Chain migration
"[2] During the debate on immigration policy following Donald Trump's rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the use of the term "chain migration" became contentious.
Different ethnic groups claimed distinct physical space in city neighborhoods to provide a reception for chain migration and maintain the community network it created.
Some rural towns in the Midwestern United States and in southern Brazil were founded by immigrants and directly advertised in home countries.
In the late nineteenth century, distinct Italian provinces and towns immigrated to the United States and Argentina via chain migration.
Chain migration and the pseudo-familial nature of “paper sons” produced a relatively cohesive community that maintained ties with China.
Other groups, such as Germans fleeing chaos in Europe in the mid-1800s, Irish fleeing famine in Ireland in the same years, Eastern European Jews who emigrated from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and Italians and Japanese escaping poverty and seeking better economic conditions in the same period, did use chain migration strategies extensively, with resulting "colonies" of immigrants from the same villages, towns, and cities settling in enclaves in such cities as Boston, New York, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Montreal, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and Havana from the mid-1800s through the mid-1900s.
Italian immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century relied on a system of both chain and return migration.
Chain migration helped Italian men immigrate to such cities as New York in the United States and Buenos Aires in Argentina for work as migrant laborers.
Italian immigrants were called ritorni[14] in Italy and grouped with other Southern and Eastern European migrant laborers under the term “birds of passage” in America.
“Paper sons” relied on networks built by chain migration to buy documentation, develop strategies for convincing authorities on Angel Island of their legal status, and for starting a life in America.
Single, young, male laborers were initially the largest group using chain migration to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
[16] Irish men and women faced economic crisis, overpopulation, and problematic inheritance laws for large families, thereby compelling many of Ireland's daughters to leave with its sons.
Italian chain migration was initially wholly male based on intent to return, but became a source of family reunification when wives eventually immigrated.
It was common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for companies and even states to advertise to potential European immigrants in their home countries.
[18] Many similar advertisements were read in German principalities at the same time, accounting for parallel chain migration to the Great Plains.
Chinese immigrants took advantage of loopholes and false documents to enter the United States until the McCarran—Walter Act of 1952 gave them a migration quota.
The National Origins quota system provided limited family reunification as a means for chain migration and placed a preference on naturalization.
Additionally, the Immigration Act of 1924 formally opened the door to chain migration from the entire western hemisphere, placing that group under non-quota status.
U.S. citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents (or "Green card" holders) may petition for visas for their immediate relatives including their children, spouses, parents, or siblings.
During the debate on immigration policy following Donald Trump's rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the term "chain migration" became contentious.
