A brief timeline of US Policy on Immigration
For many thousands of years people have been settling the Americas. The earliest hunted, gathered, fished, and raised families in small communities. The old tradition holds that people first entered the Americas over a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska about 14,000 years ago. Recent finds, however, put the date of the oldest human remains somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 years ago. These earliest people were not really migrants in a strict sense because they simply widened their hunting areas over many generations, gradually moving into new territory as the population expanded and the animals they were tracking moved into new habitat.