A Consequential 1924 Immigration Law and the Washington State Representative Who Led the Charge to Get It Passed
One hundred years ago, the American immigration landscape was transformed by a new restrictive law called the Immigration Act of 1924. Also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, the law replaced and expanded on the temporary Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which for the first time placed annual caps on the number of immigrants admitted to the United States and set a national origins quota system for newly arriving immigrants.
The “Johnson” of the Johnson-Reed Act was Washington State Representative Albert Johnson. Johnson, who served in Congress from 1913–1933, was an Illinois born newspaper editor who arrived in Tacoma in 1898. He would eventually settle in Hoquiam in 1909 where he purchased and edited the Daily Washingtonian.
It was in this Pacific Northwest setting that Johnson would formulate his anti-immigrant positions and launch a winning campaign that would set him on course to author the most significant immigration legislation in our nation’s history. The country had seen a recent influx of migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, which was a shift from the majority Northern and Western Europeans who had immigrated to the U.S. prior to the early 1900’s. At the same time, anti-Japanese sentiment was rising and Johnson was a vocal advocate for limiting immigration from Japan and Asia generally, (he had supported the 1907 Bellingham riots that had resulted in running hundreds of South Asian laborers out of town and into Canada).
Johnson, who served on and then later chaired the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, appointed renowned eugenicist Harry Hamilton Laughlin to be the committee’s eugenics expert (Johnson himself was elected president of the Eugenics Research Association in 1923). Laughlin’s influence along with the new “science” of racial hierarchies pushed by organizations like the Immigration Restriction League were instrumental in getting the 1924 legislation passed, along with other anti-immigration measures that preceded the landmark law.
Setting the Stage for Albert Johnson and His Quotas
Prior to the late 1800’s, immigration to the United States was largely unrestricted. Gradually some restrictions took hold. In 1875 the Page Act prohibited convicts, non-voluntary laborers, and women imported for purposes of prostitution from entering the country. The law’s restrictions were narrowly enforced and effectively banned Chinese women from immigrating to America. Growing anti-Chinese sentiment led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which excluded entry to all Chinese laborers. Various other laws passed between 1882 and 1907 prohibited entry to “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge,” as well as “paupers,” polygamists, anarchists, and people with contagious diseases and mental and physical disabilities.
The makeup of new immigrants started changing in the early 1900’s in favor of Eastern and Southern Europeans. Sixteen percent of the foreign-born population was from Eastern or Southern Europe in 1900. That number had shot up to 41 percent by 1920. People from these regions were seen as inferior and unwilling to assimilate, and eugenicists and anti-immigration organizations claimed that there was science to prove it.
Several efforts in Congress were taken to establish a literacy test for incoming immigrants (many immigrants of Eastern and Southern European descent were unable to read), but each of these measures failed. One outcome of this legislative wrangling was the establishment of a congressional-presidential commission, known as the Dillingham Commission, to study the immigration issue. The 1911 reports of the Dillingham Commission, despite the use of dubious research methodologies, confirmed immigration restrictionists’ beliefs that the physical makeup and character of new immigrants had changed. The commission recommended a literacy test, a higher head tax, and restrictive quotas based on national origin.
Increased Restrictions, Quotas, and the Immigration Act of 1924
After the Dillingham Commission reported its findings, Congress again set its sights on establishing a literacy test. After a last hour veto by President William Taft in the final days of his administration in 1913, and another veto by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915, Congress was able to overcome a second Wilson veto in 1917 and pass a literacy test bill. It also increased the head tax to eight dollars and created an “Asiatic Barred Zone” that left intact the Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan that allowed certain categories of Japanese citizens to immigrate.
Albert Johnson was appointed chair of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in 1919. As immigration increased after World War I and fear spread of radicals among their ranks, Johnson seized the opportunity to propose legislation creating a quota system. He succeeded in getting the temporary Emergency Quota Act of 1921 passed in early 1921. According to the Migration Policy Institute it “limit[ed] total arrivals from outside the Western Hemisphere to about 358,000 per year, with each country allotted annual caps equal to three percent of the size of that country’s immigrant population in the United States as of the 1910 Census.” The “Asiatic Barred Zone” remained in place.
With the enactment of the temporary quota law, the groundwork had been laid to pass a more extreme and permanent immigration restriction law. Johnson, along with his colleague Pennsylvania Senator David Reed, compromised on a new quota scheme. At the outset, the quotas would work similarly to those of the 1921 law. The number of entrants from each country was reduced to two percent of that country’s population residing in the U.S. as determined by the 1890 census. The purpose of using the earlier census data was to achieve larger percentages of immigrants coming from Northern and Western Europe as those were the populations arriving in the largest numbers in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s (under the new law about 85% of immigration slots went to Northern and Western Europeans).
Beginning in July of 1927 a new annual cap of 150,000 immigrants was installed and quotas were calculated differently (in actuality this was delayed to 1929). According to the Migration Policy Institute, the new “per-country caps [were] based on the U.S. population with origins in each country (including the descendants of immigrants) as of 1920.” This required quota calculations to take in to account not only the immigrant population but the descendants of immigrants as well, making for a complicated national origins formula.
Johnson’s bill was proposed on March 17th and breezed through the House and Senate, receiving President Calvin Coolidge’s signature on May 26, 1924. Johnson characterized this achievement as “America’s Second Declaration of Independence” and declared “[t]he day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races has definitely ended.” The law placed no restrictions on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, allowed for some non-quota exceptions, authorized the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol, and solidified a visa system, requiring applications and medical screenings for entry.
Notably, the 1924 law kept in place the “Asiatic Barred Zone” and denied entry to those who were ineligible for citizenship, effectively continuing the ban of most people of Asian descent, and shutting the door on Japanese immigrants. Descendants of enslaved Africans were also excluded from consideration in calculating quotas for African countries.
The aim of the law was to reduce immigration numbers and to selectively favor Northern and Western Europeans, cutting roughly 700,000 new entries a year to around 150,000. The law did indeed stem the flow of immigrants who were Italian, Slavic, and Jewish. Over 200,000 Italians entered the U.S.in 1921. Just over 6,000 received visas in 1925. Tragically, the law did not include any provisions for refugees, and the U.S failed to later modify the law to accommodate Jews seeking to flee Nazi Germany.
America’s quota system survived for over four decades. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 modified the quota calculations and set quotas for Asian nations (the Chinese Exclusion Act had been repealed by the Magnuson Act in 1943). Immigration numbers increased modestly. Between 1952 and 1960 an annual average of 257,000 immigrants entered the United States. The national origins quota system was finally phased out under 1965 legislation signed by another Johnson — President Lyndon B. Johnson. One of the ugly chapters in the nation’s immigration story had ended, but not before the legacy of a Congressman from Washington had been cemented.
More information about Albert Johnson, the Johnson-Reed Act, and U.S. immigration history can be found in these books in our collection:
The Red Coast: Radicalism and Anti-Radicalism in Southwest Washington by Aaron Goings, Brian Barnes, and Roger Snider
Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America by Daniel J. Tichenor
America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States by Erika Lee
The Making of Asian America: A History by Erika Lee
The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America by Beth Lew-Williams
Immigration Law and Procedure in a Nutshell by David Weissbrodt, Laura Danielson, Howard S. (Sam) Myers III, Sarah K. Peterson, and Sarah Brenes (2023- eBook edition)
Immigration Law and Procedure in a Nutshell by David Weissbrodt, Laura Danielson, Howard S. (Sam) Myers III (2017- print edition)
Kurzban’s Immigration Law Sourcebook: A Comprehensive Outline and Reference Tool by Ira J. Kurzban
Crimmigration Law by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
Immigrant children on “roof garden” playground at Ellis Island, with “Uncle Sam” cart, circa 1910; Natives from Carpineto Romano, Italy, celebrating their arrival in the United States aboard the Christopher Columbus, 1922; Russian immigrants at Ellis Island, 1923; Eastern European immigrant at Ellis Island, circa 1910. National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument
Additional Online Resources
Albert Johnson
Johnson, Albert (1869–1957) (HistoryLink.org Essay 8721)
Albert Johnson’s Scrapbooks, 1913–1915 (Washington State Library)
Johnson, Albert, 1869–1957 (Biographical Directory of the United States Congress)
The 1920 Anti-Japanese Crusade and Congressional Hearings (The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project)
Citizen Klan: Electoral Politics and the KKK in WA (The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project)
The Regional Origins of America’s First Comprehensive Federal Immigration Law (Time: Made by History)
Race, History, and Immigration Crimes (107 Iowa L. Rev. 1051 (2022))
Eugenics
Eugenics Laws Restricting Immigration (Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement, Dolan DNA Learning Center and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Eugenics and Immigration (University of Missouri Controlling Heredity exhibit)
Eugenics and Scientific Racism Fact Sheet (National Human Genome Research Institute)
Eugenics (Arizona State University Embryo Project Encyclopedia)
Buck v. Bell and the History of Forced Sterilization Laws (Washington State Law Library Blog)
U.S. Immigration History and the Immigration Act of 1924
How U.S. Immigration Laws and Rules Have Changed Through History (Pew Research Center)
Major U.S. Immigration Laws, 1790-Present (Migration Policy Institute)
A Brief History of U.S. Immigration Policy from the Colonial Period to the Present Day (CATO Institute)
A Century Later, Restrictive 1924 U.S. Immigration Law Has Reverberations in Immigration Debate (Migration Policy Institute)
The Lasting Legacy of the Johnson-Reed Act (Tenement Museum)
Current Legislation: The Immigration Act of 1924 (10 American Bar Association Journal 490 (1924))
Immigration Act of 1924 Prohibits Immigration from Asia (Equal Justice Initiative’s A History of Racial Injustice)
The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act) (Office of the Historian)
The 1924 Law That Slammed the Door on Immigrants and the Politicians Who Pushed it Back Open (Smithsonian Magazine)
A 1911 Report Set America On a Path of Screening Out ‘Undesirable’ Immigrants (Smithsonian Magazine)
From 1917 to 2017: Immigration, Exclusion, and “National Security” (South Asian American Digital Archive)
Immigration History (Immigration and Ethnic History Society)
Immigration and Ethnic History Society Resources
Immigration to the United States, 1789–1930 (CURIOSity Collections, Harvard Library) (SC)
