The Immigration Act of 1924
Lydia Shelley
The Immigration Act of 1924 (AKA the Johnson-Reed Act), signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge, set limits on the number of immigrants which would be allowed into the United States by nationality. This was neither the first U.S. law limiting immigration or the first quota system. It was preceded in 1917 by legislation that required a literacy test for immigrants over 16 and required newly arrived immigrants to pay higher tolls. These early efforts ultimately didn’t restrict immigration to the satisfaction of Congress, leading to the further immigration legislation in 1920. The quota system, which was first proposed by Senator William P. Dillingham, based quotas on three percent of the total U.S. population of each national origin, based on the 1910 census. This resulted in a total of 350,000 visas being available for immigrants each year. However, no quotas were placed on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. President Woodrow Wilson did not support the quota system and prevented it through a pocket veto, but it was implemented in 1921 by President Warren Harding in a special session of congress (Office of the Historian, United States Department of State).
By 1924 the quotas were deeply ingrained in immigration policy and there was mass support for expanding them. This support led to the Immigration Act of 1924, which decreased the quota from 3 to 2 percent of foreign-born inhabitants of the U.S, and calculated them based on the 1890 census. The new act also calculated quotas based on the origins of the entire U.S. population, which increased the numbers of immigrants allowed to emigrate from the British Isles and Western Europe, but limited others. Finally, the act prevent immigration by anyone who was deemed “ineligible for citizenship on the basis of race or nationality.” This primarily impacted immigrants of Asian origin, even those who had previously not been prevented from entering: immigrants from what was called the “Asiatic Barred Zone” were entirely disincluded from immigration to the United States. The Immigration Act of 1924 limited the number of immigrants allowed entry to the United States yearly to 165,000, less than 20 percent of the pre-World War I average (Office of the Historian, United States Department of State).
Who Was Shut Out?: Immigration Quotas, 1925–1927
The climate of insecurity which existed after World War I made restrictive immigration policies desirable to the American public and Congress alike. However, the primary goal of the Immigration Act of 1924 was to keep the United States ethnically and racially homogenous. President Coolidge is quoted as saying “America must remain American” upon signing the act (Office of the Historian, United States Department of State). This act also has connections to the pseudo-scientific study of eugenics, which was defined by its inventor Francis Galton as “the study of the agencies under social control that improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally” (University of Minnesota). Eugenicists believed that social problems were passed down genetically from certain individuals, often members of certain ethnic/racial groups. There was direct involvement by eugenicists in the creation of the Immigration Act of 1924, with the goal of preventing Southeastern European immigrants from entering the United States because they were viewed as genetically lesser, intellectually inferior, and criminal. In spite of these xenophobic origins, the Immigration Act of 1924 would not be repealed until 1965 (Lombardo).
The Immigration Act of 1924 has also re-appeared in the context of 21st century immigration debates. In 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions referenced The Immigration act of 1924 as an ideal way of dealing with questions of immigration, stating: “In seven years we’ll have the highest percentage of Americans, non-native born, since the founding of the Republic. Some people think we’ve always had these numbers, and it’s not so, it’s very unusual, it’s a radical change. When the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly, we then assimilated through 1965 and created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America. We passed a law that went far beyond what anybody realized in 1965, and we’re on a path to surge far past what the situation was in 1924” (Railton).
Sources:
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5078/
https://cla.umn.edu/ihrc/news-events/other/eugenics-race-immigration-restriction
