The Trump administration has effectively closed down or severely restricted most non-white immigration from the Middle East, Africa and Asia into the U.S. while keeping upon immigration from white Commonwealth and EU countries, and white persons from South Africa. President Trump said on April 26,2026, “The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.”

Here is a truncated time line of an early time of such a restriction – through 1924.

1882 — Chinese Exclusion. The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers. It was the first major federal immigration law to exclude a named ethnic laboring population.

1883 — Francis Galton coined “eugenics.”  Some “races or strains” were naturally more suitable than others and should be helped to prevail.

1890–1896 — Racial separation approved by Supreme Court. In Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the Supreme Court ruled that legally compelled “separate but equal” facilities did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

1894 — The Immigration Restriction League founded. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge as leading political ally.

1899 — European racial types William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe organized Europeans into physical and geographical types, especially the northern or Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean groups.

1910–1911 — Congress approve official dictionary of races. The Dillingham Commission produced a Dictionary of Races or Peoples. The categories gave legislators a federal body of supposedly objective racial data on which later restrictions could be built.

1916 — Madison Grant ranks European races– In The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant presented the Nordic race as the principal creator of American and European civilization and warned that immigration and racial mixture were causing its decline. The Eugenics Record Office reported that southern and eastern European immigrants carried hereditary criminality, mental illness, and “feeblemindedness.”

1917 —Asian barrier becomes law. The Immigration Act of 1917 created the Asiatic Barred Zone, excluding immigration from much of Asia and the Pacific.

The act combined three ways of ranking people: educational capacity, supposed individual defect, and geographical-racial origin.

1921 — Racial preference systematic preference in law The Emergency Quota Act limited annual immigration from each European nationality to 3 percent of the number of foreign-born residents from that country recorded in the 1910 census.

1922 — The Supreme Court rules that Japanese people are not white In Ozawa v. United States, the Supreme Court held that “white person” essentially meant a member of the Caucasian race and that Japanese people were not Caucasian.

1924 — The Immigration Act of 1924 The Johnson-Reed Act reduced each European nationality’s immediate quota to 2 percent of its population in the 1890 census. The date was deliberately chosen because it preceded the largest immigration from Italy, Russia, Poland, and the rest of southern and eastern Europe. Britain, Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia received much larger quotas.