Remembering America's worst immigration law
It's been a hundred years since the 1924 act. Could it happen again?
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1924, the most restrictive immigration law in American history. The anniversary seems to be attracting little discussion, but it has great relevance to today. At a time when Donald Trump is touring the country accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of America, you have to go back to 1924 to find a major piece of immigration legislation which was passed in the same spirit.
In some respects, the atmosphere which led to the 1924 immigration act - which was praised by Adolf Hitler - is alien to our time. The discussion was mostly about people who are now classified as white, primarily Eastern and Southern Europeans. The unsuitability of blacks and Asians for citizenship was regarded as so obvious that it required little debate. The political coalitions were also somewhat different. White Progressives put up little resistance in the face of the nativist onslaught, in part because they shared concerns about whether new immigrants could become assimilated at a sufficient rate. They also thought that their foes - corrupt businessmen and machine politicians - built their power off the back of cheap immigrant labor and votes.
But even if many of the details were different, the rhetoric and ideas which were central to the passage of the 1924 law are shockingly recognizable today. The immigrants in question - who, remember, were white Europeans - were condemned as “bestial hordes”, “a stream of alien blood” poised to overrun and (yes) poison the nation. As today, immigration was tied up with questions concerning employment, the maintenance of the supremacy of the nation’s elite groups, and national security. It all came together during a moment of profound crisis to produce the most restrictive immigration law in American history, one which explicitly and purposefully sloughed off the country’s idealized portrayal as a “nation of immigrants”.
Could it happen again?
War, anarchy, race
The 1924 law was the high point of a nativist movement which had been festering for decades, driven initially by the arrival of millions of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. Previous immigrants had come predominantly from Northern and Western Europe, and these so-called “new immigrants” were viewed as vastly inferior. At a time when it was normal to talk about “stock” and “blood”, Teutonic Northern Europeans were seen as the people whose race made them most similar to the original American colonists and hence most likely to be able to thrive in the land of liberty. Italians, Russians and Hungarians, by contrast, were dismissed as illiterate and impoverished, completely unused to a free way of life and equally unsuited to it.
At the same time, a general reactionary spirit was growing in certain quarters due to the profound social and economic changes that the United States was undergoing. The country’s rapid industrialization and urbanization made it seem like traditional ways of life were dying, and the “great migration” of Southern blacks to work in wartime industry in the North was seen to pose a threat to white supremacy. At the same time, millions of immigrants were arriving in Northern cities, often living in squalor and poverty, and (it was believed) refusing to assimilate to the “American way of life”.
The outbreak of World War I and the Red Scare which followed the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 made matters worse. Unassimilated immigrants came to be seen not just as a dangerously alien presence, but also a threat to national security. There was a long association between Eastern and Southern European immigrants and anarchism, and the Bolsheviks added the spectre of Communism to the list. The war also raised the question of whether German-Americans and Irish-Americans would remain loyal if the United States entered the war on the side of Britain. The answer was yes - but that didn’t stop a wave of official and semi-official repression falling on these communities, including a number of lynchings.
Anti-semitism also played a prominent role in the national mood. Over a hundred thousand Jews arrived from Central and Eastern Europe in 1920-1, fleeing persecution and arriving in a land which seemed not to want them. An official in the State Department warned Congress that the Jewish migrants were “abnormally twisted”, “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits”. An emergency immigration law passed in 1921 was largely portrayed as an anti-Jewish measure, but it was only a foretaste of what was to come.
The 1924 quota system
These movements came together to eventually produce the 1924 law, also known as the Johnson-Reed act. The act created the U.S. Border Patrol, and limited entry into the United States to those who had first obtained a visa abroad. But far more radically, it also limited who would be able to obtain the right to immigration - and did so on an explicitly racist basis.
At the core of the 1924 law was the “quota system”, which limited the number of immigrants to the United States each year to a certain number. For each nationality, this number was 2% of the number of people of that national background who had been recored as present in the United States in the census of 1890. A 30-year-old census was chosen because this year largely predated the “new immigration” and the “mongrelization” of the American population that it was believed to have produced. There had been vastly more people of English or German background present in the country in 1890 than Hungarians or Poles, and so they received higher quotas. Asians were to be excluded entirely. Thus would the supremacy of white Europeans be maintained.
Although it had been preceded by the emergency act of 1921 and various state-level initiatives, it is hard to overstate how radical a change the 1924 law was. Asians and blacks had, of course, been excluded from citizenship for a long time, but shutting the gates even to Europeans was a drastic move which explicitly shrugged off the pretence that the United States was a “nation of immigrants”. It was not until 40 years later, amid the civil rights movement, that the doors were flung open again with the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965. The period between saw further spasms of nativism - mass deportations of Mexican-Americans during the Great Depression, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” deportations of the 1950s.
Nativism today
Today, progressives have an ambivalent relationship to this period of American history. On the one hand, it cuts against the idea that the United States has always been welcoming of immigrants, and that Trump’s MAGA movement represents some massive deviation from the status quo of the past. On the other hand, the nativism of the 1920s provides another way of understanding Trumpism, one which highlights the ways in which he is just the latest incarnation of an old and infamous force.
There are certainly some similarities between the 1920s and the 2020s. Globalization, rising income inequality and automation have delivered economic shocks and created a similar sense that old values are disappearing. Cultural and demographic change has been rapid in the past few decades, and it has fuelled a modern nativist movement which wants to turn back the clock. Most shocking has been the return to the very mainstream of Republican Party politics of blatant white supremacism and concern about “blood”. Donald Trump himself has openly wondered why so many immigrants came from “s**thole countries”, wishing instead that they came from “Norway”.
But 2024 is also profoundly different to 1924. Whereas in the 1920s even progressives and big businesses got caught up in or were complicit with the nativist tide, today there are powerful forces arrayed against immigration restrictions. Despite the growth in MAGA power, many Republicans continue to regard immigration as an important driver of economic growth, a belief supported by the facts. Democrats remain broadly opposed to excluding legal immigrants from the country, and there is deep polarization on the issue of immigration in general. Progressives often lament that this polarization has prevented any progress in liberalizing immigration policy over the past few decades. But it has also made it impossible for nativists to achieve their priorities - such as Trump’s border wall - as well.
The other big difference between then and now is that nowadays the immigration conversation revolves around “illegals”, many of whom arrive from the Western hemisphere. The 1924 law contained no quotas for the Western hemisphere, and immigration from Latin America was not a major issue at the time. Since the 1990s it’s been close to the whole ball game, at least in regard to public and political attention.
Even as the Central American refugee crisis has made a tightening up of the asylum system the main nativist priority, Congressional polarization has prevented any major changes being made. During the Trump administration, this produced a strange effect. Trump’s rhetoric and the concerns of his MAGA movement were mostly focused on “illegals” at the southern border, but his inability to take much action there meant the bulk of his policy changes actually fell on the backs of legal migrants. Trump constructed a so-called “invisible wall” which made it much harder to come to the United States legally, even as he did little to nothing before the pandemic to address the humanitarian crisis at the southern border.
When discussing his next term, Trump has suggested some ominous policies, including the construction of a network of deportation camps into which undocumented migrants will be herded before being summarily deported. While his vision is terrifying, it would also be extremely difficult to achieve for so long as the basic processes of American democracy are still in operation. There is far from a social and political consensus around Trump’s plans, and that ought to be enough to stop them. In this sense, the polarization of 2024 is preferable to the nativist consensus of 1924.
But that only remains the case for so long as democracy does hold, something that can no longer simply be assumed. The battle for American democracy is ongoing everywhere - in the courts, in Congress, in civil society, and at the ballot box. The immigration law of 1924 is a reminder of the stakes, and what can happen if the battle isn’t won.
Quotes without a hyperlink to the source are taken from a book by John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860 - 1925.