ImmigrationArchive.com Chronicles History of Immigration Reform in US through Newspaper Articles

What can be learned from historic newspapers about immigration policies of the past?

(PRWEB) April 10, 2006 -- ImmigrationArchive.com, a free archive of 50,000 historical newspaper pages, is one of the most comprehensive research resources on the history of immigration available on the web. As the topic of immigration continues to be a frontrunner in politics and in the media, ImmigrationArchive.com provides historic newspaper articles on:

· Chinese Exclusion Act from 1882
· Opening and closing of Ellis Island
· Immigration Act of 1924
· Controversial Immigration and Nationality Act from 1952
· Immigration Act of 1965 that overturned the Act of 1924
· Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 that granted amnesty to people who illegally immigrated to the US before 1982
· Thousands of other headlines on immigration

With the use of Optical Character Recognition technology, researchers can quickly obtain articles about immigration by searching with key words or dates. For example, to find articles on Elian Gonzalez, a Cuban refugee whose plight was brought into the media spotlight in 2000, researchers can simply type in his name. Articles from specific dates, such as when Congress enacted new immigration quotas in 1929, can be found by searching dates or years under the Advanced Search feature.

Immigration Archive also features a detailed timeline that chronicles the history of immigration in the US through newspaper articles. The timeline begins in 1845 when the potato famine in Ireland brought a massive wave of European immigrants into the US and ends in 2005 when volunteers form the Minuteman Project to help law enforcement secure US borders. Next to each entry is a newspaper article that details the event. For instance, an article from The Newark Daily Advocate from January 2, 1892, describes the opening of Ellis Island in New York.

"Immigration control has been on the agenda of the government throughout US history," said Greg Hollingsworth, researcher for the site. "As the debate on immigration heats up, there are certainly things that we can learn from policies of the past."

ImmigrationArchive.com is part of a series of free newspaper archives sponsored by NewspaperARCHIVE.com that include September11Archive.com, FBIArchive.com, AIDSArchive.com, TitanicArchive.com, CollegeBasketballArchive.com,
MartinLutherKingJrArchive.com, AbrahamLincolnArchive.com
and ProBaseballArchive.com.

Researchers interested in finding more information on Immigration can also go to NewspaperARCHIVE.com where there are 297,545 newspaper pages on the topic. NewspaperARCHIVE.com, the largest newspaper database available online, is owned by Heritage Microfilm and began in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1999.

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