These are persons living amongst us who have arrived here illegally. some fleeing their homelands. othersmany more. mostcoming here looking for economic opportunity in the manner that legal aliens have done for centuries. It is only in this century that we began requiring persons to obtain documents and be permitted to enter the United States. as a general rule. We had the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1880s. I believe. There was an effective. informal sanction on Japanese immigration. Some legislation was adopted in the second decade of the century. Then. in 1924. a more general Naturalization Act was enacted which controlled immigration. Until very recently. none of these measures affected the Western Hemisphere at all. This pattern has been there through most of our history. I cannot imagine a hospital in New York or Seattle or San Antonio. in 1890. looking at a 3yearold child with a lifethreatening condition. and saying. "We will not treat it. The child is not a legal immigrant." That is not what the idea of hospitals is. Hospitals are not about health insurance. Hospitals are about caring for the sick.
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immigrant Naturalization Chinese Exclusion immigration