The law continued the practice of not including Western hemisphere countries in the quota system, although it introduced a new length of residence. The Immigration Act of 1924 shaped the American population throughout the 20th century, greatly restricting immigration and ensuring that arriving immigrants were mostly from Northern and Western Europe. It closed the door to almost all new Asian immigration and excluded most European Jews and other refugees fleeing fascism and the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe. One of the most restrictive immigration laws in the U.S.
In the United States, its numerical limits on annual arrivals and the use of national origin quotas, aided by restrictions at the time of the Great Depression, limited religious, ethnic and racial diversity and dramatically reduced the size of the country's foreign-born population for four decades. The authors of the 1924 law were strongly influenced by ideas related to eugenics. Quotas were designed to rewind the country's racial and ethnic mix. The law further restricted Asian immigration and increased powers of deportation.
The policies achieved their objectives of drastically reducing and reshaping immigration. A century later, the legacy of the law is still visible A century after the enactment of the law, the United States, in the midst of a presidential campaign, is once again mired in an intense debate about the value of immigration, acceptable levels and which immigrants to receive. The rhetoric used in current debates is sometimes eerily similar to that of the 1920s. At that time, most Asians were already excluded from the country.
Public and political opinion focused on the large number of new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, especially those of the Catholic or Jewish faith, and on whether they could assimilate into the country and whether they were, in the wording of the time, of a “racial background” as favorable as the first immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. Immigration in the early 19th century primarily involved Western and Northern Europeans, particularly those from the British Isles, Germany and France. In the 1880s, immigration began to increase and the main countries of origin were displaced, with an increasing number of immigrants from Italy, Poland and Russia, among other countries. The first two decades of the 1900s brought the highest levels of immigration the country has ever seen, with 14.5 million people arriving from fiscal year 1900 to fiscal year 1919 (see figure).
In 1900, 16 percent of the foreign-born U.S. population came from Eastern or Southern Europe; by 1920, their proportion had more than doubled to 41 percent (see figure). Nowadays, the distinctions between white Americans of British, French, German, Irish, Italian, or Polish descent are often superficial, but in the The 1920s were deeply felt. Europeans from different countries and religious backgrounds were considered to constitute different races that fell on different rungs in a hierarchy of superiority, as described by what was then perceived as the avant-garde “science of eugenics”.
The influential eugenicist Charles Davenport considered that Italians were prone to committing “crimes of personal violence”, while Jews were characterized by “intense individualism and ideals of profit at the expense of any interest”. Since eugenicists believed that different races had different characteristics and capacities, Davenport argued that the government should be careful not to “adulterate” our national germ with socially inappropriate traits. Driven by these sentiments, Congress created the bipartisan Dillingham Commission to study the consequences of the new immigration. The commission's influential 1911 report described different racial types, arguing that Northern and Western Europeans were superior to those in Southern and Eastern Europe.
This report suggested that policies such as literacy tests or race-based annual immigration limits could give priority to “higher-quality” immigrants for the benefit of the country. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which re-emerged during this period as a group that opposed immigration in general, and in particular that of Jews and Catholics, whom the KKK considered a threat to the country's stability and morality, increased concern for newcomers of people from different racial and religious backgrounds. At the other end of the political spectrum, the influential American Federation of Labor (AFL) also called for new restrictions on immigration, in order to protect the U.S. UU.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, laws limited only immigrants with certain individual attributes, rather than all people above a certain annual numerical threshold. A law of 1875 banned people suspected of being prostitutes. The China Exclusion Act of 1882 banned the entry of most new Chinese immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1891 excluded polygamists, people with contagious diseases, people convicted of “moral turpitude” crimes, and people who could become “public charge” by relying on aid of the government.
A 1903 law banned anarchists and other people, including beggars. However, the vast majority of Europeans who arrived in the United States were allowed to enter; the U.S. Immigration Service excluded only 1 percent of the 25 million Europeans who arrived between 1880 and World War I. Designed to change the origin of immigrants When immigration recovered after World War I, it became clear that the literacy test and the per-person tax were not providing the desired effect.
Restrictionists feared the mass immigration of Europeans displaced by World War I, and the U.S. economy experienced a brief depression that ended opposition from business groups to limits on immigration. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921, initially set to last just over a year, established the first annual numerical limit on U.S. immigration, limiting total arrivals from outside the Western Hemisphere to approximately 358,000 per year, and each country was assigned annual limits equivalent to 3 percent of the size of that country's immigrant population in the United States according to the 1910 census. Immigration from the Western Hemisphere was limitless and arrivals from most of Asia remained prohibited.
Compared to the temporary law of 1921, the law of 1924 had a radical and permanent impact on the United States. The explicit objective of the quotas was to roll back the country's racial and ethnic mix to an era dominated by immigration from Western and Northern Europe. Reed, one of the main sponsors, wrote in The New York Times that, with the approval of the bill, “the composition of our population will not change in the coming decades in the same way that it changed between 1885 and the outbreak of the World War. The United States would then become “a more homogenous nation” and a “much better place to live,” he added. Within the quotas, preference was given to family members (minor children, parents and spouses) of U.S.
citizens, who could represent up to half of a country's quota each year, and to people trained to do agricultural work and their dependants. In addition, the way in which the 1929 quotas were calculated introduced more restrictions. The 1924 law instructed authorities to exclude from the 1920 population count all immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, all people who did not qualify for citizenship and their descendants (which excluded Asian immigrants and their descendants), descendants of “slave immigrants” and Native Americans. In applying this accusation, the Board of Contributions excluded even the U.S.
The effect was to increase all European quotas and reduce those of other regions of the world. Therefore, while 9 percent of the United States, U.S. The population was understood to be of African descent in 1920, and less than 1 percent of the 1929 quotas were allocated to African countries. Restrictions for Asians, increased powers of deportation, and other provisions.
While quotas based on national origin have received the most attention, the 1924 legislation also contained other important provisions. For example, it prohibited immigration to anyone who did not meet the requirements for naturalization in the United States, which recoded the ban on Asian immigration, since only people classified as black or white could become naturalized at that time. Partly to incorporate U.S. residents.
The regions that were formerly part of Mexico, Mexicans and other Latin Americans were officially classified as white for the purpose of naturalization. Minimum allocations were allocated to Japan and other Asian countries, but only non-Asian people in the region were able to take advantage of them. Only a limited number of migrants were exempt from the law's general quotas and prohibitions, including the wives and unmarried minor children of U.S. citizens, teachers and ministers of any religion, their wives and underage children, and the students.
Government officials and their families and employees were also exempt, as were temporary visitors. Therefore, even for countries that were facing immigration bans or to which legal limits applied, narrow paths to the United States continued to exist. The 1924 law consolidated the requirement that immigrants apply for and obtain a visa at a consular office abroad before entering the United States. The United States created an ad hoc visa system during World War I, but under the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, entry within numerical limits was authorized to Ellis Island and other United StatesThe ports, which created a situation in which shipping companies rushed to deliver migrants before the annual quotas were reached, and in which migrants who exceeded the limits were returned to Europe at the expense of the companies.
After 1924, immigrants had to undergo medical examinations, complete their application and obtain a visa stamp in their foreign passport. In this way, immigrants could embark to the United States with the confidence that they could enter legally, and the United States could control immigration levels at the place of origin. Finally, although independent of the Immigration Act of 1924, two days after its enactment, Congress passed the Labor Appropriations Act of 1924, which established the Border Patrol as a new federal force charged with protecting land borders between the ports of entry. Previously, federal inspectors had enforced land borders with the goal of preventing the illegal entry of Chinese migrants and other types of prohibited immigration, as well as the smuggling of alcohol during Prohibition.
Some Europeans who couldn't take advantage of the new quotas crossed the border illegally in the 1920s, as did Mexicans who evaded paying taxes per person, the literacy test, or other restrictions. Unauthorized European entries declined in the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, although some found solutions by staying longer on temporary visas or migrating to Canada long enough to obtain the status of migrants from the Western Hemisphere. While immigration from the Western Hemisphere was legally unlimited, the enforcement of the public payment provision, literacy tests, and the prohibition of contract work limited the number of Mexicans who could enter. Some arrived anyway, either crossing border posts or as temporary workers, but the number declined during the Great Depression, when authorities also deported more than 1 million Mexicans and Native Americans of Mexican descent during “repatriation campaigns.” Quotas and low limits on immigration generally left most people outside the Western Hemisphere without a legal way to reach the United States.
In the absence of the humanitarian channels that currently exist and were created after the Second World War, these restrictions largely kept the doors of the United States closed to Jews and other people fleeing the Holocaust and other atrocities. Estimates suggest that the United States did not allow more than 250,000 Jewish refugees to enter between 1933 and 1944, a small number compared to the approximately 6 million who died. Efforts to help European Jews were relatively minor and were based on executive discretion, such as an instruction from 1935 that European consulates did not consider the likelihood of becoming a public charge sufficient to deny a visa, extend visitor visas to German Jews who could not return, combine German and Austrian quotas to ensure that both were covered and allow some Jews to enter the United States with visitor visas. The 1924 law was replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which maintained a low annual limit on immigration and national origin quotas that heavily privileged Northern and Western Europeans.
The 1952 law, passed without the veto of President Harry Truman, eliminated the Asian Prohibited Zone, but allocated only 100 visas per year to Asian countries. It wasn't until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that the law of 1924 was repealed. The new law, popularly known as the Hart-Cellar Act, was drafted by Senator Emanuel Celler (Democrat from New York), who had tried repeatedly and tenaciously to end the 1924 law. Therefore, it was not until 1965 that the racist vestiges of the 1924 law were finally eliminated and the quotas of national origin.
However, the law of 1924 is still in force in other respects. Numerical limits on annual immigration, divisions by country (even if they are now generally applied uniformly), the prioritization of family members, and the requirement to obtain medical inspections and visas abroad are cornerstones of the United States. The implementation of the 1924 law also highlighted the power of the executive branch to limit or reshape immigration within the limits of the law, for example, by greatly restricting visa approval or expanding leniency when necessary. In the midst of recent inaction by Congress on immigration, such measures have once again gained support. In addition, the division of immigration into legal or illegal categories fundamentally shaped the understanding of immigration over the past century.
And unlike the era before 1921, the law of 1924 created the architecture of today's reality, in which most people in the world cannot legally enter the United States. The country will surely debate which immigrants or groups are desirable and why for at least another hundred years. In the short term, the United States could consider whether and how it can control who enters and who is excluded. For better or worse, many of the key parameters of both debates were shaped 100 years ago in a law that continues to reverberate. Muzaffar Chishti is a principal investigator at the MPI and director of the MPI office at New York University School of Law.
Julia Gelatt is the associate director of frequently requested statistics on immigrants and immigration in the States. United. Policy Beat in the MPI's online magazine Each month, MPI authors review key legislative, judicial, and executive measures on U.S. and U.S.
immigration at the local, state and federal levels. Keep up to date with the latest news. The 10 most important migration issues of the year. These measures emphasized border control, prioritized the enforcement of laws over hiring immigrants, and tightened eligibility for admission. Initial legislation tended to impose limits that favored Europeans, but a radical law of 1965 opened the doors to immigrants from other parts of the world.
People with immigrant visas can live and work in the United States and can eventually apply for citizenship, if they so choose. Before 1924, most of the deportations were of people considered to be a public charge, often taken from hospitals and jails, but by the late 1920s most of the deportations were of immigrants who lacked a proper visa. As a continuation of the 1921 law, immigration from the Western Hemisphere remained unrestricted, although Mexican immigration was limited in other ways, as described below. Those who wish to immigrate for other reasons must apply to the Department of State for an immigrant visa.
Under the current U.S. immigration process, prospective immigrants must obtain a permit from the U.S. government before entering.
