POLITICAL GENEALOGY
Chain Migration: What’s Changed?
6 min readFeb 13, 2018
The immigration debate is permeated by a forgetful nostalgia that frequently bubbles up the declaration, “But my ancestors came here legally!” Others have explained that this ignores how incredibly easy this was to do until the 1920s, so I’d like to address a few additional, underappreciated aspects of chain migration that seem to have been conveniently forgotten.
