Legal Immigration. Immigration policy is a responsibility of the national government. It
was not until 1882 that Congress passed the first legislation restricting entry into the United
States of persons alleged to be "undesirable" as well as virtually all Asians. Following the end
of World War I, Congress passed a comprehensive Immigration Act of 1921 that established
maximum numbers of new immigrants each year and set a quota for each foreign country at
3 percent (later reduced to 2 percent) of the number of that nation's foreign born living in
the United States in 1890. These restrictions reflected anti-immigration feelings that were
generally directed at the large wave of southern and eastern European, Catholic, and Jewish
immigrants (Poland, Russia, Hungary Italy, Greece) that had entered the United States prior
to World War I. It was not until the Immigration Act of 1965 that national-origin quotas
were abolished, replaced by preference categories for relatives and family members and professional and skilled persons