History Lab: US Immigration Policy

History labs are a great way to make Social Studies content come to life. Investigative learning experiences in history labs help students learn historical content while developing critical reading and analytical skills - just like historians!

The US Immigration Policy History Lab is designed for students to examine immigration policy in the United States from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s in order to answer the following focus question:

In what ways have the debates about US immigration policy changes or stayed the same over time? This lab highlights legislative responses to immigration, including:

The Chinese Exclusion Act.

The First Quota Act.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

The lab is intended to provide students with a conceptual view of immigration policy in the United States and connect content most often studied in the Gilded Age unit to later events. The lab includes an assessment in which students apply content knowledge to contextualize and sequence two documents.