The Worthy Part of Mankind: America’s 236-Year Immigration Argument That Never Ends

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Mike Baker

The Worthy Part of Mankind: America’s 236-Year Immigration Argument That Never Ends

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Mike Baker

Synthesized and compiled from the reporting and scholarship of George F. Will (The Washington Post), the Migration Policy Institute, the Pew Research Center, the National Archives, NBC News, ProPublica, the Brookings Institution, and the University of Texas Immigration History Project.

A figure pushing a boulder labeled IMMIGRATION up a steep hill, with an American flag in the stormy background

The boulder always rolls back down. And every Congress picks it up again. (Image: AI-generated)

In 1790, James Madison stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and said something that should have settled the matter — and instead launched the longest-running argument in American political history.

“It is no doubt very desirable that we should hold out as many inducements as possible for the worthy part of mankind to come and settle amongst us, and throw their fortunes into a common lot with ours.”
— James Madison, House of Representatives, 1790

The worthy part.

Two words. 236 years. A dozen major acts of Congress. Countless executive orders, Supreme Court decisions, deportation campaigns, amnesties, and enforcement crackdowns. And we still cannot define them.

As George F. Will observed in a 2018 Washington Post column that only grows more relevant with every failed Congress: America keeps pushing that rock up the hill. We never reach the summit. The boulder always rolls back down. And we pick it up and start again.

That is not a failure of politics. It is the politics. The question of who deserves to be an American is so fundamental — so entangled with race, class, religion, economics, labor markets, and national identity — that no Congress in the history of this republic has ever resolved it. Each generation gets its turn with the rock. And every generation fails. Not because our legislators are incompetent or corrupt — though sometimes they are — but because the question itself resists resolution. Immigration touches everything at once, and you cannot fix everything at once.

What follows is the story of how we got here: the major acts of Congress, the moments that seemed like breakthroughs and turned out to be preludes to the next crisis, and the structural reasons why comprehensive immigration reform is, and may always be, the great unfinished business of the American republic.

1790: Madison Sets the Trap

Madison’s remark came during debate over the nation’s first naturalization law. The Naturalization Act of 1790 answered Madison’s question with brisk efficiency: the worthy were free white persons of good moral character who had resided in the United States for at least two years. Simple. Brutal. Honest about its brutality.

But Madison also said something that tends to get buried. He continued: “But why is this desirable? Not merely to swell the catalogue of people. No, sir, it is to increase the wealth and strength of the community.”

Worthiness, in Madison’s framing, was never purely moral. It was economic. It was utilitarian. The republic needed people who would contribute — who would throw their fortunes into the common lot. That tension between moral gatekeeping and economic pragmatism has never left us. Every immigration debate since 1790 is, at its core, an argument between those two impulses. And they never resolve cleanly, because a nation needs both: principles it can defend and a labor force it can sustain.

The Constitution offered Congress only one tool: the power to establish a “uniform Rule of Naturalization.” It said nothing about who could enter. Nothing about how many. Nothing about from where. Congress would have to figure it out. It has been figuring ever since.

1882: The Chinese Exclusion Act — The First Hard Answer, and It Was Racist

For nearly a century after Madison’s speech, immigration policy operated largely as an open door. The country needed settlers, laborers, soldiers, and farmers. Then Congress gave its first definitive answer to the worthiness question — and it was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

For the first time in American history, an entire ethnic group was declared, by law, unworthy. Chinese laborers had built the transcontinental railroad. They had mined California gold. They had, in every material sense, increased the wealth and strength of the community. None of it counted. The Act suspended Chinese immigration for ten years. Congress extended it in 1892 via the Geary Act. In 1902, Congress made it permanent — and added a new requirement that every Chinese resident carry registration papers or face deportation.

The Supreme Court upheld all of it. The federal courts enforced all of it. This was not an aberration. It was a statement of first principle: worthiness could be defined by race alone, and Congress had plenary power to do so without judicial interference.

The rock had reached a certain altitude. Then it rolled back down in the most shameful way possible.

1917–1924: Eugenicists, Literacy Tests, and the Quota System

The Progressive Era brought a new kind of answer to Madison’s question. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917 over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, imposing literacy tests on new arrivals and creating an “Asiatic barred zone” — a geographic exclusion covering most of Asia.

Then came the Dillingham Commission, a bipartisan congressional study group whose 1911 report described racial hierarchies among Europeans, ranking Northern and Western Europeans as superior to those from Southern and Eastern Europe — Italians, Jews, Poles, Greeks. Congress acted on those findings.

The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 capped each nationality’s immigration at 3 percent of its representation in the 1910 census. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 — the most sweeping restriction in American history to that point — tightened it to 2 percent, calculated against the 1890 census, deliberately chosen to freeze out the more recent waves from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Senator David Reed, a co-sponsor, wrote in The New York Times that the law would ensure America became “a more homogeneous nation” and “a vastly better place to live in.” The explicit goal of the quotas was to rewind the country’s demographic mix to a time dominated by Western and Northern European immigration.

The worthy part of mankind, it turned out, was Anglo-Saxon. The rock rolled back down the hill.

1952: The McCarran-Walter Act — Cold War Nativism in a New Suit

By the early 1950s, the 1924 quota system was an international embarrassment. Cold War America was asking the world to choose freedom — while its immigration law told most of the world it was racially unfit to join us. Congress took up reform.

The result was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, known as the McCarran-Walter Act. President Truman vetoed it. Congress overrode him.

The law made real progress in some areas: it eliminated racial restrictions on citizenship, finally allowing Japanese and Korean immigrants to naturalize. It introduced a preference system that prioritized skilled workers, and it granted immigration quotas to every nation on earth for the first time.

But it preserved the national-origins quota system — the same racist framework from 1924, dressed in Cold War language. Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, the law’s chief architect, described it as a weapon “to preserve this Nation, the last hope of Western Civilization.” Eighty-five percent of available immigration slots went to Western and Northern Europeans. Japan — the largest Asian quota — received 185 slots per year. The entire Asian-Pacific region was capped at 2,000 immigrants annually.

The law even introduced the “Asia-Pacific Triangle” — a global race quota ensuring that Asians who held citizenship in other countries could still be charged against the Asian quota if they immigrated to the United States. Race, not nationality, determined the ceiling.

Truman, in his veto message, called it a “slur on the patriotism, the capacity, and the decency of a large part of our citizenry.” He was right. Congress passed it anyway. The rock rolled back down.

1965: Hart-Cellar — The Great Rupture

The real break came with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as the Hart-Cellar Act. Passed in the wake of the Civil Rights Act and signed by President Lyndon Johnson, it abolished the national-origins quota system entirely — for the first time since the founding, race was formally removed as a criterion for worthiness.

The new system rested on two pillars: family reunification and skills. No more quotas by country of origin. No more racial ceilings.

The architects of the bill, including Senator Edward Kennedy, assured skeptics the demographic composition of the country would not change significantly. They were spectacularly wrong. Annual immigration tripled. The source countries shifted almost entirely from Europe to Asia and Latin America.

The law also, largely by accident, planted the seeds of the next crisis. It imposed the first-ever numerical cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere — 120,000 per year. For generations, Mexicans had moved back and forth across a largely open border, filling agricultural labor demands on both sides. The cap made that informal system illegal overnight, without creating any legal pathway to replace it. The undocumented population began to grow. The rock had reached its highest point yet — and then it began its inevitable descent.

1986: Reagan’s Bargain — Amnesty for Enforcement That Never Came

By the mid-1980s, an estimated 3 to 4 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States. Congress tried the comprehensive approach.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 — the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, signed by President Ronald Reagan — was the first true attempt at a grand bargain: legalization for those already here, combined with employer sanctions to cut off the economic magnet drawing new undocumented arrivals. Approximately 3 million undocumented immigrants, including 2.3 million Mexicans, received legal permanent resident status.

The enforcement side collapsed almost immediately. Employer sanctions were underfunded, under-enforced, and riddled with a fundamental contradiction: Congress told employers to verify immigration status while simultaneously prohibiting them from discriminating against workers who looked foreign. The I-9 form became a paperwork ritual that everyone participated in and no one seriously enforced.

The undocumented population, which had briefly declined after IRCA, resumed its growth. By 2007, it stood at approximately 12 million. The amnesty had happened. The enforcement had not. The grand bargain was half a bargain — and the half that remained was resentment.

IRCA did not fail because Congress was dishonest. It failed because the underlying economic forces — wage differentials, labor demand, existing migration networks, family relationships — were stronger than any enforcement mechanism Congress was willing to fund. The rock rolled back down.

1996: Clinton Signs the Crackdown — Tough Laws, Lasting Consequences

The backlash to IRCA’s failure produced a different kind of answer. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 — IIRAIRA — was the most punitive immigration law since the Chinese Exclusion era.

President Clinton signed it, declaring it would strengthen “the rule of law by cracking down on illegal immigration at the border, in the workplace, and in the criminal justice system — without punishing those living in the United States legally.” That last clause proved hollow.

IIRAIRA’s consequences cascaded across the legal immigration system:

  • It redefined “aggravated felony” to include hundreds of low-level offenses, triggering mandatory deportation without any immigration judge weighing individual circumstances.
  • It made deportation triggers retroactive — immigrants convicted of offenses years earlier could now be deported for conduct that was not deportable when it occurred.
  • It created expedited removal — the authority to summarily deport people without a hearing before a judge.
  • It established the 3-year and 10-year bars: unlawful presence for 180 days triggered a 3-year bar on reentry; one year or more triggered a 10-year bar — trapping millions who might otherwise have sought legal status.
  • It expanded mandatory detention with no limits on duration, seeding the for-profit detention industry that operates to this day.

IIRAIRA did not reduce illegal immigration. Deportations rose from roughly 50,000 per year before 1996 to over 200,000 by the early 2000s. The undocumented population also rose. Both numbers went up simultaneously, because the law increased the consequences of being caught without addressing the reasons people came.

2001–2012: The DREAM Act, DACA, and the Children Left Behind

In 2001, Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) introduced the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act — the DREAM Act. Its premise was simple: children brought here without authorization, through no choice of their own, who had grown up American in every meaningful sense, deserved a pathway to legal status.

The DREAM Act failed in 2001. It failed again in 2007. It failed in 2010 by five votes in the Senate — five votes — capping a decade of bipartisan effort. It has never passed both chambers of Congress in 22 years of trying.

In June 2012, having run out of congressional options, President Obama announced DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Not a law. An executive memorandum. Over 800,000 people enrolled.

DACA is not law. It has been rescinded, reinstated, modified, challenged, partially blocked, and litigated in virtually every federal circuit. It provides no path to citizenship. It offers only the promise — renewed every two years, for a $495 fee — that this administration, unlike the next one, will not deport you today.

The Dreamers are the living proof of Congress’s failure. They are Americans in every way except on paper. And after 22 years, Congress still has not given them the paper.

2007 and 2013: The Comprehensive Reform That Wasn’t

The 2000s produced two serious attempts at comprehensive immigration reform — each building on the same basic architecture, each failing in instructive ways.

In 2007, Senators Kennedy and McCain led a bipartisan effort backed by President George W. Bush: a path to legalization, expanded legal immigration, a guest worker program, and serious border enforcement. It died in the Senate, killed by a talk-radio-fueled backlash over “amnesty” and a White House that had spent its political capital on Iraq.

In 2013, the Gang of Eight — four Democrats and four Republicans, including Marco Rubio and John McCain — negotiated a 1,200-page bill that passed the Senate 68 to 32. It offered a 13-year path to citizenship, required English and payment of fines, added 20,000 Border Patrol agents, and mandated E-Verify. It was the most comprehensive immigration bill since 1965.

Speaker John Boehner refused to bring it to the House floor. He later said it was one of his greatest regrets — that he tried a dozen times to move immigration reform and was “slapped down” by his colleagues every time. The bill died without a vote.

The pattern, as ProPublica documented, is structural. The essential elements of any comprehensive package are well understood: border security, visa enforcement, a legal pathway for the undocumented, and a legal immigration system that matches labor demand. Every serious bill includes all four. Every serious bill fails — not because these goals are contradictory, but because the political coalitions required to pass all four simultaneously never exist at the same moment in American politics.

After 2013: Executive Action, Courts, and the Permanent Crisis

After the Gang of Eight collapsed, Congress stopped governing immigration through legislation and started governing it — or failing to govern it — through executive actions and litigation.

President Obama announced DAPA in 2014 — DACA-style relief for parents of U.S. citizens. A federal judge in Texas blocked it. The Fifth Circuit upheld the block. The Supreme Court tied 4-4. DAPA never took effect.

President Trump restricted legal immigration through travel bans, public charge rules, asylum restrictions, and the “Remain in Mexico” policy. Courts blocked many of them. Some took effect anyway.

President Biden reversed many Trump policies by executive order on Day One. Courts blocked some of those reversals. By 2024, immigration had become, per the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the issue on which Republicans and Democrats are most completely divided — not one of eight tested immigration policies commands majority support from both parties simultaneously. Not one.

As the Brookings Institution observed in 2025: “In the four decades since the 1986 law, politics has made it impossible to take another crack at a workable solution. Even when there were enough Republican votes in Congress to pass a bill, GOP leaders were often reluctant to move forward, fearing the anti-immigration anger in the grassroots of the party.”

Why It Never Gets Solved: The Structural Argument

George F. Will’s great insight — drawing directly on Madison — was not merely historical. It was architectural. The debate over immigration worthiness is not a problem awaiting a solution. It is a permanent feature of a pluralistic democracy confronting a question that touches every fault line simultaneously.

Consider what Congress must balance in any comprehensive immigration bill:

  • Labor economics: Business wants workers. Unions want wage floors. Both are right.
  • Family ties: Families want reunification. Critics want skills-based selection. Both have legitimate arguments.
  • Rule of law: Enforcement advocates want consequences for illegal entry. Humanitarian advocates want due process for every person. Both are constitutional values.
  • National security: Border security is a legitimate sovereign interest. Mass detention without hearing is a constitutional crisis. Both propositions are true.
  • Fiscal impact: Immigrants pay far more in taxes than they consume in benefits — over time. In the short term, costs fall on state and local governments. Both are accurate simultaneously.
  • Cultural identity: This is the oldest and most explosive variable — the one Madison’s “worthy part” always invoked. And it is the one that most resists rational resolution, because it is not a policy question. It is a question about who we are.

Albert Camus wrote that we must imagine Sisyphus happy — that the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. But Camus was writing about the individual human condition. For a nation, the endless rolling of the rock is not redemptive. It is a governance failure wearing the disguise of a philosophical dilemma.

The question is not whether we can define “the worthy part of mankind.” History answers that: we cannot, not with any definition that survives the next generation’s moral reckoning. The question is whether we can build an immigration system humane enough, flexible enough, and honest enough to function in the absence of a permanent definition.

We have not done so yet. Every generation picks up the rock and starts climbing. And every generation, so far, has let it roll back down.

The Bottom Line

Madison gave us the question in 1790. Here is the answer history has given us back:

In 1882, the worthy were everyone except the Chinese. In 1924, the worthy were Northwestern Europeans. In 1952, the worthy were anti-Communists. In 1965, the worthy were anyone with family here or skills we needed. In 1986, the worthy were those who had already arrived — plus a promise of enforcement that was never kept. In 1996, the unworthy were anyone who had broken any law, however minor, ever. In 2001, the unworthy included children brought here as toddlers. In 2012, a president made them temporarily worthy by executive memo, because Congress could not. In 2013, the Senate defined worthiness in 1,200 pages — and the House refused to vote on it. Today, the definition changes with each administration, each court order, each election cycle.

There is no settled answer. There has never been a settled answer. The immense complexity of the question — its entanglement with race, economics, law, sovereignty, family, and identity — makes a permanent answer essentially impossible in a democratic system where majorities shift and values evolve.

What we have instead is the process. The argument. The rock. And every time you hear a politician say they have finally found the answer — comprehensive, permanent, final — remember that James Madison said the same thing in 1790. The First Congress thought they had it figured out too.

The rock is already rolling back down.

Sources and Further Reading

This entry was posted in American history, Chinese Exclusion Act, comprehensive, Congress, Gang of Eight, George F. Will, Hart-Cellar Act, IIRAIRA, Immigration Act, immigration history, immigration policy, IRCA, James Madison, McCarran-Walter Act, political stalemate, Sisyphus. Bookmark the permalink.

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