The Immigration Act of 1924

11 Key excerpts on "The Immigration Act of 1924"

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  From Open Door to Dutch Door

  An Analysis of U.S. Immigration Policy Since 1820

  • Michael C. LeMay(Author)
  • 1987(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  The law had support from members of both parties: only 35 Republicans and 36 Democrats opposed it in the House. It had over- whelming support from virtually every section of the country, the only dis- sent coming from some senators and representatives of districts in the north- east where immigrants from SCE Europe were concentrated. The measure was politically popular. It reflected the triumph of the "Nordic majority" in the country over the southeastern minority. The Immigration Act of 1924, or the Johnson-Reed Act, as it became popularly known, was a lengthy and technical one. Its central restrictive features are summarized in Box 2. Perhaps as important to the quota system, the provision for requiring visas served as an effective regulating device. Indeed, the overseas issuance of visas charged against quotas became the most effective means devised to control the use of quotas and to allow for administrative screening of im- migrants prior to their entry into the U.S. The 1917 provision prohibiting persons "who might become public charges" provided an effective ad- ministrative tool to enforce that prohibition. It was used to dramatically cut down the amount of total immigration during times of depression by setting strict standards for economic tests to demonstrate the applicant's ad- missibility. THE NATIONAL ORIGINS ACT OF 1929 Passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act did not end the battles, although it settled the major policy position firmly in favor of restriction. The na- tional origins principle was by then accepted as the basis of our national im- migration policy. Future battles concerned only the mechanics of how the quotas themselves would be fixed. In an editorial in March of 1924, the New York Times summed up the fundamental perspective of the national origins system, advocating what it held to be the basic needs of a permanent quota system:

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  The Politics of Immigration in France, Britain, and the United States

  A Comparative Study

  • M. Schain(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  24 The 1921 legislation was meant to be temporary. However, this should not obscure the fact that it represented a turning point in American immi- gration policy. The turning point was not so much that immigration was restricted, but rather in the way that it was restricted. By restricting immi- gration through quotas, its objective was to freeze the composition of the American population, and to ensure that immigration from southeastern Europe would be l i mited. This concept of s f hapi ng the composit ion of immigration along national and racial lines (all Asians remained elimi- nated f rom consi deration) then remained the principle of immigration f cont rol for t he next 44 years. Dur i ng the next t wo years, the level of immigration was cut in half, although there was a final sharp peak in 1924, i n ant icipat ion of t he legislat ion passed that year. The temporar y leg islation was extended until 1924, while discussions within congress continued on how to make the system both permanent Development of U.S. Immigration Policy 1 95 and more rest rict ive. The pr i nciple of quotas that reflected exist i ng popul at ion dist ribut ion was a lready in pl ace. What had not been final ly resolved was how these quotas would be calculated. For the moment, it was possible to use a proportion of those born abroad already in the coun- tr y , but this permitted a level of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe that proved to be polit ica lly unaccept able. With 150,000 entries in 1922 from Southern and Eastern Europe, immigration was continuing at a level that was unacceptable to developing congressional sentiment. Between 1921 and 1924, the political pressures no long revolved around whether there should be restriction, but rather the formula that should be used. The Johnson-Reed Act of 192 4 The “permanent” legislation passed in 1924 was also a compromise of sorts. On one hand, the total ceiling each year was reduced from 350,000 to 150,000.

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  Making Americans

  Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy

  • Desmond King(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  PA RT T H R E E Legislating Americans C H A P T E R S E V E N Enacting National Origins The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924) Despite the enactment of a literacy test in 1918, the pressures to limit the number of immigrants arriving in the United States did not cease, and the publication of the 1920 census demonstrated continued pop-ulation growth from immigration. 1 Proponents of restriction returned to the battle with renewed vigor after the First World War and suc-ceeded in getting Congress to enact quota-based limits on immigra-tion in 1921. This achievement set the stage for the struggles over im-migration that characterized the 1920s, manifest in both the 1924 Johnson-Reed law and in the adoption in 1929 of a national-origins-based quota system. President Calvin Coolidge gave a restrictionist message—broadly endorsing an “America is for Americans” rhetoric—to the Congress in December 1923. It was a prelude to the 1924 law. The Immigration Restriction League urged him to remain steadfast. 2 Congressman John Cable congratulated President Coolidge on his efforts “to stop the seepage of aliens” entering the U. S. and recommended a larger appropriation for the immigration office. 3 The U. S. Department of Labor maintained that there were “millions of unnaturalized [immi-grants], outside of the unnaturalizable races,” who were living unde-tected. 4 It wanted tougher enforcement laws and increased funding for inspectors. Both the association of some immigrants with anar-chism (manifest in the discovery of bombs in May 1919, including one outside the Attorney General’s house) and labor conflict galva- nized anti-immigrant sentiments. Alleged communists were arrested and deported. In 1921, Congress, overturning a presidential veto, imposed a temporary limitation on new immigrants from Europe that was organized in terms of nationality quotas.

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  Beyond Borders

  A History of Mexican Migration to the United States

  • Timothy J. Henderson(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Behind all of these practical arguments lay the legal reality that, according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the US–Mexican War, Mexicans living in the formerly Mexican territories that came into the possession of the United States were to automatically receive US citizenship, so long as they did not leave the territory or declare a wish to remain citizens of Mexico. Accordingly, it was not legally feasible to place them in a category with Asians, who were allegedly “unassimilable” people who were legally ineligible for US citizenship and hence legitimate targets of discrimination. The point had been decisively established in 1896 when an impoverished Mexican named Ricardo Rodríguez, who had lived in San Antonio, Texas, for ten years, applied to the federal district court for US citizenship. The resulting case, which came after a prolonged effort on the part of many white Texans to disenfranchise all Mexicans and people of Mexican descent in Texas, attracted considerable popular interest. The court ruled that Rodríguez – and, by extension, all Mexicans – was entitled to US citizenship.

  The restrictionist impulse led ultimately to the passage of The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which followed many of the recommendations made in the 1911 Dillingham Commission report. At the time of the debates over the 1924 Act, Mexicans were considered legally “white.” That fact, together with the labor needs of southwestern growers and US diplomatic concerns, effectively trumped the arguments of nativists and organized labor: no quotas were established for Mexico, nor for the rest of the nations of the Western Hemisphere.

  This is not to say that The Immigration Act of 1924 is irrelevant to the story of Mexican immigration to the United States. The Act began with the premise that the dominant racial strain in the United States was, and should remain, “Nordic.” Since Asians were already barred from immigrating by the Immigration Act of 1917 – a point that the 1924 Act upheld – the 1924 Act was aimed principally at restricting immigration of southern and eastern Europeans. The law established a “national origins quota system” that limited immigration of persons of any given nationality to 2 percent of the number of persons of that nationality who had resided in the United States in 1890, as revealed by the census of that year. As intended, this Act severely curtailed the immigration of Europeans, adding to the shortages of unskilled labor that southwestern employers had been moaning about for years, further cementing the position of Mexicans as the dominant source of agricultural labor in the Southwest. Southwestern employers swore they had no choice but to entice Mexicans across the border. As one wealthy rancher complained in 1928, “We have no Chinamen, we have no Japs. The Hindu is worthless, the Filipino is nothing, and the white man will not do the work.”8

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  Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798-1965

  • E. P. Hutchinson(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  84 Other bills were introduced to promote the entry of certain relatives of citizens of the United States. 85 The Quota Act of 1921 was the subject of eight or more bills and resolutions, one to repeal the act (H.R. 622, Perlman [N.Y.]), several to extend its operation, some to liberalize, and others to strengthen the act. 86 A considerable group of other bills proposed to limit 87 or to limit and select immigration; 88 and among them were all but one of the bills to be reported out and considered by Congress during the session (see H.J. Res. 283, below). With the 1921 Quota Act as extended about to expire on June 30, 1924, both House and Senate began working on new bills to replace it: the Johnson bill (H.R. 6540) in the House and the Reed bill (S. 2576) in the Senate. The House committee, reporting out the Johnson bill on February 9, 1924, in House Report 176 (68-1), empha-sized the urgent need for new legislation. Impending immigration was said to be large, and already would have risen to between 1 .5 million and 2 million, annually, except for the 1921 Act. It was the Committee's opinion also that the literacy test and other selective provisions in the 1917 Act would be powerless to check the influx. With this prospect in view, the Johnson bill with committee approval would reduce the quota for each country to 2 percent plus 200 immigrants and shift the base year from 1910 back to 1890, provide for an examination of prospective immi-grants overseas, and put the burden of proof of admissibility on the would-be immigrants. Under the bill, nonquota status was more limited 84 S. 2082, Sterling (S.D.); S. 2451, Wadsworth (N.Y.); H.R. 83, McClintic (Okla.); H.R. 455, Clancy (Mich.); H.R. 2900, Kelly (Pa.); H.R. 3239, Vestal (Ind.); H.R. 4089, Lineberger (Calif.); H.R. 5628, Fredericks (Calif.). 85 S. 1497, Copeland (N.Y.); H.R. 3844, Hill (Md.); H.R. 5713, Doyle (111.). 86 H.R. 83, McClintic (Okla.); H.R. 2696, Graham (111.); H.R. 4127, Lindsay (N.Y.); H.R.

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  America Classifies the Immigrants

  From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census

  • Joel Perlmann(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  From that seat, he shepherded the crucial Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924 through succeeding Congresses and continued to press for still-further restrictions during the second half of the decade. Even before Johnson took over, the House committee had held hearings on a temporary halt to immigration. While the committee was prepared to recommend such an action at the war’s end, the committee members judged that there was not yet adequate support for it, since the numbers of arriving immigrants had not yet returned to frightening mag-nitudes. The committee instead concentrated on other matters, such as deporting radicals. By the summer of 1920, large-scale immigration was resuming, and at just the same time, the economy was turning downward. This, the com-mittee members judged, was the auspicious moment; accordingly, they in-troduced a bill calling for a two-year halt to all immigration because of an “emergency.” Specifically, they stressed conditions in postwar Europe and especially in east-central Europe. Destruction there was said to have pro-duced chaos, mass unemployment, and starvation—as well as a rise of Bol-shevism. An ensuing immigration wave was already underway, and it might soon exceed prewar levels. Immigrant ghettos would grow again in Amer- The Second Quota Act, 1924 205 ican cities, and they would become self-sustaining, rather than emptying out. From such ghettos would come all the attendant problems of crime, health concerns, and failed assimilation (particularly of groups that were hard to assimilate in the best of times). The solution? First, Congress must impose a temporary ban on all immigration. During the respite, it could develop a reasonable long-term policy. In the absence of great demand for more American workers, these arguments encountered little opposition from employers. 5 There was certainly widespread sentiment in Congress for new restric-tion measures.

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  Immigration In America's Future

  Social Science Findings And The Policy Debate

  • David Heer(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  63

  The result of the demand for more restrictions was The Immigration Act of 1924, which, unlike the 1921 act, was designed to be permanent. The new law made two significant changes. First, the act abrogated the gentleman's agreement with Japan and prohibited all immigration from that nation by the indirect means of barring immigration from all nations whose subjects were not legally eligible to become U.S. citizens. Second, quotas for immigration from other Eastern Hemisphere nations were reduced, with the reduction greatest for the nations of eastern and southern Europe.

  The demand for the legal prohibition of all Japanese immigrants came mainly from Californians. Discrimination against Japanese immigrants in California had been widespread. In 1913 California had passed a law barring all persons ineligible for naturalization (including the Japanese) from acquiring real estate. In 1923 the California Joint Immigration Committee was formed in order to press Congress to bar further immigration of Japanese. The organization joined representatives of the American Federation of Labor, the American Legion, and the National Grange. Responding to a warning from the Japanese government, the U.S. secretary of state, Charles E. Hughes, argued that Japan should receive a token quota of about 150 immigrants per year. The Japanese ambassador to the United States in turn wrote Secretary Hughes that "grave consequences" would follow if Congress passed legislation to exclude all Japanese immigrants. The message proved counterproductive. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge referred to it as a "veiled threat," and the Senate passed the Japanese exclusion provision by a vote of seventy-one to four.64 In signing The Immigration Act of 1924, President Calvin Coolidge indicated his personal opposition to the Japanese exclusion provision but said he would not veto the act simply because of it. The Japanese were offended by the act, declaring a national day of mourning.65

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  A Nation of Immigrants

  • Susan F. Martin(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  After several failed attempts, legislation imposing a literacy requirement was adopted over President Wilson’s veto in 1917. Although immigration decreased somewhat during and immediately after World War I, it resumed former levels as soon as conditions in Europe permit- ted. Believing that the qualitative restrictions in place were inadequate to stem the tide, those favoring restriction turned to quantitative restrictions as well as to shifts in the ethnic composition of immigration. The national origins quotas established in the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924 accomplished these aims. They led to substantial reductions in numbers of immigrants and severe limita- tions on immigration from eastern and southern Europe. The 1920s legislation represented a repudiation of the Pennsylvania model and what was considered by too many to be a failure of Americanization. The seemingly insatiable demand for foreign labor was checked, at least in terms of European migration, but there was a resurgence of the Virginia model, with temporary immigration from Mexico in some cases replacing permanent immigration from Europe. The underlying reasons for this major shift in US immigration policy is examined, as is the larger context in which the debates on immigration took place. Focusing on questions about America’s place in the world following World War I, the chapter examines what became the newest manifestation of the Massachusetts model in the country’s reaction to the so-called Red Scare. It concludes that the nativist tradition already established in the colonial and early republic periods flourished to new heights with the new restrictions on immigration. qualitative restrictions on admission As immigration grew in the decades after the Civil War, many Americans reacted with alarm to the changing characteristics of the new immigrants. 140 The Triumph of Restrictionism

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  The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture

  • Christopher Bigsby(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Persons from the western Hemisphere could enter “without numerical restriction,” that is outside the quota limits, as could close family members of persons already in the United States. The bill was vetoed by President Woodrow Wilson but was repassed and signed in early 1921 by President Warren G. Harding. The quota system, although modified, would endure until 1965. Even after that the revised system retained many of the features first introduced in 1921. The 1921 law reduced immigration: in 1921–4 some 550,000 immigrants entered annually. Although this sliced prewar arrival numbers roughly in half, restrictionists made further cuts. The 1924 law reduced the quotas significantly in two ways, one straightforward, the other devious. It cut quota percentages from 3 to 2 percent and, instead of using the 1920 census went back to the 1890 census. These changes cut the total annual quota to 180,000. The quotas for Italy and Poland, for example, plummeted from 42,000 and 31,000 under the 1921 law to 4,000 and 6,000 after 1924 while the quotas for Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia were expanded. The new law also stopped all immigration from Japan by barring the immigration of any person who was “ineligible for citizenship.” Since the naturalization law limited acquired citizenship to “white persons” and “persons of African descent,” Japanese were added to the other Asians who had previously been barred. It is clear that a majority of Americans applauded the 1921–4 restrictions although immigration policy was one of the issues which bitterly divided Americans in the 1920s. John Higham’s wonderful phrase, the “tribal twen- ties,” strikes, I think, just the right note. If we think of the main “tribes” as teams, we can speak of four different contests going on simultaneously: roger daniels 80 rural versus urban, dry versus wet, Protestant versus Catholic, and native stock versus immigrant stock.

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  Does Immigration Increase Crime?

  Migration Policy and the Creation of the Criminal Immigrant

  • Francesco Fasani, Giovanni Mastrobuoni, Emily G. Owens, Paolo Pinotti(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  As documented in Higham (1955), the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was passed in response to a combination of economic crises, fear of foreign radicals, and also the continued flow of immigrants from non-Western Europe. The 1921 Act fixed annual lawful immigration from each country at 3% of the total number of residents in the USA in the 1910 Census. In 1924, the threshold was lowered to 2% of the population, and the relevant Census pushed further back in time to 1890. Moving the Census backwards arguably had a larger impact on immigration than lowering the percentage threshold; 1897 was the year at which ‘new’ immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe outnumbered by those from Western Europe and Scandinavia (Meyers, 2004). The Immigration Act of 1924 can be thought of as an attempt to force the composition of immigrants thirty years backwards. Of course, this resulted in immigrant visas designated for favoured countries going unused, and thousands of people from less desirable countries, 4.1 institutional background 103 including children attempting to flee the Holocaust, being turned away. 3 As Figure 4.4 shows, the justification that newer immigrants were somehow morally inferior to the older immigrants groups is not obviously supported by crime data available at the time. Prior to 1920, ‘older’ immigrants from Western Europe or Scandinavia were slightly over-represented in prisons relative to immigrants from ‘newer’ places among people of peak criminal age. New immigrants between 26 and 35 years of age were more criminal than older immigrants, suggesting that settlement patterns likely complicate direct comparisons, as they did in the case of Asian immigrants in the 1800s. Among the oldest groups ‘new’ immigrants are about as criminal as ‘old’ ones. All Ages Ages 36–49 Ages 26–35 Ages 16–25 1.5 1 .5 0 Incarceration Rate 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1940 1930 1920 Census Year Old Imm.

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  The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

  Legislating a New America

  • Gabriel J. Chin, Rose Cuison Villazor(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The growth of non-quota immigration in the years leading up to the 1965 Act thus proved the quotas unnecessary, even as it might also have reduced the urgency of getting rid of them. If the ad hocery of mid-century U.S. immigration policy was prompted at least in part by the limitations of the national origin quotas, doing away with the latter presumably offered the opportunity to rein in the former. And yet the genealogy of the refugee provisions in the 1965 Act reveals divisions not just between Congress and the executive, but within Congress, about whether ad hoc legislation and executive discretion were really all that bad. Ultimately, the 1965 Act reflects deep ambivalence about just how flexible immigration policy needs to be – and the extent to which such flexibility is compatible with Congressional control over immigration. Attempts to undo the INA’s quotas date back at least to President Truman, who vetoed the McCarran-Walter Act when it was passed in 1952. Representative Walter’s death in May 1963 presented reformers an opportunity – or would have, had Walter’s replacement as chair of the House Immigration Subcommittee, Representative Michael Feighan, proven more amenable to reform. It was only after Feighan, a Democrat who had represented Ohio for twenty-two years, won the 1964 primary in his immigrant-heavy 32 Wolgin, supra note 12, at 153, n.77 (citing Stephen Thomas Wagner, The Lingering Death of the National Origins Quota System: A Political History of United States Immigration Policy, 1952–1965, Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University (1986), at 305–06). 33 See 111 Cong. Rec. 24225, 24225–26 (Sept. 17, 1965) (statement of Senator Kennedy). Refugees and the 1965 Immigration Act 177 district by a slim plurality that he stopped holding up the immigration bill that the Kennedy administration had earlier proposed; for the first time, public hearings were scheduled, though they did not lead anywhere during the 88th Congress.

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