... 1921, as the Statue of Liberty neared its 35th birthday, Congress passed an Emergency Quota Act, putting a halt to the massive immigration of the previous century. The Act and its successor, the Immigration Act of 1924, by limiting new arrivals to a small percentage of those of the same nationality already in the United States, nearly shut the door to immigrants from anywhere other than northern and western Europe. Today immigration remains a contested issue, as our colleagues at ImmigrationProf Blog have been detailing, a compromise bill announced Thursday already garnering is much criticism.... 2002 (five years ago today), East Timor, which had been under the supervision of the United Nations since acquiring independence in 1999 from Indonesia, which had ruled it with an iron hand for the prior quarter-century. In an election last Sunday, the tiny country (fewer than 1 million people, occupying 1/2 of the island of Timor, itself about the size of Netherlands) put Nobel Peace Prizewinner José Ramos-Horta on track to become its new President.
