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Introduction | xv By the end of the 19th century two important changes had occurred in relation to immigration. The federal government opened New YorkÊs Ellis Island immigration reception center in 1892, indicating the federal control of immigration processing, and immigration patterns had shifted away from Northern and Western Europe to Eastern and Southern Europe. Ellis Island became the gateway to America for most Europeans. In 1910, the Angel Island processing center in San Francisco Bay was opened for primarily Asian immigrants. The differences between the two centers illustrate the American attitudes toward European and Asian immigrants. Ellis Is- land allowed most immigrants through relatively easily, while Angel Island largely became a detention center. As immigration shifted to Eastern and Southern Europe, the country saw an in- creasing number of Jews and Italians. Large numbers of both groups arrived in the United States from the 1880s to the beginning of World War I in 1914. Both these white groups, like the Irish before them, were met with great hostility. Considered as not white enough, and representing races and cultures that nativists felt were un- assimilable and would overwhelm and outbreed Anglo-Saxon Protestant America, these immigrants inspired new restrictionist laws, the first against Europeans. Start- ing with congressional attempts in the 1890s to secure a literacy test for arriving immigrants (the legislation was passed in 1917), the hostility finally resulted in op- pressive national quota laws by the 1920s. The Literacy Act required the immigrant „to read any recognized language‰ and also included an Asiatic Barred Zone to bar more Asian immigrant (Daniels 2004). The 1920s legislation set the immigration patterns for the next 40 years. New strategies to limit immigration came into play in 1921 with the Emergency Quota Act, which was extended to 1924. Fearful that immigration would increase too much after the war, Congress reacted to the nationÊs general desire to limit the im- migrant numbers and control their origins. A numerical cap (357,000) was placed on immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere, while no limitation was put on immi- gration from the Western Hemisphere: Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada. A countryÊs quota was set at three percent of that countryÊs nationals living in the United States as of the 1910 census. The intent was to give preference to Northern and Western European immigrants. The lawÊs purpose was also to restrict Eastern and Southern Europeans from entering the United States, and to limit others plan- ning to arrive. This legislation was considered temporary and was replaced by a much more stringent National Origins Act in 1924. In 1924, after the nationÊs rising concern with radicalism in the United States, and worries about the new immigrants overtaking AmericaÊs culture, politics, and so-called genetic purity, Congress passed new legislation that closely followed the wishes of the Ku Klux Klan. Historian Roger Daniels calls the 1924 act „the great- est triumph of nativism‰ (Daniels 2004). This law, which was set to go fully into effect in 1929, set an immigration cap of approximately 150,000 and nationality