Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 07:46, 21 May 2006

The United States Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Quota Act, Johnson-Reed Act, or the Immigration Quota Act of 1924, established a system of national quotas which limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people who were already living in the United States in 1890, according to the census of 1890. (total quota: 164,667) 86% of the quotas were allocated to northern and western European countries. It superseded the 1921 Emergency Quota Act. The law was aimed at reducing the influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s, and prohibited immigration from Asia. It set no limits on immigration from the western hemisphere which was exempt due to the dependence of the southern states on inexpensive Mexican labor. During World War I, the U.S. recruited thousands of temporary workers from Mexico to harvest crops in our labor-short farmland. Initially immigration from the other Americas was allowed, but measures were quickly adopted to deny legal entry to Mexican laborers.

Some of its strongest supporters were influenced by Madison Grant and his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race. Grant was a eugenicist and advocate of the racial hygiene theory. His data, which is now considered by the vast majority of scientists to be flawed, purported to show the superiority of the founding Northern European races.

Floor debates

On the house floor the most common argument made by those favoring the legislation, and the one reflected in the majority report, is the argument that in the interests of fairness to all ethnic groups, the quotas should reflect the relative ethnic composition of the entire country. Restrictionists noted that the census of 1890 was chosen because the percentages of the foreign born of different ethnic groups in that year approximated the general ethnic composition of the entire country in 1920. Senator Reed of Pennsylvania and Representative Rogers of Massachusetts proposed to achieve the same result by directly basing the quotas on the national origins of all people in the country as of the 1920 census, and this was eventually incorporated into the law. Representative Rogers argued that 'Gentlemen, you can not dissent from this principle because it is fair. It does not discriminate for anybody and it does not discriminate against anybody' (Cong. Rec. April 8, 1924; p. 5847). In the words of the House Majority Report:

• “The use of the 1790 census is…an effort to preserve as nearly as possible, the racial status quo of the United States. It is hoped to guarantee as best we can at this late date, racial homogeneity in the United States. The use of a later census would discriminate against those who founded the Nation and perpetuated its institutions.”

Senator Reed noted:

• "The purpose, I think, of most of us in changing the quota basis is to cease from discriminating against the native born here and against the group of our citizens who come from northern and western Europe. I think the present system discriminates in favor of southeastern Europe." (Cong. Rec., April. 16, 1924; p. 6457) (i.e., because 46% of the quotas under the 1921 act went to Eastern and Southern Europe when they constituted less than 12% of the population).

• "Let me emphasize here that the restrictionists of Congress do not claim that the 'Nordic' race, or even the Anglo-Saxon race, is the best race in the world. Let us concede, in all fairness that the Czech is a more sturdy laborer, with a very low percentage of crime and insanity, that the Jew is the best businessman in the world, and that the Italian has a spiritual grasp and an artistic sense which have greatly enriched the world and which have, indeed, enriched us, a spiritual exaltation and an artistic creative sense which the Nordic rarely attains. Nordics need not be vain about their own qualifications. It well behooves them to be humble. What we do claim is that the northern European, and particularly Anglo-Saxons made this country. Oh, yes; the others helped. But that is the full statement of the case. They came to this country because it was already made as an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth. They added to it, they often enriched, but they did not make it, and they have not yet greatly changed it. We are determined that they shall not. It is a good country. It suits us. And what we assert is that we are not going to surrender it to somebody else or allow other people, no matter what their merits, to make it something different. If there is any changing to be done, we will do it ourselves." (Cong. Rec. April 8, 1924; p. 5922).

• "America realizes that she is no longer a desert country in need of reinforcements to her population. She realizes that her present numbers and their descendants are amply sufficient to bring out her natural resources at a reasonable rate of progress. She knows that her prosperity at this moment far exceeds that of any other land in the world. She realizes that unless immigration is numerically restrained she will be overwhelmed by a vast migration of peoples from the war-stricken countries of Europe. Such a migration could not fail to have a baleful effect upon American wages and standards of living, and it would increase mightily our problem of assimilating the foreign-born who are already here. Out of these thoughts have risen the general demands for limitation of the number of immigrants who may enter this country."

• "There has come about a general realization of the fact that the races of men who have been coming to us in recent years are wholly dissimilar to the native-born Americans; that they are untrained in self-government-- a faculty that it has taken the Northwestern Europeans many centuries to acquire. America was beginning also to smart under the irritation of her 'foreign colonies'-- those groups of aliens, either in city slums or in country districts, who speak a foreign language and live a foreign life, and who want neither to learn our common speech nor to share our common life. From all this has grown the conviction that it was best for America that our incoming immigrants should hereafter be of the same races as those of us who are already here, so that each year's immigration should so far as possible be a miniature America, resembling in national origins the persons who are already settled in our country..."

• "It is true that 75 per cent of our immigration will hereafter come from Northwestern Europe; but it is fair that it should do so, because 75 per cent of us who are now here owe our origin to immigrants from those same countries..."

Colorado Congressman William N. Vaile commented:

• "That people from Southern and Eastern Europe did not begin to come in large numbers until after 1890 certainly proves that those who came before them had built up a country desirable enough to attract these latecomers. Shall the countries which furnished these earlier arrivals be discriminated against for the very reason, forsooth, that they are represented here by from 2 to 10 generations of American citizens, whereas the others are represented by people who have not been here long enough to become citizens? If there is a charge of ‘discrimination,’ the charge necessarily involves the idea that the proposed quota varies from some standard which is supposed to be not ‘discriminatory.’ What is that standard?”

While Representative Scott Leavitt stated quite bluntly that Jewish representatives should respect the desire of other Americans to retain the ethnic status quo:

• “The instinct for national and race preservation is not one to be condemned, as has been intimated here. No one should be better able to understand the desire of Americans to keep America American than the gentleman from Illinois , who is leading the attack on this measure, or the gentlemen from New York, Mr. Dickstein, Mr. Jacobstein, Mr. Celler, and Mr. Perlman. They are of the one great historic people who have maintained the identity of their race throughout the centuries because they believe sincerely that they are a chosen people, with certain ideals to maintain, and knowing that the loss of racial identity means a change of ideals. That fact should make it easy for them and the majority of the most active opponents of this measure in the spoken debate to recognize and sympathize with our viewpoint, which is not so extreme as that of their own race, but only demands that the admixture of other peoples shall be only of such kind and proportions and in such quantities as will not alter racial characteristics more rapidly than there can be assimilation as to ideas of government as well as of blood.

See: Samuel Dickstein, Meyer Jacobstein, Emanuel Celler

Possible Anti-Semitism

While motivated by a desire to preserve an ethnic status quo, these laws may also have been motivated partly by anti-Semitism, since during this period opposition to immigration was perceived as mainly a Jewish issue. This certainly appears to have been the perception of Jewish observers: for example, prominent Jewish writer Maurice Samuel (1924), writing in the immediate aftermath of the 1924 legislation, wrote that "it is chiefly against the Jew that anti-immigration laws are passed here in America as in England and Germany" (p. 217),' and such perceptions continue among historians of the period (e.g., Hertzberg 1989, 239).

The Congressional debates of 1924 reflected a highly charged context in which Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were widely perceived to not only avoid intermarriage but also to retain a separatist culture and to be disproportionately involved in radical political movements. The perception of radicalism among Jewish immigrants was common in Jewish as well as gentile publications. The American Hebrew editorialized that 'we must not forget the immigrants from Russia and Austria will be coming from countries infested with Bolshevism, and it will require more than a superficial effort to make good citizens out of them' (in Neuringer 1971, p. 165). The fact that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were viewed as 'infected with Bolshevism ... unpatriotic, alien, unassimilable' resulted in a wave of anti-Semitism in the 1920s and contributed to the restrictive immigration legislation of the period (Neuringer 1971, p. 165).

This perception was not restricted to Jews. In remarks before the Senate, the anti-restrictionist Senator Reed of Missouri noted that "Attacks have likewise been made upon the Jewish people who have crowded to our shores. The spirit of intolerance has been especially active as to them" (Cong. Rec. Feb. 19, 1921; p. 3463), and during World War II Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson stated that it was opposition to unrestricted immigration of Jews that resulted in the restrictive legislation of 1924. (Breitman & Kraut, 1987, p. 87).

The House Immigration Committee Majority Report (House Report #109, Dec. 6, 1920) stated that "by far the largest percentage of immigrants (are) peoples of Jewish extraction," (p. 4), and it implied that the majority of the expected new immigrants would be Polish Jews. The report 'confirmed the published statement of a commissioner of the Hebrew Sheltering and Aid Society of America made after his personal investigation in Poland, to the effect that 'If there were in existence a ship that could hold 3,000,000 human beings, the 3,000,000 Jews of Poland would board it to escape to America (p. 6).

The Majority Report also included a report by Wilbur S. Carr, head of the United States Consular Service, that stated that the Polish Jews were "abnormally twisted because of (a) reaction from war strain; (b) the shock of revolutionary disorders; (c) the dullness and stultification resulting from past years of oppression and abuse... ; Eighty-five to ninety percent lack any conception of patriotic or national spirit. And the majority of this percentage are unable to acquire it' (p. 9; see also Breitman and Kraut

Consular reports warned that "many Bolshevik sympathizers are in Poland". (p. 11)

Passage

President Calvin Coolidge said that preserving a strong national culture was more important then whatever economic benefits more immigrants might bring. The bill passed with strong congressional support (only 6 dissenting votes in the Senate) and was signed into law on May 6, 1924. As an example of its effect, in the ten years following 1900 about 200,000 Italians immigrated every year. With the imposition of the 1924 quota, only 4,000 per year were allowed. At the same time, the annual quota for Germany was over 57,000. 86% of the 165,000 permitted entries were from the British Isles, France, Germany, and other Northern European countries.

The law was altered with the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which raised the number of visas granted to East and Southern European immigrants to 30 percent. The act was eventually overturned with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

See also

• List of United States Immigration Acts

• 1924 in law
• United States federal immigration and nationality legislation