May 24, 1924: IMMIGRATION ACT
With President Calvin Coolidge’s signature on May 24, 1924, the United States dramatically reversed the country’s previous unrestricted immigration policies. The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act, established country quotas at 2% of each nationality recorded as living in the US in 1890. It cut annual intake to 165,000 people a year, one-fifth of the total in 1914, and cut it again to 150,000. It reduced religious, ethnic and racial diversity. Which was the point.
May 24, 1924: President Calvin Coolidge signs the Immigration Act. (Library of Congress)
Although opposed by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, his department endorsed the goal: “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” Passed with veto-proof majorities and supported by the AFL-CIO, the Ku Klux Klan, eugenicists and most Americans, the law institutionalized the xenophobia of a nation anxious about Bolshevism and an influx of people with darker complexions, incomprehensible languages and suspect religions. Catholic and Jewish immigrants from southern and eastern European countries had increased from 16% in 1900 to 41% in 1920. The Act’s sponsors, Representative Albert Johnson (R-WA) and Senator David Reed (R-PA) saw the bill as dam blocking “a stream of alien blood.”
New York Times headline, April 27, 1924. (NYT archives)
Both American continents had been settled by immigrants. Indigenous people crossed a northern land bridge or came by boat from Southeast Asia. Vikings and Portuguese came in search of codfish. In 1493, after Pope Alexander VI divided the globe for European exploration, the Spanish sailed west searching of cities of gold, as well as political, religious and economic conquests. The Dutch, Portuguese, French and British competed in a global land grab, agreeing only on the superiority of white, patriarchal, Christian control and frequent enslavement of native inhabitants. African Americans were involuntary immigrants, having been enslaved and imported to North America, beginning in 1619.
Use of the word “native,” defined as “a person born in a specific place or associated with a place,” is complicated. Who was native to America? The Constitution excluded the original Native Americans as members of foreign nations. After generations of genocide, they became wards of the government, before earning full rights in the 1960s.
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, defines as citizens “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” including “formerly enslaved persons.” (At the time, the amendment defined citizens as male. Questions about the status of women, citizens without voting rights, would reignite the woman suffrage campaign.)
The term “white replacement” first appeared in the 1850s, referring to the threat posed by Irish immigrants, who were white but Catholic and threatened to out procreate Anglo-Saxon Protestants. White, married, “native” women were encouraged to have more babies. Abortion went from being commonplace to criminal. Fear of dilution of the white race prompted the pseudo-science of eugenics in the 1890s.
Immigrants were feared as competition for jobs, carriers of disease, troublemakers or terrorists. Yet our huge continent absorbed millions of newcomers, starting with second sons, servants, convicts, religious refugees, rebels and renegades, people escaping famine, conscription, persecution and poverty, searching for safety, freedom and possibility.
Their labor built the nation and enriched its culture and cuisine. Enslaved African Americans empowered the international cotton trade. Scandinavians grew amber waves of grain; Welshmen mined coal; Irishmen dug canals and laid rails moving west, while Chinese immigrants blasted through mountains to complete the first transcontinental railroad. Photographs of the 1869 “golden spoke” ceremony excluded Chinese workers.
Completing the Union Pacific Railroad, May 10, 1869, Promontory, Utah (NPS)
Chinese immigrants were victims of every racial stereotype. In 1854, the California Supreme Court held that people of Asian descent could not testify against a white person, so whites could avoid punishment for anti-Asian crimes.
Fear of a “Yellow Peril” among western whites prompted Congress to act. The 1875 Page Act prohibited recruitment of laborers from “China, Japan, or any Oriental nation.” Its sponsor, Representative Horace Page (R-California), wanted to “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.” Rather than face humiliating and invasive examinations, Chinese women stopped coming. The absence of potential wives skewed the gender ratio to five women to 100 men, creating bachelor Chinatowns and labeling Chinese men as shiftless.
Domestic politics trumped diplomatic treaties. The Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 suspended the admission of all Chinese workers for a decade and required those already here to carry certificates identifying them as laborers, merchants, scholars or diplomats. It was the first time the country restricted immigration so strictly and specifically.
An 1886 advertisement for detergent (Wikipedia)
Decade by decade, the 1882 Act was extended and made more restrictive. The amended act barred polygamists, people guilty of moral turpitude, and the contagious (1891), anarchists and beggars (1903), and Hawaiians and Filipinos, residents of American territories (1907). Japanese immigration was restricted by a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” between the US and Japan in 1907. Over President Wilson’s veto, Congress required literacy tests for people over age sixteen and an $8 head tax (1917).
Chinese exclusion acts were not repealed until 1943, when the United States and China were allies during World War II. Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, a Wellesley graduate and China’s first lady, played a role, skillfully lobbying President Franklin Roosevelt and the Congress. The 1890 quota remained, with a limit of 105 Chinese immigrants annually.
Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and the Roosevelts visit Mount Vernon, February 2, 1943.
(mountvernon.com)
The national origin system remained until President Johnson signed the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, at the base of the Stature of Liberty, when only five percent of the country was foreign-born. Democrats Phillip Hart (MI) and Emanuel Celler (NY) introduced the bill. It prioritized professionals and family members, banned homosexuals, established an annual maximum of 20,000 people from any one country, and set rules regarding refugees and asylum seekers. The Immigration Act of 1990 was more comprehensive. It established a “flexible” worldwide cap on immigrant visas, based on employment and family ties.
An unanticipated global population explosion and economic upheaval prompted a surge of legal and illegal immigration, altering America’s demographics. By 2000, the foreign-born entered the US at higher rates than any time since the 1850s. Complicated by drug cartels, the risk of terrorism, political demagoguery, and lack of bipartisan resolve to enact solutions, immigration could determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
Asian Americans, now the “model minority,” are the fastest growing demographic group in the US, about seven percent of the population. In 1978 Congress passed a resolution proposing an annual week of recognition in May, chosen because the first Japanese immigrants arrived in the US on May 7, 1843, and the Golden Spike was struck on May 10, 1869. The observance was expanded to a month in 1990 and renamed AAPI Heritage Month in 2009.
During the Obama administration, Congress passed a resolution condemning every Chinese Exclusion Act. In 2016, President Obama signed legislation replacing “Oriental” in federal law with “Asian American, Native Hawaiian [or] Pacific Islanders.” More recently, racist rhetoric about the origins of the Covid virus led to a spike in anti-Asian violence.
Ever since the authors of the Declaration of Independence condemned King George III for restricting immigration and the growth of the colonies, the United States has both welcomed and rejected newcomers, depending in part on who they were.
Immigration is an essential element of our democracy, not only because everybody’s ancestors came from somewhere else, but because it is aspirational. As Doris Meissner, senior scholar at the Migration Policy Institute, asserts, “immigration is the story of human potential. When we are at our best as a country, we embrace human potential for everyone.”
SOURCES:
Gillian Brocknell, “The Long, Ugly History of Anti-Asian Racism and Violence in the US,” Washington Post (March 18, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/03/18/history-anti-asian-violence-racism/
Muzaffar Chishti and Julia Gelatt, “A Century Later, Restrictive 1924 U.S. Immigration Law Has Reverberations in Immigration Debate,” Migration Policy Institute Policy Beat (May 15, 2024), https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/1924-us-immigration-act-history
Elisabeth Griffith, Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality, 1920-2020 (Pegasus, 2022).
National Archives, “Chinese Exclusion Act (1882),” https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/chinese-exclusion-act
Office of the Historian, “The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act),” https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act
Minhae Shim Roth, “Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month,” History (April 30, 2024), https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/asian-american-pacific-islander-heritage-month