jan 1, 1924 - National Origins Act

Description:

A federal law limiting annual immigration from each foreign country to no more than 2 percent of that nationality’s percentage of the U.S. population as it had stood in 1890. The law severely limited immigration, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Some native-born Protestants saw immigration as the primary cause of a perceived moral decline. A nation of 105 million people had added more than 24 million immigrants over the previous four decades; the newcomers included many Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe, whom one Maryland congressman referred to as “indigestible lumps” in the “national stomach.” “America must be kept American,” President Coolidge declared in 1924. Rising anti-immigrant views evoked the hostility toward Irish and Germans in the 1840s and 1850s. In this case, nativism fueled a momentous shift in immigration policy.

Congress had banned Chinese immigration in 1882, and Theodore Roosevelt had negotiated a so-called gentleman’s agreement that limited Japanese immigration in 1907. Now nativists charged that there were too many European arrivals, some of whom, they claimed, undermined Protestantism and imported anarchism, socialism, and other radical doctrines. Responding to this pressure, Congress passed emergency immigration restrictions in 1921 and a permanent measure three years later. The National Origins Act (1924) used backdated census data to establish a quota system: in the future, annual immigration from each country could not exceed 2 percent of that nationality’s total in the 1890 census. Since only small numbers of Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians, and other Southern and Eastern European immigrants had arrived before 1890, the law drastically curtailed immigration from those places. In 1929, Congress imposed even more restrictive quotas, setting a cap of 150,000 immigrants per year from Europe and continuing to ban most immigrants from Asia.

However, the new laws did not restrict immigration from the Western Hemisphere. As a result, Latin Americans arrived in increasing numbers, finding jobs that had gone to other immigrants before exclusion. More than 1 million Mexicans entered the United States between 1900 and 1930, including many fleeing the instability caused by the Mexican Revolution. Nativists lobbied Congress to block this flow; so did labor leaders, who argued that impoverished migrants lowered wages for other American workers. But Congress heeded the pleas of employers, especially farmers in Texas and California, who wanted cheap labor.


Other anti-immigrant measures emerged at the state level. In 1913, by an overwhelming majority, California’s legislature had passed a law declaring that “aliens ineligible to citizenship” could not own “real property.” The aim was to prevent Asians, especially Japanese immigrants, from owning land, though some had lived in the state for decades and built up prosperous farms. In the wake of World War I, California tightened these laws, making it increasingly difficult for Asian families to establish themselves. California, Washington, and the territory of Hawaii also severely restricted any school that taught Japanese language, history, or culture. Denied both citizenship and land rights, Japanese Americans would find themselves in a vulnerable position when the United States entered World War II.

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