Many of our ancestors would not have qualified under today’s immigration laws.
Today’s laws require that potential immigrants be closely related to qualified U.S. citizens or permanent residents, have employment offers from U.S. employers, or qualify as refugees. Today’s laws would have effectively restricted many of our families from coming legally to the United States.
Many European immigrants benefited from “amnesties.”
Acknowledging the large numbers of Europeans in the United States without proper authorization, the government devised ways for them to remain in the country legally. The 1929 Registry Act allowed “honest law-abiding alien
who may be in the country under some merely technical irregularity” to register as permanent residents for a fee of $20 if they could prove they had lived in the country since 1921 and were of “good moral character.” Roughly 115,000 immigrants registered between 1930 and 1940—80% were European or Canadian. Between 1925 and 1965, 200,000 unauthorized Europeans legalized their status through the Registry Act, through “pre-examination”—a process that allowed them to leave the United States voluntarily and re-enter legally with a visa (a “touch-back” program), or through discretionary rules that allowed immigration officials to suspend deportations in “meritorious” cases. In the 1940s and 1950s, several thousand deportations a year were suspended; approximately 73% of those who benefitted were Europeans (mostly Germans and Italians).
https://www.americanimmigrationcoun...todays-immigration-laws-created-a-new-reality