Get to know more about Immigration and Nationality Act

 In 1952, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) came into effect. The US immigration law frame work was revised and certain laws were consolidated under the INA. Many of the most important aspects of immigration law are contained in the INA, which has undergone numerous revisions throughout the years.

The United States Code (U.S.C.) places restrictions on the INA. The entirety of the US legal system is included in the US Code. The U.S. Code's Title 8 covers "Aliens and Nationality."

A leading US immigration lawyer in the UK claims that by the mid 1960s, there were more calls for reforming US immigration laws, which were partly attributed to the growing power of the civil rights movement. Immigration at the period was based on the national-origins quota system, which had been in place since the 1920s and assigned a quota to each nationality according to its symbol in previous U.S. census data. The civil rights movement's emphasis on treating everyone equally regardless of race or nationality led many to view the quota system as antiquated and biased. Specifically, the quota system was criticized by Greeks, Poles, Portuguese, and Italians—a growing number of whom were seeking entry into the United States—for favoring Northern Europeans over them.

In actual (and with the advantage of hindsight), the bill conceptualized in 1965 indicated an affected break with past immigration policy, and would have an instant and lasting impact. In place of the national-origins quota accommodation, the act enabled for favorites to be made as per the categories, such as relatives of U.S. citizens or permanent residents, those with skills thought useful to the United States or refugees of violence or unrest. Though it eliminated quotas per se, the system did put caps on per-country and total immigration, as well as caps on each category. Similar to the past, family reunion was a big goal, and the new immigration policy would progressively permit entire families to displace themselves from other nations and set their lives in the U.S.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, illegal immigration frequently came up in political discourse because immigrants continued to enter the country mostly by land through Mexico and Canada. The Immigration Reform Act of 1986 attempted to address the problem by facilitating better enforcement of immigration laws and expanding opportunities for lawful immigration. Together, the two amnesty programs for illegal aliens included in the statute chose to pardon about 3 million of them. An further example of immigration law is the 1990 Immigration Act, which expanded and modified the 1965 act to increase immigration to 700,000 overall. In order to further increase the diversity of the immigrant flow, the law also allowed for the admittance of immigrants from "underrepresented" nations.

A resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment coincided with the economic downturn that beset the nation in the early 1990s, particularly among Americans of lower incomes who were seeking employment and immigrants who were willing to accept lower salaries. Congress addressed border enforcement and immigrant use of social assistance in 1996 when it passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. It is imperative for a US immigration lawyer in the UK to consider the same.