Shadowing Practice: What was immigration like before ICE? - Learn English Speaking with Video

So I noticed something interesting on the history page of ICE's website.

Right here it says, Despite U.S.

Immigration and Custom Enforcement's relatively young age, its functional history predates the modern birth of the agency by more than 200 years.

That phrase, functional history, stuck out to me.

So I decided to do some digging.

It's functional history.

They're arguing that there was a functional equivalent, right, to their agency.

Wow.

Now, we know that ICE was created by the Homeland Security Act in 2003.

To defend the United States and protect our citizens against the dangers of a new era.

So what exactly do they mean by this?

I reached out to ICE directly, asking for their explanation of this functional history, but they never got back to me.

That narrative is kind of an effort to make the agency itself seem like it has this deep lineage

that it simply does not.

Following breaking news in Minneapolis where city officials confirm a shooting occurred reportedly involving a federal ICE agent.

It is the second shooting of an American citizen by federal officers in that city in just three weeks.

The f* did you just do?

So I decided to do a bit of my own research.

We're going to take a look at three distinct eras in American history, showing how immigration policy slowly transformed from labor management to law enforcement,

culminating in the creation of ICE.

So, on the same page of their site, ICE refers to the remarkable development of the country throughout the 19th and 20th centuries,

including the essential role of immigration and the evolving laws and regulations.

Now, in terms of how the US treated immigration enforcement, the 19th and 20th centuries are actually really different from each other.

One of the remarkable things is that the constitution is actually silent on immigration.

So for the first century of the republic, Congress plays virtually no role in regulating the arrival,

admission, exclusion or deportation of foreigners.

With one notable exception, the Alien and Sedition Act, which authorized the president to deport non-citizens and allowed their arrest and imprisonment during wartime.

There is a panic in the United States over the potential radical ideas that certain immigrants are bringing to the United States,

specifically after the French Revolution.

But real immigration restrictions wouldn't happen for almost another hundred years.

And that's because until the Civil War resolved the issue of slavery in the US, regulating immigration at the federal level was incredibly difficult.

The problem throughout the antebellum period is if Congress had muscled in and said,

we're going to control the arrival of the Irish poor into Boston or New York,

exactly the same authority could have been used to regulate the arrival of free black people in South Carolina.

When you have slavery in the picture, it takes a civil war to resolve that conflict between the national and the local level.

So then in 1882, after the Civil War, Congress passed two foundational laws restricting immigration in the US.

The Immigration Act allowed the exclusion of certain vulnerable minorities, such as people carrying contagious diseases.

The same year, in 1882, Congress passes another law, and that's the Chinese Exclusion Act.

This law discriminates against Chinese people on grounds of race.

It also discriminates on grounds of class because it's targeting not all Chinese people, but Chinese laborers in particular.

Now, since immigration isn't in the Constitution, this law was put to the courts.

And the Supreme Court made a decision that would have ripple effects all the way to the modern day.

In effect, what the court rules is that power over national borders is

so fundamental to the definition of any nation that it's extra constitutional.

It's a matter of national security and geopolitics.

This pivotal moment is when the US declares it has the right to turn immigrants away based solely on race or ethnicity.

And in 1891, the first federal immigration agency was established to enforce these laws, the Office of the Superintendent of Immigration.

And it had a staff of four people.

The immigrants of old turn their eyes toward America's gateway, Ellis Island.

It's really hard to overstate just how central Ellis Island was to immigration at this time.

About two years after the formation of the first agency, the staff had grown to 180 people, and 119 of them were employed at Ellis Island.

And that's because from 1892 to 1924, 20 million immigrants arrived in the U.S., and 12 million of them came through Ellis Island.

And almost none of them were turned away.

In that 40-year period between the 1880s and the 1920s, We would estimate that somewhere between only 1

and 2% of all European immigrants coming to the United States were excluded on arrival.

In an era without passports, without visas, without the administrative capacity to really enforce the law beyond a certain point,

the expectation, as long as you weren't Chinese, coming to the United States is that you would get in.

And that was only 100 years ago.

And the greatest war the world had known exploded in Europe.

After World War I, the United States shifted from welcoming immigrants to restricting them.

Many Americans feared a wave of displaced European refugees.

And rising xenophobia intensified concerns that these immigrants would threaten national security and the so-called American way of life.

These fears culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924.

Until 1924, American borders were normatively open, and after that they became normatively closed.

You get a large-scale numerical restriction.

And this is the start of the third distinct era of US immigration.

The Immigration Act of 1924 set strict limits on how many immigrants could enter the US from each country.

US immigration is restricted by law to a selective annual quota from each foreign country.

The quotas were based on the 1890 US Census, and the goal was to preserve the proportions of each nationality from over 30 years prior,

which largely restricted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.

And immigrants were excluded from not only China, but all of Asia, as well as Africa.

Upon signing the law, President Calvin Coolidge said, America must be kept American.

So that to me is the turning point

because we totally take it for granted that there is a cap on immigration today.

And just by accepting that, we are accepting the logic of the restrictionists.

So in 1933, immigration enforcement was merged with naturalization and became the Immigration and Naturalization Services, or the INS.

They would remain the immigration agency until 2003.

And then in 1940, President Franklin D.

Roosevelt moved the INS from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice.

And that's a change that will come to redefine immigration in the US.

He does that pretty explicitly with the understanding that things are getting dicey in Europe.

The harvest days of 1939 brought a turn of world events whose effect on US economy no man can yet predict.

The threat of World War II added to the growing notion of immigration as a national security issue.

Immigration was no longer just about managing a workforce.

FDR wrote in his reorganization plan, I am convinced that under existing conditions,

the immigration and naturalization activities can best contribute to the national well-being only

if they are closely integrated with the activities of the Department of Justice.

The INS was now tasked with fingerprinting every immigrant in the US, and organizing internment camps and detention centers for people they considered to be enemy aliens.

So that is people who do not have citizenship, people whose political backgrounds have put them on the United States' radar.

During World War II, the INS detained almost 32,000 German, Italian, and Japanese non-U.S citizens, who were also denied lawyers.

In total, the INS operated as many as 65 incarceration camps in this period.

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Now, back to the video.

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Now, there's one region we haven't really discussed so far that's central to this era of change in American immigration.

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Latin America.

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It's important to note that the quota system implemented in the 20s never affected Latin America.

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Agricultural businesses in the Southwest don't want any restriction on the labor supply.

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Latin America is exempted from these laws.

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And that sentiment continued through to World War II, when there was a massive labor shortage in the US.

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The 1942 Bracero program allowed millions of Mexican men to enter the US and work legally on short-term labor contracts.

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Braceros, in Spanish, this means a man who works with his arms and hands.

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The program, a partnership with the Mexican government, guaranteed fair wages for the workers.

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But many employers, especially in Texas, wanted even cheaper labor.

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So while millions of Mexicans entered the country through legal means in the 40s and 50s, hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers also crossed the border illegally and found work.

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And so it's in this time that the immigration debate in the US really focuses on the southern border.

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And in 1954, President Dwight D.

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Eisenhower implemented Operation Wetback, named after a pejorative slur for Mexican immigrants.

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The operation used military tactics to pursue its goals, led by INS head and US Army Lieutenant General Joseph Swain.

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The American Border Patrol struggles against a tense, explosive international problem.

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Along the sprawling California-Mexico border, thousands of Mexican wetbacks or illegal entrants are sneaking into the United States.

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The result was one of the largest deportation efforts in US history.

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The INS completed sweeps of factories and farms, shipping undocumented immigrants back to Mexico in boats, buses, and planes.

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The US later claimed that 1.3 million people were deported.

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So as we get into the 60s and 70s, the immigration service is in kind of a tricky spot.

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At the height of the civil rights movement in the U.S., President Lyndon B.

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Johnson signed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

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The consequential law prioritized family reunification and skills and repealed the longstanding policy of restricting immigration based on race and ethnicity.

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It was also around this time that Americans started focusing more on undocumented immigrants on the interior of the U.S.

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The agency is also moving away from just policing the border.

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There is very much a sort of growing consensus and understanding that undocumented people are living in American communities throughout the U.S.

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The INS is really stretched thin.

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They are trying to do interior enforcement or internal operations, not just work that is near the border.

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The INS's budget in 1975 is $181 million.

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By the time the agency ends in 2003, the budget has eclipsed $6 billion.

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And the INS grew this budget by doubling down on immigration as a national security and criminal justice issue.

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This is an era where there is massive funding and bipartisan support for things like the war on crime, the war on drugs.

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And so the INS began to explicitly rebrand.

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They don't want to be known for naturalization.

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They don't want to be known for, you know, working through asylum hearings.

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What they want to be known for is law enforcement.

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In a statement by the Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan in 1986,

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he refers to the INS as the criminal justice agency charged with the important responsibility for oversight

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and control of aliens attempting to enter or reside within our borders.

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Criminal justice agency.

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Then in 2001, 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists, all non-U.S citizens, used America's temporary immigration system to attack the U.S.

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And immigration became solidified as a matter of national security.

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The Department of Homeland Security was created, merging 22 existing agencies and sub-agencies.

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Under the new DHS, INS and Customs Enforcement were consolidated into ICE.

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This is explicitly a law enforcement body.

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And this is a transition that the agency had desired, I think, for decades preceding.

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So this brings us back to ICE's original claim, that their functional history dates back over 200 years prior to the agency's creation in 2003.

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I think it's interesting, like, the work that Line is doing, right, the work that Line is doing is to try to push back to people who say, this is only a 20-something-year-old agency, right?

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They want to suggest that it's foundational to the United States, that it is not alarming, that we've had an agency like this.

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And in some ways we've had an agency that takes on some of these responsibilities.

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But immigration being an arm of law enforcement is a much more recent phenomenon.

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And when people think of ICE today, that's what they think of.

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This is a way kind of legitimizing ICE, that somehow we've always had ICE.

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We have had deportation campaigns.

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We have had, throughout American history, anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation and deportations.

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But we always haven't had masked ICE agents going into the interior of the United States with guns and breaking down doors,

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sending immigrants who are captured to third countries.

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I think it's gradual.

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I think the story of immigration law is really a story about sort of compounding restrictions on who can come.

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American immigration has long been deeply tied to race and origin, whether that was Chinese laborers or World War II alien enemies.

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Today, with a much more powerful agency like ICE, Latino communities have been challenged with the most punitive impacts.

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We're going to have to have a deportation level

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that we haven't seen in this country for a long time since Dwight Eisenhower actually...

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To that extent, there probably will be some, I mean, ICE-like, it may not be called ICE,

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there will be some kind of institutions that are programs to curtail some immigration.

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The question is, will we see this kind of enforcement in the interior,

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this kind of illegal enforcement without judicial warrants going into people's houses and arresting them?

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The United States is, and always will be, a nation of immigrants.

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And with that, attention over immigration is partially fundamental to this country's DNA.

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ICE is the culmination of centuries of shifting immigration rhetoric and enforcement.

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But at the same time, it's so important to remember that immigration enforcement is not written into the Constitution.

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Of course, as a historian, I will find certain precedents.

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Then one could conclude from that one of two things.

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One is, oh my god, it's always been terrible.

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Or you could say, well, all of these things have been fought, many of these things have been fought over before.

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The rights that were won for Americans in the past are vulnerable.

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They have to, we have to fight to retain them.

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Christian Poss on how social media algorithms are shaping coverage of ICE, a video with senior correspondent Constance Grady that digs into ICE's recruitment ads,

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and a recent episode of The Docket where we break down Trump's war on birthright citizenship.

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So join us on Patreon to get access to more stories like this, stay connected to our reporting, and help fund ambitious journalism.

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Thanks.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: What was immigration like before ICE? - Learn English Speaking with Video

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