowed to immigrate to the US and the US government formally acknowledges the “secret war” with a Laos Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. The resettlement of the refugees slows down after new legislation is passed following 9/11 that prohibited people who had engaged in armed conflict to immigrate. As of 2010, there are approximately 260K Hmong living in the US, mostly in California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. Contrary to the model-minority Asian stereotype, Hmong have a high poverty rate (37.8%), high dropout rate (38%), low per capita income ($12,923 in 2014), low median household income ($48K in 2014), and high rates of mental health disorders.

1984 — Madonna Louise Ciccone releases her second full-length album Like a Virgin, her first international number-one album and the first album by a woman to sell over five million copies. A Roman Catholic from Michigan (her father was second-generation Italian, her mother French-Canadian) and a high-school overachiever who briefly attended U of M on a dance scholarship before moving to New York, Madonna was discovered by a club DJ who brought her demo to Seymour Stein (raised an Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn) of Sire Records (Stein also worked with the Ramones, Talking Heads, Depeche Mode, The Smiths, The Cure, Ice-T, and others). Madonna released eleven albums on the label or its parent company Warner Bros. Records until 2008. Now in her sixties with six children (two adopted from Malawi) and still releasing albums, Madonna is the best-selling female artist of all time according to Guinness and the highest-grossing solo touring artist of all time with receipts in the range of $1.4 billion. She has lived in Lisbon, Portugal since 2017.

1986 — Immigration Reform and Control Act or the Simpson-Mazzoli Act (IRCA) for the first time targets companies employing illegal immigrants. It also offers legalization to undocumented immigrants who entered the country before January 1, 1982 under certain conditions.

1988 — N.W.A. release their first studio album Straight Outta Compton, inventing the gangsta rap genre. Founded by Eazy-E (Eric Wright, son of a postal worker and school administrator) with the help of famed music manager Jerry Heller (Jew from Cleveland, Ohio, represented big-name rock acts beginning in the 60s like Elton John, Pink Floyd, Journey, Black Sabbath, the Who, and many others), N.W.A. was short-lived as a group, but launched the careers of Dr. Dre (Andre Romelle Young, son of an amateur R&B musician and step-brother of rapper Warren G) and Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson, son of a hospital clerk and a machinist), as well as Eazy-E, who had eleven children and died of AIDS in 1995 at the age of 30. Eazy-E originally proposed an equal partnership with Heller, but Heller insisted on a management role with a 20% share of revenue, which he claims was standard for senior music managers. It is this arrangement that led Ice Cube and Dr. Dre to leave the group and begin solo careers.

1989 — The “Disney Renaissance” in animation begins with the release of The Little Mermaid, followed by Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994). After the death of brothers Walt (1966) and Roy (1971) Disney (third-generation Irish via Canada on their father’s side, German-English on their mother’s), the company’s focus drifted to live-action films and their famous amusement parks. In 1984, the Sid Bass family (a Texas oil family) bought 18.7 percent of the company after an unsuccessful hostile takeover by Saul Steinberg’s (Brooklyn Jew) Reliance Group Holdings and a purchase agreement with MCA Inc. (Music Corporation of America, founded by Jules Stein, a second-generation Lithuanian Jew), which fell through because MCA Chairman Lew Wasserman (second-generation Russian Jew from Cleveland, Ohio) could not agree to make Disney CEO Ron Miller (Walt Disney’s son-in-law) president of MCA. Sid Bass and the Disney board appointed Michael Eisner (New York secular Jew from an affluent family) CEO, Frank Wells (traces his ancestry back to the Mayflower) president, and Jeffrey Katzenberg (New York Jew) head of Walt Disney Studios. Although Eisner oversees a rehabilitation and expansion of the Disney empire, including several takeovers and acquisitions, he is criticized for his management style and for often acting without consulting the board or shareholders. For these reasons and because the company hit several bumps in different areas in the beginning of the 2000s, Eisner is removed from the board of directors in 2004 and resigns in 2006. Bob Iger (New York secular Jew) is announced as Eisner’s successor in 2005.

1990 — The Long Island, NY rap group Public Enemy releases their most successful album, Fear of a Black Planet, which the Library of Congress added to its National Recording Registry in 2005. Public Enemy was formed when Chuck D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, from Queens) met Flavor Flav (William Jonathan Drayton Jr, from Freeport, NY) at Adelphi University on Long Island. Chuck D studied graphic design, hosted a hip-hop radio show for a local rock station, designed flyers for hip-hop events, and drew a cartoon for the Adelphi student newspaper. When Chuck D issued a two-song demo tape to promote the schools’ radio station, in 1985, it caught the attention of the legendary music producer Rick Rubin (Jew from Lido Beach, NY), who had just founded Def Jam Records with Russell Simmons (from Queens, now living in Indonesia to avoid extradition to the US on sexual assault charges). Rubin originally did not understand Flavor Flav’s role in the group and wanted to sign Chuck D as a solo artist (Rubin was instrumental in transforming the Jewish rap group the Beastie Boys from a punk band into a rap group, and also discovered LL Cool J and Run-DMC, among others). Chuck D later brought on his old production group Spectrum City and a local DJ named Terminator X to form Public Enemy. Public Enemy is the first to make pro-black politics the center of their identity as a musical act (not just on the occasional song), the first rap group to find success internationally, and pioneer the art of music sampling. In 2020, Flavor Flav is temporarily fired from the group for refusing to endorse Bernie Sanders.

1991 — Neil Rudenstine (father was a Ukrainian Jew, mother was a Roman Catholic from Italy; he is Episcopalian) becomes the first president of Harvard University with Jewish ancestry (1991–2001). Since Rudenstine, three out of four Harvard Presidents have been Jewish, including the current president: Lawrence Summers (2001–2006, first practicing Jewish president) and Lawrence Bacow (2018-present, mother immigrated after WWII as a Holocaust survivor, father came to the US as a child to escape pogroms). (The non-Jewish president is Drew Gilpin Faust, 2007–2018, the first female president of Harvard, great-granddaughter of a US senator from Tennessee, and descended from the New England Puritan Reverend Jonathan Edwards, who was the third president of Princeton.) This follows a similar pattern at other elite universities. Princeton: Harold T. Shapiro (1988–2001), Christopher L. Eisgruber (2013–present). Yale: Rick Levin (1993–2013), Peter Salovey (2013-present). Columbia: Michael I. Sovern (1980–1993), Lee Bollinger (2002-present). MIT: Leo Rafael Reif (2012-present). University of Chicago: Edward H. Levi (1968–1975), Hugo F. Sonnenschein (1993–2000), Robert Zimmer (2006-present). Caltech: Harold Brown (1969–1977), Marvin L. Goldberger (1978–1987), David Baltimore (1997–2005), Thomas F. Rosenbaum (2014 — present). Johns Hopkins: Steven Muller (1972–1990), Daniel Nathans (1995–1996), Ronald J. Daniels (2009-present). Northwestern: Arnold R. Weber (1984–1994), Morton O. Schapiro (2009-present). Penn: Martin Meyerson (1970–1981), Claire Fagin (1993–1994), Judith Rodin (1994–2004), Amy Gutmann (2004-present). Dartmouth: John G. Kemeny (1970–1981), James O. Freedman (1987–1998), [Jim Yong Kim, only Asian here, 2009–2012]. Brown: Sheila Blumstein (2000–2001), Christina Paxson (2012-present). Cornell: Jeffrey S. Lehman (2003–2005), David J. Skorton (2006–2015), Elizabeth Garrett (by marriage, 2015–2016), Martha E. Pollack (2017-present). This list is obviously selective (and in no particular order haha). Stanford has never had a Jewish president.

1992 — LA riots over six days from April 29 to May 4 result in 63 killed; 2,383 injured; 12K arrested; and property damage of ~$850M, about half of which is in Koreatown. Over 2,300 Korean-owned small businesses are looted and ransacked. The riot is sparked by the acquittal of four LAPD in the heavily televised arrest of Rodney King, but two factors contribute to the disproportionate targeting of Korean-owned businesses. Thirteen days after the videotaped arrest of Rodney King, 15-year-old African-American Latasha Harlins was killed by Korean shop-owner Soon Ja Du. Du confronted Harlins after seeing her place a bottle of orange juice in her backpack. Du then reached over the counter and grabbed the backpack and was punched twice by Harlins. Du falls when Harlins releases the backpack and throws a stool at Harlins while getting up. Du retrieves a revolver from under the counter but it is not visible to Harlins, who finally presents the bottle of orange juice and places it on the counter. As Harlins turns to leave, Du shoots Harlins in the back of the head from about three feet. Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter on November 15, 1991. The jury recommended the maximum sentence of 16 years, but the judge sentenced Du to probation, community service, and a small fine, noting the killing was committed under “extreme provocation” and that Du’s experience with past robberies at the store was a mitigating circumstance. Tupac Shakur refers to the incident in at least seven songs (in favor of Harlins). The judge in the case is targeted by protestors and an unsuccessful recall campaign. Du’s store is looted and burned down during the riots and never reopens. The other factor is the police response, who abandon the Koreatown area in order to protect the more affluent white neighborhoods adjacent to it. When Korean shop owners are repeatedly ignored by police dispatchers, Koreans organize their own defense, with Korean radio stations calling for volunteers and open gun battles being televised on the national news. After the riots, both liberal and conservative Korean Americans become more active in politics as they recognize that a group of people cannot live in a country without political representation and political engagement. Prior to the 1965 Immigration Act, Koreans in America were more likely to be war brides than refugees or immigrants, numbering less than 2K in the country. By 1970, the number of Koreans ballooned to almost 70K and then to 355K in 1980. As of the 2010 census, there were 1.7M people of Korean descent in the US.

1994 — Quentin Tarantino (of vague Irish descent on his mother’s side and Italian on his father’s, whom he has never met) releases his second film, Pulp Fiction. Tarantino, an LA high-school dropout who was obsessed with early cinema and pop culture, secured financing for the film after the breakout success of his first film, Reservoir Dogs, a screenplay Tarantino wrote after meeting Jewish film producer Lawrence Bender at a party in Hollywood, who helped secure financing for the project from Jewish film producer Richard Gladstein at Live Entertainment (now Lionsgate). Now actively courted by Hollywood executives, Pulp Fiction landed at Columbia Tristar, who ultimately rejected it, then traveled to Harvey and Bob Weinstein (New York Jews; their maternal grandparents immigrated from Poland) of Miramax, becoming the first project completely financed by the company. With a budget of $8.5M, the film grosses over $200M, ushers in an era of independent films, popularizes many film techniques (such as non-linear storytelling), and introduces an element of self-reflexivity in the US mainstream market, where the audience is assumed to have prior working knowledge of previous films. In 2017, Tarantino marries Israeli singer Daniella Pick in a Reform Jewish ceremony and now lives in Israel.

1995 — Seminal grunge band Pearl Jam loses a 14-month fight with ticket distribution company Ticketmaster. The dispute begins when a journalist revealed Ticketmaster had charged service fees for some charity concerts the band had given. When Ticketmaster refused to waive service fees, the band attempted in 1994 to organize their own tour, but Ticketmaster held exclusive contracts with most of the venues in the US and the band eventually cancelled the tour. Two members of the band gave testimony to an antitrust investigation in D.C., but the Justice Department closed the investigation without action. Ticketmaster started in 1976 as a company that licensed software and sold hardware for ticketing systems, but in 1982 their new CEO Fred Rosen (New York Jew) convinced Jay Pritzker of the Pritzker family (Ukrainian Jewish family that immigrated to the US from Kiev in 1881; Jay is the third-generation, son of the patriarch of the Pritzker empire, and uncle of J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois) to invest substantially in the company, moving to computerized ticketing and acquiring its rival Ticketron in 1991, establishing market dominance. It has expanded several times since. Pearl Jam would continue a partial boycott of Ticketmaster until 1998.

1996 — Tupac Shakur is killed in Las Vegas, after a Mike Tyson fight, at the age of 25. Born in East Harlem to two Black Panther Party members, his family moved to Baltimore the year Tupac began eighth grade. For his third year of high school, he transferred to the public Baltimore School for the Arts, studying acting, jazz, and ballet. He performed in Shakespeare plays, was cast as the Mouse King in a production of the Nutcracker, and was known as the school’s best rapper. His family moved to Marin City, California (just north of San Francisco) in 1988, where he finished high school and was active in theater. In 1989, Tupac attended a poetry class held by Leila Steinberg (Mexican-Turkish mother and Polish Jewish father) who worked as a backup dancer and singer in the 80s. Taking him into her home to live with her family for a period, Steinberg became Tupac’s mentor and then his manager. It was Steinberg who convinced Digital Underground to sign him, giving him his first break. Combining the street aesthetic of N.W.A without the excessive violence and misogyny and the politics of Public Enemy while remaining relatable to the average person, and producing ten albums’ worth of material (six released posthumously) before the age of 25 during the “golden age” of the genre, Tupac is considered by many to be the greatest rapper of all time.

1998 — Marvel Comics emerges from bankruptcy under the control of Israeli-American businessman Isaac Perlmutter and his partner Avi Arad, edging out Americans Carl Icahn (Brooklyn Jew) and Ronald Perelman (third-generation Lithuanian Jew), who had acquired it as part of New World Entertainment in 1989. Marvel suffered two blows in the 90s leading to bankruptcy. In early 1992, seven of its best artists (Todd McFarlane, Korean American Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, and Whilce Portacio) abruptly left Marvel to publish their own titles under a deal with Malibu Comics, founding Image Comics. At issue was Marvel’s “work for hire” policy, which is the only condition under copyright law in which an employer is considered the legal author of the work created by an employee. Work for hire shuts the artist out of royalties from licensing deals for toys, merchandise, etc. The other blow was an industry-wide slump in the mid-90s (Marvel filed for bankruptcy in December of 1996). In this period Marvel begins to capitalize on its intellectual property by licensing films: Men in Black (1997), Blade (1998), X-Men (2000), and Spider-Man (2002). Marvel Entertainment is acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2009 for $4.24B.

2000 — Total US population: 281.4M — 75.1% white, 12.3% black. Asians now at 3.8%. Hispanics at 12.5% (more than black population for first time). Jews are now 1.97% of the population, or 5.53M. Although lower as a percentage of the total population, 5.53M is the largest the Jewish American population has ever been (this is the “core” Jewish population number and does not count non-practicing Jews with partial Jewish Ancestry). Census adds category “two or more races” for first time, at 2.4%.

2004 — Google’s initial public offering on August 19 gives Google a market capitalization of $23B. Google began as a research project in 1996 by Stanford PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin (a “third founder,” Scott Hassan, would leave before Google was officially founded). Page was born in Michigan in 1973 to a computer science professor and a computer programming instructor. His mother is Jewish; his maternal grandfather later emigrated to Israel. He went to U of M for computer engineering and then enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford. While searching for a dissertation topic, he was encouraged to explore the mathematical properties of the early Internet by his supervisor, Terry Winograd (also Jewish). Page was then joined by fellow Stanford PhD student Sergey Brin, who immigrated to the US with his family at the age of six in 1979. Both of Brin’s parents are Jewish STEM graduates of Moscow State University (the highest-ranking university in the Soviet Union and in Russia today). The Brin family lived in Europe until Brin’s father was able to secure a teaching position at the University of Maryland with the help of fellow Jewish MSU grad Anatole Katok. During the transition, the Brin family received assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish-American nonprofit established in 1881 to aid Jewish refugees. Brin began his graduate studies at Stanford on a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, an independent agency of the US government. Page and Brin published their paper on Internet link analysis with a prototype of the Google search engine, called PageRank, in 1998. Their research and patent cites a similar and earlier site-scoring algorithm called RankDex, developed by Chinese software engineer Robin Li for the New Jersey company IDD Information Services. (Li would go on to found Baidu. PageRank’s patent expired in 2019 and was not renewed. The patent was assigned to Stanford University, who granted Google exclusive rights to use it in exchange for 1.8 million shares of the company, which Stanford sold in 2005 for $336M.) Google was incorporated on September 4, 1998 and initially based in the garage of friend Susan Wojcicki (Jewish mother, Polish-American father, has worked for Google since 1999, currently CEO of YouTube). They received $100K from Andy Bechtolsheim, a German Jew who immigrated in 1975 to study at Carnegie Mellon and later Stanford (founder of Sun Microsystems), and later about $1M from “angel investors,” including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. In 1999, they raised $25M from venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins (founded by Eugene Kleiner, an Austrian Jew who arrived in New York in 1940 after fleeing the Third Reich) and Sequoia Capital (founded by Don Valentine, a Catholic from the Bronx, but by this time managed by Douglas Leone, who immigrated to the US from Italy as a child in 1968, and Michael Moritz, a Welsh Jew who came to the US to study at the Wharton School in the 70s). In 2000, Yahoo!, one of the most popular websites during the early Internet, announced it would begin using Google as its default search engine, essentially giving Google market dominance. Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Stanford Engineering graduate students Jerry Yang (immigrated to the US as a child from Taiwan in 1978) and David Filo (born in Wisconsin, raised in Louisiana). In 2001, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital convince Page to step down as CEO and bring on Eric Schmidt (from Virginia, father was an economist who worked at the US Treasury Department during Nixon). After their IPO, Google expands very quickly, acquiring YouTube in 2006 for $1.65B, DoubleClick in 2007 for $3.1B, and Motorola in 2011 for $12.5B. In 2005, Larry Page bought Android in its infancy for $50M without even informing CEO Eric Schmidt, essentially investing in the then struggling company. Before the sale, Android (founded by Andy Rubin, Jew from Chappaqua, NY), was saved from eviction by a cash donation from tech entrepreneur Steve Perlman (Jew from Connecticut), who refused to take a stake in the company. Google generated $50B in revenue for the first time in 2012. Now (2020) with a market capitalization of $1.237T on $162B (2019) revenue, and considering its dominant role in the distribution of information and the data it collects on a minute-by-minute basis, Google (now Alphabet) may be the most powerful corporation that has ever existed in human history. (A few corporations are larger by market cap, especially state-owned energy corporations, and a few retailers are larger by revenue, such as Amazon and Walmart.)

2010 — Total US population: 308.7M — 72.4% white, 12.6% black. Asians at 4.9%. Hispanics at 16.3%. “Two or more races” at 2.9%. Core Jewish numbers drop to 5.425M or 1.76%. The number of practicing Catholics decline from 24% in 2007 to 21% in 2014 (or 51M). 13% of US adults are former Catholics. 65% of Catholics are white, 29% are Hispanic. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/10/7-facts-about-american-catholics/

2013 — Netflix begins making content with their first series House of Cards. Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings (born in Boston, father worked for the Nixon administration and mother was from a Social Register family and granddaughter of Alfred Lee Loomis, the investment banker who helped develop radar and the atom bomb during WWII) and Marc Randolph (Austrian-Jewish nuclear-engineer father and Jewish mother from Brooklyn; is distantly related on his father’s side to Sigmund Freud and Edward Bernays, the propaganda specialist known as “the father of public relations”). Netflix began as an online DVD rental service using a per-per-rent model similar to brick-and-mortar movie rental stores. They chose DVDs because they could be put in the mail without being damaged and began with 925 titles, virtually the entire catalogue of movies and TV available on DVD at the time. In early 2000, they introduced the flat-fee unlimited rental model. They were still losing money, however, and offered to be acquired by Blockbuster for $50M in a type of merger, which Blockbuster ironically turned down. The next year, the cost of DVD players came down, DVD players became the most popular Christmas gift of the year, and subscriptions subsequently surged. Netflix went public in 2002 and posted its first profit during the fiscal year 2003 of $6.5M on $272M revenue. (Randolph retired from the company in 2004.) In 2005, as the Internet became fast enough for video content, Netflix began acquiring licensing rights with the original intention of selling a piece of hardware called a “Netflix box” which could download movies overnight to be ready to watch the next day. After discovering how YouTube users were willing to stream content despite the lack of high definition, the “Netflix box” was scrapped and the company introduced its streaming service in 2007. One of the key components of the streaming service was a recommendation algorithm known as Cinematch, which benefited Netflix, the customer, and content-producers alike. In 2010, Netflix began offering a stand-alone streaming service. In 2011, Netflix announced its intention to separate its DVD rental service into a subsidiary called Quickster, and then backed away from the plan. On July 20, 2020, Netflix becomes the largest media company in the world by market capitalization, climbing past traditional rivals Walt Disney, AT&T, and Comcast, and has already changed the way TV and film media is produced and consumed. The Netflix subscription model means there are no advertisers to object to content; there are no “seasons” and the shows do not end with “cliffhangers” or begin with “recaps,” since their customers choose when and what to watch and binge-watching is common; and shows that would be unviable on traditional TV are viable on Netflix by appealing to a niche base. By one count, Netflix produced more original movies and shows in 2019 — just six years after their first series — than the entire TV industry in 2005. https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/netflix-more-2019-originals-than-entire-tv-industry-in-2005-1203441709/

2016 — Donald J. Trump, third-generation German-American on his father’s side and second-generation Scottish-American on his mother’s, is elected 45th President of the United States as a Republican. An outsider with no political experience, Trump runs not only against Democrats but against the open opposition of the last two Republican presidential candidates and the last Republican president. Trump was born in the same year as George W. Bush and Bill Clinton (1946). Obama (b. 1961) is currently the only president to have been born later than 1946. (Biden is four years older than Trump, born in 1942, and if sworn in would immediately become the oldest president in US history, beating Reagan, who left office at 77 years and 349 days, and Trump, who was the oldest upon inauguration at 70 years and 220 days.)

The basic skeleton of this timeline was pulled from these wiki pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Catholic_Church_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_immigration_to_the_United_States

For everything else, you may assume the source is the wiki page for the topic in the entry. While I attempted to find the best data possible given time restrictions, it is almost not possible for a list this large to be free of errors. The intended value of this timeline is in the larger picture the details convey. Please verify any information for yourself before repeating it elsewhere.