Immigration Act of 1924

The Naturalization Act of 1790 declared that only people of white descent were eligible for naturalization, but eligibility was extended to people of African descent in the Naturalization Act of 1870.[5] Chinese and Japanese people were barred from immigrating to the US in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the (unenforced) Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907, respectively.[2] According to historian Mae Ngai, before World War I, the United States had "virtually open borders."[6]

A limitation on Southern and Eastern European immigration was first proposed in 1909 by US Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.[7] The Immigration Act of 1917 further restricted immigration from Asia. In the wake of the post-World War I recession, many Americans believed that bringing in more immigrants would worsen the unemployment rate. The Red Scare of 1919–1921 had fueled xenophobic fears of foreign radicals migrating to undermine American values and provoke an uprising like the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.[8] The number of immigrants entering the United States decreased for about a year from July 1919 to June 1920 but doubled in the year after that.[9]

US Representative Albert Johnson and Senator David Reed were the two main architects of the act, which in the wake of intense lobbying, passed with strong congressional support.[10] There were nine dissenting votes in the Senate[11] and a handful of opponents in the House of Representatives, the most vigorous of whom was freshman Brooklyn Representative and Emanuel Celler, a Jewish American. Decades later, he pointed out the act's "startling discrimination against central, eastern and southern Europe."[12]

Proponents of the act sought to establish a distinct American identity by preserving its ethnic homogeneity.[13][14] Reed told the Senate that earlier legislation "disregards entirely those of us who are interested in keeping American stock up to the highest standard—that is, the people who were born here."[15] He believed that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, most of whom were Catholics or Jews, arrived sick and starving, were less capable of contributing to the American economy, and were unable to adapt to American culture.[13] Eugenics was used as justification for the act's restriction of certain races or ethnicities of people to prevent the spread of perceived feeblemindedness in American society.[16] Samuel Gompers, himself a Jewish immigrant from Britain and the founder of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), supported the act because he opposed the cheap labor that immigration represented even though the act would sharply reduce Jewish immigration.[17] Both the AFL and the Ku Klux Klan supported the act.[18]

US President Calvin Coolidge signs the Immigration Act on the White House South Lawn along with appropriation bills for the Veterans Bureau. John J. Pershing is on the right.

Lobbyists from the West Coast, where a majority of Japanese, Korean, and other East Asian immigrants had settled, were especially concerned with excluding Asian immigrants. An 1882 law had already put an end to Chinese immigration, but as Japanese and, to a lesser degree, Korean and Filipino laborers began arriving and putting down roots in Western United States, an exclusionary movement formed in reaction to the "Yellow Peril." Valentine S. McClatchy, the founder of The McClatchy Company and a leader of the anti-Japanese movement, argued, "They come here specifically and professedly for the purpose of colonizing and establishing here permanently the proud Yamato race." He cites their supposed inability to assimilate to American culture and the economic threat that they posed to white businessmen and farmers.[8]

Opposing the act, US Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes said, "The legislation would seem to be quite unnecessary, even for the purpose for which it is devised."[19] The act faced strong opposition from the Japanese government with which the US government had maintained a cordial economic and political relationship.[8] In Japan, the bill was called by some the "Japanese Exclusion" act.[20] Japanese Foreign Minister Matsui Keishirō instructed the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Masanao Hanihara, to write to Hughes:

the manifest object of the [section barring Japanese immigrants] is to single out Japanese as a nation, stigmatizing them as unworthy and undesirable in the eyes of the American people. And yet the actual result of that particular provision, if the proposed bill becomes law as intended, would be only to exclude 146 Japanese per year.... I realize, as I believe you do, the grave consequences which the enactment of the measure retaining that particular provision would inevitably bring upon the otherwise happy and mutually advantageous relations between our two countries.[21]

Members of the Senate interpreted Hanihara's phrase "grave consequences" as a threat, which was used by hardliners of the bill to fuel both houses of Congress to vote for it. Because 1924 was an election year and he was unable to form a compromise, President Calvin Coolidge declined to use his veto power to block the act,[22] although both houses passed it by a veto-overriding two-thirds majority. The act was signed into law on May 24, 1924.[23]

The immigration act made permanent the basic limitations on immigration to the United States established in 1921 and modified the National Origins Formula, which had been established in that year. In conjunction with the Immigration Act of 1917, it governed American immigration policy until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 was passed, which revised it completely.

The act provided that no alien ineligible to become a citizen could be admitted to the United States as an immigrant. That was aimed primarily at Japanese aliens[2] although they were not explicitly named them in the act.[24] It imposed fines on transportation companies who landed aliens in violation of US immigration law. It defined the term "immigrant" and designated all other alien entries into the United States as "non-immigrant," or temporary visitors. It also established classes of admission for such non-immigrants.[25]

The act set a total immigration quota of 165,000 for countries outside the Western Hemisphere, an 80% reduction from average before World War I,[1] and barred immigrants from Asia, including Japan.[5] However, the Philippines was then a US colony and so its citizens were US nationals and could thus travel freely to the United States.[26] The act did not include China since it was already barred under the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The 1924 act reduced the annual quota of any nationality from 3% to 2% of the number of foreign-born persons of such nationality residing in the United States in 1890.[18] A more recent census existed, but Congress used the earlier to give a greater proportion of immigrants to Northern and Western Europe and to decrease those from Eastern and Southern Europe.[27] The reduced quotas were set to last until 1927, when they were replaced with a total annual quota of 150,000.[13][28] The act gave 85% of the immigration quota to Northern and Western Europe and those who had an education or had a trade. The other 15% went disproportionately to Eastern and Southern Europe.[28]

The act established preferences under the quota system for certain relatives of US residents, including their unmarried children under 21, their parents, and spouses at least 21 and over. It also preferred immigrants at least 21 who were skilled in agriculture and their wives and dependent children under 16. Non-quota status was accorded to wives and unmarried children under 18 of US citizens; natives of Western Hemisphere countries, with their families; non-immigrants; and certain others.

Subsequent amendments eliminated certain elements of the law's inherent discrimination against women.

The act also established the "consular control system" of immigration, which divided responsibility for immigration between the US State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The act also mandated no alien to be allowed to enter the United States without a valid immigration visa issued by an American consular officer abroad.[29]

Consular officers were now allowed to issue visas to eligible applicants, but the number of visas to be issued by each consulate annually was limited, and no more than 10% of the quota could be given out in any one month. Aliens were not able to leave their home countries before having a valid visa, as opposed to the old system of deporting them at ports of debarkation. That gave a double layer of protection to the border since if they were found to be inadmissible, immigrants could still be deported on arrival.[27]

Relative proportions of immigrants from Northwestern Europe[lower-alpha 1] (red) and Southern and Eastern Europe[lower-alpha 2] (blue) in the decades before and after the act

The act was seen in a negative light in Japan, causing resignations of ambassadors and protests.[23] A citizen committed seppuku near the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo with a note that read: "Appealing to the American people."[20] According to David C. Atkinson, "This indignity is seen as a turning point in the growing estrangement of the U.S. and Japan, which culminated in the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor."[23]

The act's revised formula reduced total immigration from 357,803 between 1923 and 1924 to 164,667 between 1924 and 1925.[30] The law's impact varied widely by country. Immigration from Great Britain and Ireland fell 19%, while immigration from Italy fell more than 90%.[31] From 1901 to 1914, 2.9 million Italians immigrated, an average of 210,000 per year.[32] Under the 1924 quota, only 4,000 per year were allowed since the 1890 quota counted only 182,580 Italians in the U.S.[33] By contrast, the annual quota for Germany after the passage of the act was over 55,000 since German-born residents in 1890 numbered 2,784,894.[33] Germany, Britain, and Ireland had the highest representation in 1890.[33] The provisions of the act were so restrictive that in 1924 more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Portuguese, Romanians, Spaniards, Chinese, and Japanese left the United States than arrived as immigrants.[18]

The law sharply curtailed immigration from those countries that were previously host to the vast majority of the Jews in the United States, almost 75% of whom immigrated from Russia alone.[4] Because Eastern European immigration did not become substantial until the late 19th century, the law's use of the population of the United States in 1890 as the basis for calculating quotas effectively made mass migration from Eastern Europe, where the vast majority of the Jewish diaspora lived at the time, impossible.[34][35] In 1929, the quotas were adjusted to one-sixth of 1% of the 1920 census figures, and the overall immigration limit reduced to 150,000.[12][36][30] The law was not modified to aid the flight of Jewish refugees in the 1930s or 1940s despite the rise of Nazi Germany.[lower-alpha 3][lower-alpha 4] The quotas were adjusted to allow more Jewish refugees after World War II, but without increasing immigration overall.[36]

During World War II, the U.S. modified the act to set immigration quotas for their allies in China.[5] The immigration quotas were eased in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and replaced in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.[2][39]

• Anti-Italianism
• Antisemitism in the United States
• China Swede
• Eugenics in the United States
• Indian Citizenship Act
• Nordicism
• List of United States Immigration Acts
• Racial equality proposal
• Statue of Liberty National Monument
• White Australia policy
• Yellow Peril

Footnotes

Citations

• Eckerson, Helen F. (1966). "Immigration and National Origins". Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The New Immigration. 367: 4–14. doi:10.1177/000271626636700102. JSTOR 1034838. S2CID 144501178.
• Lemay, Michael Robert; Barkan, Elliott Robert, eds. (1999). U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History. Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-30156-8.
• Ian, Haney-López (2006). White by law : the legal construction of race (Rev. and updated, 10th anniversary ed.). New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0814736947. OCLC 213815614.
• Ngai, Mae M. (2004). Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-16082-5.
• Zolberg, Aristide (2006). A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-02218-8.

• Statistics of who was allowed in after the Immigration Act of 1924
• "'Shut the Door': A Senator Speaks for Immigration Restriction" – transcript of speech given before Congress by Sen. Ellison D. Smith, April 9, 1924
• Eugenics Laws Restricting Immigration
• Text of 1924 Immigration Act and enabling proclamation by the President at the Wayback Machine (archived September 24, 2016). Additional archives: Chapter 190, An Act To limit the immigration of aliens into the United States, and for other purposes, May 26, 1924, Statutes at Large: Congress 68 - Law Library of Congress.
• Quotas defined in Immigration Law of 1924