List of United States immigration legislation

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There have been a number of Immigration Acts in the United States.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 established the rules for naturalized citizenship, as per Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first (and only) explicitly race-based immigration act.
The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 established national quotas on immigration based on the number of foreign-born residents of each nationality who were living in the United States as of the 1910 census.
The Immigration Act of 1924 aimed at freezing the current ethnic distribution in response to rising immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as Asia.
The National Origins Formula was established in 1929. Total annual immigration was capped at 150,000. Asians were excluded but residents of nations in the Americas were not restricted.
The Immigration and Nationality Act (or McCarran-Walter Act) of 1952 somewhat liberalized immigration from Asia, but increased the power of the government to deport illegal immigrants suspected of Communist sympathies.
The Immigration Act of 1965 discontinued quotas based on national origin, while preference given to those who have U.S. relatives. For the first time Mexican immigration was restricted.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 granted amnesty to illegal immigrants who had been in the United States before 1982 but made it a crime to hire an illegal immigrant.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 made drastic changes to asylum law, immigration detention, criminal-based immigration, and many forms of immigration relief.
The Real ID Act of 2005 created more restrictions on political asylum, severely curtailed habeas corpus relief for immigrants, increased immigration enforcement mechanisms, altered judicial review, and imposed federal restrictions on the issuance of state driver's licenses to immigrants and others.