Excerpted from above link:
The United States had an “open door” policy for white immigrants from the nation’s founding until the passage of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. As a result of the Naturalization Act of 1790, all “free white persons” of “good moral character” arriving on our shores were offered a short, simple path to full citizenship. In one of their often unheralded yet non-the-less remarkable contributions, the first generation of American statesmen welcomed Catholics ineligible for full citizenship in Great Britain, and Jews unable to naturalize in France. Over the next century, despite occasional bursts of nativist braying—most notably, the No Nothing Movement of 1854-1856—this nation remained largely faithful to those celebrated lines of the poet Emma Lazarus that are now inscribed upon the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearing to breathe free. While this promise of welcome rang undeniably hollow for Africans and Asians—one of our greatest causes for national shame—the very essence of American “exceptionalism” was our open gate.
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