Review for 11 and 12

            “The passage of restrictive immigration legislation and the phasing in of the national origins system in the 1920s brought an entire era of American immigration history to an end. The century of immigration was over”. Chapter 11 covers what took place immediately following the end of the century of immigration and for the most part I found the information to be fairly obvious. During the early years of the 1920s immigration remained was consistent with the same number of people who had immigrated in the past. The passage of restrictive laws that prevented how many people could immigrate into the country help bring curtail the number of migrants into the United States. The onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s saw an even further decline in the number of men women and children who made their way into the United States. Finally, continuing the downward trend of immigration World War II say the biggest decline in immigration to the United States. There was nothing about this chapter I did not think could have been deduced without study as it is easy to understand how these events would limit immigration. Obviously, passing any kind of law that makes it harder to enter the country will prohibit people from entering the country. The Great Depression caused a global reduction in the amount of money that was present in the world. As such few people had the ability to immigrate into the United States. On top of their being a limit on the amount of wealth that was present in the world, there was virtually no money or work to be had in the United States. As such the main reason that immigrants had for traveling to America no longer existed further decreasing the number of people willing to emigrate to the United States.

            The Sleepy Lagoon case was really interesting. I am often shocked at how it is possible for our judicial system to become so corrupted that blatantly innocent people can be sentenced for crimes it is obvious they could not have committed. The way the men in the Sleepy Lagoon were railroaded due to prejudice reminds me a lot of what happened to Sacco and Vanzetti two Italian immigrants who were also falsely convicted of crimes due to their ethnicity. Falsely convicting immigrants for things they certainly did not do undermines our judicial system and weakens the faith people have in it, especially in the long term. It also means that the murderer of Jose Diaz was never brought to justice, because the legal system was too busy convicting innocent Chicano men for the crime. This kind of activity creates massive divisions in society that take a lot of time to heal, assuming they do and lead to much resentment. It is shocking to learn that the treatment of Hispanics in California is eerily similar to what African-Americans faced in the South prior to desegregation. It is common knowledge how bad conditions in the South were for minorities, but I did not think that the situation on the West Coast was as bad as it was.