Remember those ads for the Scandinavian furniture company IKEA? Our forefathers must have had similar thoughts, because during the nation's early years, Americans favored - indeed, encouraged - free, open immigration. It was a big country; they needed folks to settle it.

Not until the late 1800s did the public begin to question that policy. After the Civil War, some states started to pass their own immigration laws, which prompted the Supreme Court to rule in 1875 that immigration was a federal responsibility.

Immigration continued to rise in the 1880s, bringing an avalanche of cheap labor. With this influx of foreign cut-rate workers, economic conditions began to deteriorate in some areas, so Congress passed a series of immigration laws and fine-tuned the existing regulations. An increasingly complex web of laws and policies made it apparent that the nation needed a federal agency to enforce things from the top.

The Immigration Act of 1891 established an Office of the Superintendent of Immigration within the Treasury Department. This office was responsible for admitting, rejecting, and processing all immigrants seeking admission to the United States and for implementing national immigration policy.

One of the office's first tasks was to collect arrival manifests - the lists of passengers from incoming ships. To do this, "immigrant inspectors," as they were called, were stationed at major American ports of entry.

U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, San Francisco, Calif., was billed as the "Ellis Island of the west." This early view shows the ship dock and passenger gangway leading to the main building. Photo Credit: courtesy of the Library of Congress

The legendary immigration station at Ellis Island in New York opened in January 1892 and would remain the nation's largest, busiest station for decades to come. It teemed with immigrants and officials and representatives from the era's many immigrant-aid societies, who all worked in or passed through Ellis Island's hearing and detention rooms, hospitals, cafeterias, administrative offices, and railroad ticket offices. So massive were the goings-on at Ellis Island that by 1893 it employed 119 of the Superintendent's entire field and headquarters staff of 180.

The Superintendent of Immigration drew many of its early inspectors from state agencies or by hiring away former Customs and Chinese inspectors and by training recruits. The Immigration Act of 1882 had, among other provisions, a head tax of fifty cents on each immigrant. That money went into an "immigrant fund" that financed the fledgling immigration service until 1909, when Congress replaced the fund with an annual appropriation.

Legislation in March 1895 upgraded the Office of Immigration to the Bureau of Immigration and changed the agency head's title from Superintendent to Commissioner-General of Immigration.

The Bureau's first task was to formalize and standardize basic operating and regulatory procedures. For example, inspectors queried arrivals about their suitability for permanent entry and recorded their admission or rejection on manifest records. Detention guards cared for those who were detained until their cases were decided, or, if the decision was negative, until they were deported. Inspectors served on boards of special inquiry that reviewed each exclusion case.

The most frequent reason for exclusion was a foreigner's lack of money or nearby friends or relatives. The special inquiry board usually reversed that decision if someone could post bond for the immigrant or if one of the aid societies would take responsibility for him. Those to whom the board denied admission were deported at the expense of the transportation company that brought them to the United States port.

Main building of the U.S Immigration Station, Ellis Island, N.Y., circa 1900. Photo Credit: courtesy of the Library of Congress

The head tax collected on immigrants in the Service's earliest years had placed the new agency within the Treasury Department. But in fact, Congress's primary interest in immigration, the reason it had become a federal concern in the first place, was to protect American workers and wages. This made immigration more a matter of commerce than revenue, so in 1903, Congress transferred the Bureau of Immigration to the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor.

There was another aspect to the matter of regulating immigration: The Constitution had assigned the task of naturalization, the process by which an immigrant becomes an American citizen, to Congress. Since 1802, however, Congress had been letting "any court of record" carry out this function. A century later, Congress appointed a commission to investigate how this haphazard approach to a serious national responsibility was working. In 1905, the commission reported - not surprisingly - that there was almost no uniformity in practices and procedures among the nation's more than 5,000 naturalization courts.

To address this lack of uniformity, Congress passed the Basic Naturalization Act of 1906, which established naturalization procedures that endure to this day. The Act encouraged state and local courts to relinquish their jurisdiction to federal courts, and it expanded the Bureau of Immigration into the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization.

Immigration officers at the Immigration office located in the train depot at Portal, N. Dak., circa 1924. Photo Credit: courtesy of the Library of Congress

Just seven years later, in 1913, the Department of Commerce and Labor reorganized into today's separate cabinet departments, and for a time, the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization followed suit, each becoming a separate bureau, one for immigration, one for naturalization. They stayed like that until 1933.

Immigration from Europe had quieted down a bit during World War I, but it resumed full-force after the war. Trying to control the influx, Congress instituted the national-origins quota system.

Laws passed in 1921 and 1924 limited the numbers of newcomers by assigning a quota to each nationality based upon its representation in previous U.S. census figures. Each year, the State Department issued a limited number of visas; only those immigrants who had obtained them and could present valid visas were permitted entry.

A corollary to severely restricted legal immigration is increased illegal immigration. So the quota-visa policy led to many of the immigration challenges that we see today.

Illegal entries and alien smuggling began to rise along land borders, so Congress created the Border Patrol, in 1924, within the Immigration Service. Stricter immigration policies coupled with Border Patrol apprehensions meant that agency staff and resources were becoming more heavily involved in deportations. And a corollary of deportations was that more aliens were conducting more court battles in order to stay.

U.S. Customs Inspectors and U.S. Immigration Inspectors process newly arrived Chinese immigrants on the railroad platform in Sumas, Wash., which served as the first Sumas border inspection station. Photo Credit: courtesy of the Library of Congress

Thus was born the Immigration Board of Review, created within the Immigration Bureau in the mid-1920s. (The Board of Review became the Board of Immigration Appeals after moving to the Justice Department in the 1940s; it is now the Executive Office of Immigration Review.)

In 1933, the two agencies reunited by executive order into today's Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

With war brewing in Europe in the 1930s, immigration took on a new, prescient quality: not only was immigration a matter of economics, it was also becoming a matter of national security.

So President Roosevelt moved the INS from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice in 1940. With this prophetic move, the task of securing our borders against enemy aliens was added to INS's wartime responsibilities. Its workforce doubled during the war years from approximately 4,000 to 8,000 employees.

National fears about the foreign-born continued to bubble up. In some instances, these fears were handled poorly, as when INS organized internment camps and detention facilities for enemy aliens, even when they were not actually enemies or aliens.

Immigration decreased after World War II. INS programs of the late 1940s and early '50s addressed the needs of returning GIs and the conditions in post-war Europe, restoring to America's immigration policies the heart that had temporarily been lost during the internment-camp era.

The War Brides Act of 1945 facilitated admission of the spouses and families of returning American soldiers. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 allowed many refugees, displaced by the war and unable to enter the United States under regular immigration procedures, to be admitted. With the onset of the Cold War, the Hungarian Refugee Act of 1956, the Refugee-Escapee Act of 1957, and the Cuban Adjustment Program of the 1960s did much the same, offering a new home to the "huddled masses" who sought freedom, opportunity, and escape from tyranny.

The downside to America's open heart and outstretched arms was public concern - indeed, alarm - that our too-open post-war policies were letting criminal aliens, communists, subversives, and organized crime figures enter or remain in the United States along with legitimate refugees.

INS enforcement activities in the mid-1950s addressed those concerns. Public alarm over illegal aliens living and working in the United States resulted in stronger border controls and targeted deportation programs.

In 1965, Congress amended the body of immigration law by replacing the national-origins system with a preference system designed to reunite immigrant families and attract skilled workers. This change in national policy meant that the majority of applicants for immigration visas now came from Asia and Central and South America rather than Europe. Although the number of immigration visas available each year was still limited, Congress continued to pass special legislation, as it did for Indochinese refugees in the post-Vietnam era of the 1970s.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 expanded the agency's responsibilities, making it more a modern-day law-enforcement agency. The Act charged INS with enforcing sanctions against American employers who hired undocumented aliens. This meant the INS was now investigating, prosecuting, and levying fines against corporate and individual employers and deporting aliens found to be working here illegally. But this same law allowed certain illegal aliens, in certain circumstances, to legalize their residence here, and INS also administered that program.

As travel and technology helped make the world a smaller place, the emphasis on controlling illegal immigration for all the reasons discussed above - economic, national-security, crime-control - fostered INS's growth in the late twentieth century. The workforce that had numbered some 8,000 from World War II through the late 1970s grew to more than 30,000 employees in 36 districts around the world by 1998.

The one-time force of immigrant inspectors became a corps of officers specializing in inspection, examination, adjudication, legalization, investigation, patrol, and refugee and asylum issues. These very skills and specialties made for a natural marriage with the U.S. Customs Service after 9/11. Legacy INS employees now work in one of three agencies - the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Today's U.S. Customs and Border Protection provides for selective immigration and controlled entry of tourists, business travelers, other temporary visitors, as well as all kinds of merchandise and commodities for private and commercial purposes - every animal, mineral, or vegetable that crosses our borders, no matter the reason.