Talk:Immigration Act of 1891

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Payson Act[edit]

I am deleting from the article this unsourced assertion: "Payson Act of 1887 restricted the ownership of real estate in the United States to American citizens and those who have lawfully declared their intentions to become citizens, with certain specific exceptions."

Admittedly, Wikipedia's sourcing requirements have been inconsistently enforced. The inconsistency occasionally turns to mischief, so for my own part I do not wish to be too zealous in the enforcement. However, the deleted assertion not only is unsourced but, indeed, according to sources I can see, appears to be positively incorrect. See this legislation and this paper.

I say, "unsourced." A link is provided by the old article, but it leads to some web page that looks like someone's mere summary of lecture notes. At any rate, even if the unsourced could be characterized as sourced (and I do not believe that it can), it is misleading at best, as we have seen.

Whether the 1887 U.S. federal act linked is the Payson Act is unknown to me. I find no reference to anyone named Payson in the matter, nor does the name "Payson Act" generate any hits (other than the present Wikipedia article) during a Google search. However, the paper linked suggests that the evolution of the law had been in the direction more or less opposite to the direction that the deleted unsourced assertion suggests. The 1887 act represented, as far as I can see, not a new anti-immigrant drive but a momentary retrenchment in what had otherwise been a drive to liberalize alien property rights.

If someone wishes to write an article on the 1887 act, that would be interesting, but I do not believe that discussion of the matter belongs in the present article at all, even if the assertion were corrected. Assertion deleted. Tbtkorg (talk) 14:05, 2 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]