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The 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts a Century Later: Roots and Long Shadows

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Maddalena Marinari, The 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts a Century Later: Roots and Long Shadows, Journal of American History , Volume 109, Issue 2, September 2022, Pages 271–283, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaac232

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Incensed over rumors that the new constitution of the League of Nations might “limit the right of any nation to decide who shall be admitted into its life,” Prescott Hall, one of the most prominent advocates for immigration restriction in the United States, wrote a scathing article in 1919 arguing that any such clause represented a threat to the soul of the nation. “Immigration restriction,” he wrote, “is a species of segregation on a large scale, by which inferior stocks can be prevented from both diluting and supplanting good stocks.” The connection between eugenics and immigration policy was well established by 1919. Hall's words exemplified much of the rhetoric that would soon contribute to the passage of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924. Through these laws, Congress imposed a ban on most immigration from Asia, devised a quota system based on national origins to restrict immigration from eastern and southern Europe, hardened the boundaries between legality and illegality, and expanded several categories for exclusion and deportation. By the mid-1920s, immigration laws had become tools of social engineering and nation building that intersected with the dispossession and coerced assimilation of Native Americans, the segregation and disfranchisement of Black Americans, the invasive policing of welfare recipients and impoverished communities, and imperial projects at home and abroad. These histories can no longer be understood in isolation. 1

This special issue brings together leading scholars of migration, ethnicity, and race to examine how U.S. immigration policy became a site for reimagining the attributes of citizenship, to explore the intellectual milieu in which ideas about immigration restriction emerged, and to reexamine the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts a century after their passage within the framework of settler colonialism, empire building, and white supremacy. In doing so, these authors challenge the traditional chronology of the rise of federal immigration restriction both by connecting the 1921 and 1924 acts to the longer history of restrictions on free Blacks and Native Americans prior to 1882 and by reassessing the role that the passage the 1917 Immigration Act played in creating the quota system in the 1920s. Several of the authors also reframe the history behind many of the contested immigration topics today, such as border enforcement, unauthorized immigration, and asylum. Many of the essays demonstrate that demographic anxieties, the merging of anti-Black racism with xenophobia, tensions between inclusion and exclusion, and the bureaucratization of naturalization and immigration that began in the nineteenth century profoundly shaped the immigration system that emerged in the 1920s. Other contributors make a persuasive case for recognizing the intersection between foreign policy and immigration, particularly during World War I. The articles also point to the long-term impact of the legal, bureaucratic, and ideological infrastructure created by the 1921 and 1924 quota acts, especially the racial connotations of the debate over temporary versus permanent immigrants, the use of immigration laws to shape the racial makeup of U.S. society, and the connection between war and migration throughout the twentieth century. 2

The 1921 and 1924 immigration acts represented the culmination of over forty years of debate about immigration restriction and Americans' expectations about which immigrants should be allowed in the country. As this special issue shows, the 1917 Immigration Act represented a pivotal moment in this history. Also known as the Literacy Act or the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, this law imposed a literacy test on all arriving immigrants who were over age sixteen, introduced new categories of inadmissibility, and excluded immigrants from most of Asia and the Pacific Islands. When the act failed to curb immigration from eastern and southern Europe in significant numbers, restrictionists pushed for the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, also known as the Per Centum Law. This law, initially meant as a temporary measure in response to fears of an impending influx of migrants from Europe at the end of World War I, introduced quantitative restriction of European immigrants for the first time. It limited the number of immigrants admitted annually from any country in the Eastern Hemisphere to 3 percent of the number of residents from that country living in the United States at the time of the 1910 census. This guaranteed that immigrants from northern and western Europe received higher quotas than those coming from eastern and southern Europe. The Immigration Act of 1924, often referred to as the Johnson-Reed Act, reduced the yearly quota to 2 percent of each country's representation in the 1890 census, when even fewer immigrants from eastern and southern Europe resided in the United States. Legislators believed that the quota system guaranteed that the racial makeup of the United States would remain intact. This rationale also applied to the provision in the law that denied entry to all immigrants who were not eligible to naturalize, further expanding the so-called Asiatic barred zone created in 1917 to exclude all immigrants from Asia except for those from the Philippines. 3

Although legislators ultimately exempted immigrants from the Americas from the quota system, they also created the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924 to monitor crossings along the southern border and prevent irregular immigration through the Canadian border. Much of the immigration system devised in the 1920s remained in place until 1965, when Congress repealed the quota system in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Also known as the Hart-Celler Act, it replaced the quota system with a global cap on immigration, including from the Western Hemisphere for the first time, and created a preference system that gave priority to immigrants with family ties in the Unites States, professionals and skilled workers, and refugees. Although the act eliminated national origin, race, and ancestry as a basis for immigration, the preference system nonetheless introduced new forms of inequality that affect immigration to this day. 4

The 1917, 1921, and 1924 acts sent the unequivocal message that the United States welcomed only immigrants with desirable political beliefs, socioeconomic backgrounds, cultures, sexual orientations, and nationalities. For many Americans, the most desirable immigrants hailed from northern and western Europe. Although several factors have shaped U.S. immigration policy—including foreign policy, economics and labor priorities, and national security—a preoccupation with the racial makeup of immigrants has remained constant. 5

The historical and legislative context in which the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts unfolded is imperative to understanding the laws' origins, content, and ramifications. During the second half of the nineteenth century, immigration to the United States shifted away from northern and western Europe to southern and eastern Europe, Asia, and Mexico. These immigrants belonged to a movement of millions of migrants around the globe who left their countries to escape stagnant economies, political unrest, persecution, and the pressures of population growth, and to take advantage of the demand for unskilled labor in rapidly industrializing nations such as the United States. The movement to regulate and restrict this mass migration was just as global in its scope. In the United States, Americans of northern and western European ancestry regarded the “new” immigrants as biologically and culturally inferior and unassimilable. These perceptions stemmed from the United States' first decades as a nation, when race emerged as a key marker of eligibility for citizenship. In the 1790 Nationality Act, Congress restricted naturalization to “any free white person,” creating the legal category of aliens ineligible for citizenship. In 1922, in Ozawa v. United States , the Supreme Court reaffirmed this legal category, noting that “the federal and state courts, in an almost unbroken line, have held that the words ‘white person’ were meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race.” Congress did not abolish all racial restrictions on naturalization until 1952. 6

Congress passed the first restrictive federal immigration law in 1875 to “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.” The Page Act primarily targeted the immigration of Asian women who were suspected of coming to the United States for “lewd and immoral purposes.” The law built on a long history of immigration restrictions at the state level and intersected with bilateral trade treaties among the United States, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe that had regulated the movement of people through the stipulation of a reciprocal liberty for persons seeking to enter or trade in either country. Passed in the name of safeguarding public morals, the Page Act proved an effective way to restrict admission of Chinese women and thereby control local Chinese communities by skewing sex ratios and preventing Chinese American men from having children in the United States. The act introduced gender as a mechanism of federal immigration control and represented an early experiment in engineering the composition of U.S. society. The commitment to family reunification that emerged as a central tenet of U.S. immigration policy at the end of the nineteenth century would not apply to all immigrants. 7

Seven years later, Congress expanded federal authority over immigration by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1882 Immigration Act. Together, these acts explicitly put the federal government in charge of U.S. immigration policy and introduced nationwide systems of management and deportation even though they were quite ineffective initially because of limited funding, a threadbare bureaucracy, and the lack of a fully developed registration system. The Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese laborers, skilled and unskilled, from entering the country for ten years, excluded the wives of Chinese laborers, and reaffirmed that those already in the United States could not naturalize. The law was originally enacted for only ten years, but Congress renewed it for another ten years in 1892. These Chinese exclusion laws were part of a global trend among white settler societies to restrict the movement of migrants of color. These countries wanted Asian workers but did not want to alter the racial makeup of their societies. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act discriminated by class as well as race, exempting merchants, students, teachers, and tourists. These exemptions established an important precedent for prioritizing immigrants with desirable skills and knowledge and signaled the centrality of these migrants to U.S. efforts to expand its spheres of influence in Asia. Diplomats and entrepreneurs regarded these migrants as people with whom they could establish economic relations or on whom they could rely to convey a positive image of the United States in Asia. 8

The general Immigration Act of 1882, meanwhile, established the first guidelines for federal oversight of immigration and formalized the criteria, long enforced at the state level, for excluding certain categories of immigrants. Borrowing directly from state im migration laws, the federal law imposed a head tax of fifty cents on each incoming immigrant, and targeted for exclusion the “convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” The likely-to-become-a-public-charge ( Lpc ) rule would develop into a particularly capacious category that federal immigration authorities used to exclude people deemed undesirable, including the poor, many Black or other racialized migrants, individuals with disabilities, and women traveling alone or unaccompanied with children, on the logic that such people would become burdens to the state. Immigration authorities also effectively used the Lpc provision to bar those who engaged in sex acts or with sexual orientations arbitrarily deemed perverse. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as the historian Julio Capó notes, immigration officials routinely used the Lpc provision to exclude a broad range of people deemed undesirable because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. 9

Between 1871 and the outbreak of World War I, 23.5 million immigrants from Asia and Europe arrived in the United States in search of economic opportunities, social mobility, or safety. As the United States admitted these immigrants, policy makers passed more laws to decide who could enter the country and naturalize. Critics of immigration wanted restriction rather than admission to become the norm. In 1902, Congress made Chinese exclusion permanent (at least until 1943, when foreign policy priorities during World War II made it untenable). As the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe continued to rise at the turn of the twentieth century, Congress expanded the categories of excludable immigrants to include anarchists, polygamists, prostitutes, vagrants, and epileptics and began targeting immigrants with disabilities. Lamenting the costs of institutional care and decrying the supposed threat that immigrants with intellectual and physical disabilities posed by passing on heritable characteristics, legislators effectively criminalized these immigrants by conflating illness, disability, and poverty. The desire to keep out immigrants with disabilities fit within a larger trend in the United States toward the increasing segregation of individuals with disabilities into institutions and the sterilization of the “unfit” and “degenerate” under state eugenic laws. Nativism and xenophobia also intersected with industrial strife, labor unrest, and the end of western expansion. Contemporaries feared that the closing of the frontier represented a threat to the growth of American democracy, self-sufficiency, ingenuity, and individualism. Despite evidence to the contrary, many Americans blamed immigrants for crime, immorality, corruption, religious extremism, and political radicalism. Anxieties about foreign radicalism also ignited anti-Catholic nativism and anti-Semitism across the country. 10

World War I was a pivotal turning point in the confluence of U.S. foreign policy ambitions and nativist agendas. Congress narrowly passed the 1917 Immigration Act over President Woodrow Wilson's veto as advocates for immigration restriction exploited the climate of xenophobia caused by the war. Fearmongers argued that, unless Congress acted, poor and subversive immigrants from Europe would flood the country at the end of the war. The 1917 Immigration Act introduced a literacy test for immigrants over sixteen years old, increased the head tax to $8, and identified additional categories of excludable immigrants, provisions aimed primarily at southern and eastern European immigrants. The so-called Asiatic barred zone created by the act extended the racial policies of the Chinese exclusion acts to other Asian immigrants. The zone exempted the U.S. territory of the Philippines and Japan, with emigration regulated through the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907. The 1917 Immigration Act captured many of the contradictions echoed in the quota acts of 1921 and 1924. The first restrictive general immigration law, it also exempted individuals fleeing religious persecution from the literacy test, excepted Asian migrants with desirable professional qualifications and family ties in the United States, and created exceptions for Europeans in the country illegally. Although the 1917 Immigration Act identified stowaways—the majority hailing from Europe—as an excludable category, it also warranted that they, “if otherwise admissible, may be admitted at the discretion of the Secretary of Labor.” Like the restrictive laws that followed, the 1917 Immigration Act demonstrated how U.S. immigration laws can simultaneously be inclusive and exclusive. 11

The virulent nativism and the increasing popularity of the eugenics movement during World War I also led to increased scrutiny of immigrants with disabilities. As early as 1907, the Immigration Restriction League had criticized the existing immigration legislation as barring only “the most obviously diseased, decrepit, feeble-minded and generally unfit aliens.” Although that was hardly the case, restrictionists used the outbreak of World War I to renew their calls for further restrictions on immigrants with disabilities. The 1917 Immigration Act added “constitutional psychopathic inferiority” as a category of exclusion. This broad category included “various unstable individuals on the border line between sanity and insanity, such as … persons with abnormal sex instincts.” The act encouraged officials to exclude immigrants with “any mental abnormality whatever … which justifies the statement that the alien is mentally defective.” By the end of World War I, the rules for the exclusion of immigrants with physical and mental disabilities were so vague and expansive that virtually any immigrant could be excluded. 12

The 1917 Immigration Act paved the way for a rapid succession of immigration laws that tightened the nation's borders against immigrants perceived as belonging to inferior races, yet it failed to reduce immigration as drastically as supporters of immigration restriction had hoped. Immigration numbers began to fall significantly only after the passage of the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, which imposed the first numerical limits on European immigration based on national origins. Three years later, the Immigration Act of 1924 expanded the ban on Asian immigrants by excluding those who were ineligible for citizenship, introduced a yearly cap of 165,000 on immigration from outside the Americas, and made the national origins system permanent. After much debate, the national origins quotas were calculated at 2 percent of the total number of foreign-born persons from each nation recorded in the 1890 census, before eastern and southern European immigration reached its peak. As a result, the 1924 Immigration Act meant that even Asian immigrants previously allowed into the country—the Japanese in particular—would no longer be admitted to the United States and that immigrants from northern and western Europe would receive priority. The quota system promised to reduce immigration to the United States by 80 percent when compared to immigration before World War I. The peak year had been 1907, when 1.2 million migrants had arrived. 13

Like many of the immigration laws that preceded and followed it, the Immigration Act of 1924 revealed the contradictions between the calls for restriction and the demands for family reunification and certain types of highly valued labor. The law exempted immigrants from the Americas from the national origins quota system and made exceptions for highly skilled immigrants, domestic servants, and the wives and unmarried minor children of U.S. citizens. Because of these exemptions, regular immigration increased during the Great Depression, even as deportations reached new highs. By the end of the 1930s, despite repeated calls for the suspension of immigration, the number of admitted immigrants slowly began to rise, particularly because of the family exemptions that critics of immigration restriction had won. Meanwhile, migrants from Mexico offset the lost Asian and European labor in a country that still desperately needed workers in factories, mines, and agricultural fields, but they were racialized as permanently temporary labor. Within days of the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, Congress created the Border Patrol to police migrants' movement along the borders and, in 1929, passed the Undesirable Aliens Act to control and criminalize Mexican migration. The act made unlawful entry a misdemeanor and reentering the United States after a deportation a felony. Immigration to the United States did decrease in the wake of the 1924 Immigration Act, but it did not stagnate. Instead, it changed form, composition, and legal expression. 14

Except for important revisions in 1952, the immigration system created in the 1920s remained in place until 1965, when Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Hailed as a major piece of civil rights reform, the act abolished the national origins system, formalized a preference system that gave priority to family reunion and to immigrants with skills desirable in the United States, and set aside a small numerical allotment for refugees. The act also set the stage for many of the immigration debates dividing the country today. It completely, albeit unintentionally, reshaped the demographics of the United States. Despite the intention to maintain the predominantly European ancestry of the U.S. population through emphasis on family reunion, immigration to the United States shifted away from Europe to Latin America, Asia, and Africa during the final decades of the twentieth century. Many of these immigrants entered the country thanks to their qualifications as highly skilled migrants and then took advantage of the family reunion provisions to send for members of their families, many entering the country outside the yearly quotas. In 1920, 13.2 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born; by 1965, that percentage had dropped to just under 5 percent and over three-quarters of the foreign-born were from Europe and Canada. In 2015, fifty years after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, half of all immigrants in the United States hailed from Latin America and the Caribbean and 27 percent from Asia. The admission of refugees during this period further contributed to these demographic shifts. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ultimately created the most diverse society in U.S. history, a development that has resulted in repeated calls for immigration restriction characterized by the same xenophobic and nativist rhetoric that preceded the passage of the two quota acts in the 1920s. 15

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 also led to a rise in unauthorized immigration. The introduction of uniform quotas for each nation—presented by restrictionists as an egalitarian remedy to the discriminatory national origins quotas—and the first imposition of a yearly cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, a year after the end of the bracero program, resulted in an increase in undocumented immigration. The ostensible egalitarianism of uniform quotas meant that big countries such as China, India, or Mexico, with large numbers of potential immigrants, received the same yearly quota allotment as tiny countries such as Denmark, Iceland, or Ireland, which also had smaller numbers of people who wanted to leave. These changes resulted in long waiting periods for many of the immigrants from new sending countries and new significant restrictions on immigrants from the Americas. In response, many migrants crossed the U.S.-Canada or U.S.-Mexico borders without authorization or entered the country with tourist, student, or other temporary visas and remained in the United States once their visas had expired. 16

The articles in this special issue are organized around three central themes: roots, natures, and consequences. Kevin Kenny, Seema Sohi, and Mireya Loza explore the roots of the immigration laws passed in the 1920s. Together, their essays reframe the periodization of U.S. immigration restriction that presents the 1921 and 1924 acts as the beginning of a restrictive immigration regime. While Kenny traces the origins of immigration restriction to earlier debates about the mobility of enslaved and Indigenous people in the nineteenth century, Sohi and Loza make a powerful case for considering the Immigration Act of 1917 not as a building block toward the creation of the immigration regime ratified in the 1920s but as a bridge between the two immigration acts passed in 1882 and the two acts passed in the 1920s that further racialized Asian immigrants and reshaped the debate over temporary and permanent immigrants. 17

Kevin Kenny 's opening article powerfully connects slavery, Indian removal, and state policies regulating mobility to trace the constitutional and statutory origins of immigration restriction in the nineteenth century. He explains how immigration policy moved from the local to the national level before 1882 and offers readers a clear understanding of how “police power” encompassed huge swaths of people whose mobility was constitutionally and politically assigned to state control. Kenny's article demonstrates how, throughout the antebellum era, state laws regulating immigration intersected with laws regulating the movement of African Americans, both free and enslaved. The existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery, as Kenny shows, dictated immigration policy and informed Supreme Court decisions on that policy throughout the nineteenth century. 18

Seema Sohi makes a compelling argument that the 1917 act, usually regarded as a failure, not only represented the culmination of previous legislative efforts but also laid the groundwork for key legislative developments in the 1920s and beyond. She also shows how intertwined the histories of Asian and European restrictions were. Much of the literature on the 1917 Immigration Act focuses on the impact of the act on southern and eastern Europeans, whom legislators regarded as undesirable, potential anarchists, and certainly “not white,” according to the racial logic of the time. Sohi demonstrates that legislators worried about the political activism among Asian migrants as much as, if not more than, the political activism among European migrants. While proponents of the bill hoped that the literacy test would drastically reduce immigration from eastern and southern Europe, they also sought to draw an explicit connection between anti-Asian sentiment and the antiradical politics of the era. Doing so allowed politicians to broaden the net of anti-Asian exclusion to include South Asians. While their rhetoric echoed the anti-Asian language used to justify the exclusion of the Chinese and Japanese who had come before them, legislators also emphasized South Asians' political activism to legitimize their exclusion. 19

Mireya Loza explores another unintended consequence of the 1917 Immigration Act. The confluence of World War I, the passage of the 1917 act, and the return home of many Mexican nationals who did not want to risk being drafted into the U.S. Army created far-reaching anxieties about labor shortages in agriculture, railroads, mining, and construction. Leaders from each of these industries pressured the secretary of labor to find a way to work around the 1917 Immigration Act and create a guest worker program expansive enough to include entire families, not just men as the bracero program later would. This World War I precedent helped influential agribusinesses to make a case to exempt Mexicans from the quota systems passed in 1921 and 1924 and sent the message that Mexicans could be valued as workers but not as potential citizens. 20

The next three articles focus on the creation of apparatuses and institutions that emerged from increasingly restrictive immigration laws and shaped the future of immigration restriction. Adam Goodman examines the passionate debates over citizenship tests that vexed the nation during the first two decades of the twentieth century. His essay contributes to an emerging body of scholarship that seeks to connect more explicitly debates over immigration restriction and naturalization reform. It is not by chance that the 1924 Immigration Act was the first immigration law that explicitly linked the ability to immigrate to the ability to naturalize. Ashley Johnson Bavery and Romeo Guzmán focus on the impact of immigration control on two different groups, bureaucrats and immigrants. Bavery explores how the Border Patrol's efforts to contain illegality along the northern border after the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act set an important precedent for how it would soon operate along the southern border, a history that remains largely absent in the literature. Guzmán, conversely, shifts the focus to the migrants affected by the new regulations to provide a new perspective on the strategies that migrants deployed to navigate those new requirements. 21

Adam Goodman considers World War I as a pivotal moment in national debates about immigration, labor, and belonging. In 1914, amid calls for “100 percent Americanism” and complaints about the low naturalization rates among immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, bureaucrats at the recently established Bureau of Naturalization launched a multiyear effort to create a citizenship textbook. Although the textbook never came to fruition, the agency's efforts to define and impose a homogenous national identity revealed the dynamic and contested nature of citizenship during the war years and shaped how Americans and politicians during the 1920s and beyond thought about who could become a citizen. Moreover, the textbook project helped the fledgling bureau gain a foothold in the burgeoning administrative state, expanding the federal government's authority over immigration and naturalization. The 1924 Immigration Act permanently connected immigration and naturalization by barring the entry of immigrants ineligible for citizenship. To end a decade-long debate over racial eligibility to citizenship, the act declared that any person ineligible to naturalize was now ineligible to immigrate. The rationale and rhetoric behind this decision echoed many of the discussions underlying the textbook project. 22

Ashley Johnson Bavery demonstrates that current tools of border politics and policing—especially the rhetoric of criminality and disorder justifying the use of state violence—have a long history. In the years immediately after the 1924 Immigration Act, border patrolmen on the U.S.-Canada border modeled their force on the U.S. Army and initiated coercive practices to manufacture an immigration crisis that justified their permanent placement on the border. Bavery's article shows how the policies and practices set in place along the northern border, in cities such as Detroit and Buffalo, to contain illegality after the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act influenced the U.S. Border Patrol's role as the focus shifted to the southern border at the beginning of the Great Depression. By the 1930s, the tactics developed along the northern border would inform border policing on the U.S.-Mexico divide and reinforce the centrality of race in policing Latinx migrants. 23

Using a transnational lens, Romeo Guzmán focuses on how Mexican migrants responded to restrictions in the 1930s. Shifting perspectives, he approaches Mexican migrants as Mexican nationals residing abroad rather than as Mexican immigrants. The Mexican state, through its consular officials, acknowledged its citizens abroad as transnational subjects who needed help navigating the U.S.-Mexico border after the passage of immigration laws in 1917, 1924, and 1929. By focusing on this transnational consular-migrant network, Guzmán reveals a new story of restriction that examines how Mexican nationals responded to restriction by using their citizenship and connection to the Mexican state to understand and adapt to U.S. immigration law. He also emphasizes the Mexican state's role in helping migrants develop mechanisms to manage the crisis brought on by immigration laws that, in the 1930s, would lead to the voluntary and forced departure of approximately half a million ethnic Mexicans. 24

The last three articles focus on the long-term impact of the immigration system created in the 1920s. Beginning with white nationalists' current efforts to revise and appropriate the history of U.S. immigration to create a narrative of “white extinction,” Alexandra Minna Stern's groundbreaking essay examines the echoes of white nationalist narratives of racial extinction today. Focusing on a largely ignored aspect of immigration history, Yael Schacher explores how the exemptions in immigration law challenge its exclusionary message yet also demonstrate that the lack of clear guidance for these exemptions created a level of uncertainty and unpredictability that left migrants vulnerable to rejection and exploitation. Building on recent trends in the historiography of the carceral state, Carl Lindskoog chronicles the evolution of immigrant incarceration as an instrument of removal, elimination, and social control from the nineteenth century to the present. 25

Alexandra Minna Stern analyzes the continuities and discontinuities in xenophobia, white nationalism, antisemitism, and eugenic thought over the past century. She delves deeply into contemporary demographic anxieties about an increasingly multicultural country, which have led to the revival of early twentieth-century xenophobes such as Madison Grant. This revival builds on white nationalists' fixation on the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which they regard as the demographic point of no return and the pinnacle of an insidious Jewish-engineered plot to destroy the United States. Stern's article ends with a close examination of Harry H. Laughlin, an influential eugenicist appointed by Rep. Albert Johnson (co-author of the 1924 restriction act) to serve as a eugenics expert to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization after he testified before the committee in June 1920. Laughlin's nativist policy proposals reverberate to this day, particularly in the restrictionist efforts of Stephen Miller, special adviser on immigration to former president Donald J. Trump. 26

Yael Schacher uses the passage of the 1917 Immigration Act to challenge our understanding of the history of asylum in the United States. Her article shows that, although Congress formalized the application process for asylum only in the late twentieth century, immigrants have been seeking asylum in the United States in different ways for over a century. The passage of the 1917 Immigration Act marked a pivotal moment in this history. Schacher's essay focuses on an exception to the literacy test in the 1917 immigration law for those seeking admission “to avoid religious persecution,” which restrictionists of the 1920s believed was a loophole that allowed for the admission of Jewish and Syrian refugees. It recovers the stories of the claims of Jewish and Syrian women refugees who were victims of sexual violence and resorted to the religious exemption to make a case for asylum because U.S. immigration policy did not recognize sex or gender as an independent ground for persecution. 27

Carl Lindskoog argues that immigration restriction and enforcement in the 1920s are a critical chapter in America's history of migration, race, and empire. His essay cogently shows that the passage of the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts along with the creation of the Border Patrol in 1924 and the criminalization of border crossing in 1929 built on earlier efforts to use incarceration to eliminate Indigenous people from their lands and control free and enslaved African Americans and Chinese immigrants. Lindskoog's tracing of the government's use of immigration detention back to its nineteenth-century origins is a critical addition to our understanding of the history of incarceration as a tool of removal, elimination, and social control used by American officials. He reveals settler colonialism as a process that seeks to eliminate Indigenous people so that the land can be permanently occupied by the white settler population and that seeks to marginalize and render permanently exploitable other nonwhite groups on whose labor it relies. Broadening the lens also allows Lindskoog to capture the challenges to such a system through campaigns of civil disobedience, protests, and attacks against racist policies that enable this violence. 28

Erika Lee 's epilogue connects the historical developments traced in the contributions to this special issue to the present and demonstrates how restrictionists can successfully exploit a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic to advance an agenda that has been over a century in the making. What is happening today has long historical antecedents, but the scale of the attacks against legal and irregular immigration is new. A century ago, much of the infrastructure, bureaucracy, and technologies of control were still in development. Today, immigration is under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, the largest bureau in U.S. history, which draws on huge budgets and deploys vast personnel. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the largest police force in the country. 29

The scholarship on the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts is rich, vibrant, and growing. This special issue offers only a sample of these developments, and it therefore presents an opportunity to reflect on topics that deserve more attention: the role of the courts in immigration legislation, the experiences of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, as well as more attention to disability and sexuality and gender as they intersected with immigration, are just a few that stand out. Our hope is that this special issue will generate many other possible avenues of research. 30

A century after the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, “an acrid odor of the 1920s is again in the air.” Today's pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric, the xenophobic attacks against Asian Americans, and the relentless push for more restrictive and dehumanizing immigration laws all have origins in the rhetoric, violence, and restrictionism that culminated in the passage of the 1924 act. Then, as now, immigration restriction intersected with the systematic marginalization, segregation, and criminalization of other “undesirable” groups in U.S. society and was an integral component of larger debates about citizenship and belonging. As many of the articles demonstrate, the histories of anti-Black racism, anti-Asian xenophobia, and anti-Semitism have always been profoundly intertwined. 31

Taken together, the essays presented here demonstrate that it is impossible to understand the 1920s, and U.S. history more generally, without immigration history. We hope that this special issue will move this history to the forefront of any discussion or teaching of the 1920s and the impact those years have had on our present moment. The right to enter and the right to safety are once again in question and are increasingly urgent issues as global pandemics, climate change, and international conflicts put receiving countries to the test.

I wish to thank Erika Lee, Kevin Kenny, Hardeep Dhillon, Torrie Hester, Jane Hong, Ben Irvin, and the anonymous readers for the JAH for their feedback on this introduction.

Prescott F. Hall, “Immigration Restriction and World Eugenics,” Journal of Heredity , 10 (March 1919), 126. Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921); Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921); Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924). For recent scholarship that challenges the persistent assumption that these two laws marked the beginning of immigration restriction in U.S. history, see Torrie Hester, Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy (Philadelphia, 2017); Adam Goodman, The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Princeton, 2020); Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York, 2016); Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill, 2003); Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2018); and Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Y. Hsu, and María Cristina García, eds., A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924–1965 (Urbana, 2019). Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917).

Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917). Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921). Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 79 Stat. 911 (1965).

Nationality Act of 1790, 1 Stat. 103, chap. 3 (1790). Ozawa v. United States , 260 U.S. 178, 197 (1922). Amanda Frost, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers (Boston, 2021); Kunal Madhukar Parker, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (Cambridge, Eng., 2015).

Page Act of 1875, 18 Stat. 477, chap. 141 (1875). Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Princeton, 2012), 54; Hirota, Expelling the Poor; Gerald L. Neuman, “The Lost Century of American Immigration Law (1776–1875),” Columbia Law Review , 93 (Dec. 1993), 1833–1901; George Anthony Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion (Urbana, 1999); Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). Kerry L. Abrams, “Poligamy, Prostitution, and the Federalization of Immigration Law,” Columbia Law Review , 105 (April 2005), 641–716. On the intersection of gender and naturalization, see Candice Lewis Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (1998; Berkeley, 2018).

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 22 Stat. 58, chap. 126 (1882). Immigration Act of 1882, 22 Stat. 214 (1882). Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York, 2005); Marylin Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, Eng., 2008); Erika Lee, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian Exclusion in the Americas,” Pacific Historical Review , 76 (Nov. 2007), 537–62; Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question: Gold Rushes and Global Politics (New York, 2022); Elliott Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era to World War II (Chapel Hill, 2014). Jane H. Hong, Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (Chapel Hill, 2019).

Immigration Act of 1882, 22 Stat. 214 (1882). Deirdre M. Moloney, National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy since 1882 (Chapel Hill, 2012). Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2009); Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis, 2002). Julio Capó Jr., “Queer Border Crossings,” Modern American History , 2 (no. 1, 2019), 59–63.

Douglas C. Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Chicago, 2016); Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disabled upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (Columbus, 2018); Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore, 2003); Nancy J. Hirschmann, Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging (Philadelphia, 2014); Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York, 2019); Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley, 2006); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley, 2015); David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, “The Eugenic Atlantic: Race, Disability, and the Making of an International Eugenic Science, 1800–1945,” Disability and Society , 18 (Dec. 2003), 843–64; Peter Schrag, Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism and Immigration (Berkeley, 2010). Lee, America for Americans . Katherine Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Cambridge, Mass., 2018). “Table 1: Nativity of the Population and Place of Birth of the Native Population: 1850 to 1990,” in “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 2000,” by Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Feb. 2006, p. 26, https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2006/demo/POP-twps0081.pdf . Andrew Kohut, “From the Archives: In '60s Americans Gave Thumbs-up to Immigration Law that Changed the Nation,” Sept. 20, 2019, Pew Research Center , http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/04/50-years-later-americans-give-thumbs-up-to-immigration-law-that-changed-the-nation/ .

Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917). On the intersection between war and migration throughout the twentieth century, see Maddalena Marinari, “Migration, War, and the Transformation of the U.S. Population,” in Cambridge History of America and the World , vol. IV: 1945–Present , ed. David C. Engerman, Max Friedman, and Melani McAlister (Chicago, 2021), 419–39; Ellen Wu, “It's Time to Center War in U.S. Immigration History,” Modern American History , 2 (July 2019), 215–35. Maddalena Marinari, Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965 (Chapel Hill, 2020); Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, 2002); Zolberg, Nation by Design . For the act's provisions on disability, see Baynton, Defectives in the Land . For the act's effect on immigrants espousing ideologies regarded as threats to American democracy, see Julia Rose Kraut, Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 2020).

Robert DeCourcy Ward, “The New Immigration Act,” North American Review , 185 (July 1907), 593. On the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907, see Eiichiro Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire (Oakland, 2019), 96–97. Douglas Baynton, “Defectives in the Land: Disability and American Immigration Policy, 1882–1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History , 24 (Spring 2005), 33.

Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924). U.S. Congress, House, “A Bill to Provide for the Deportation of Certain Undesirable Aliens,” 66 Cong., 2 sess. Cus. 172-74 593 1920 H. R. 11118 May 10, 1920. S. Deborah Kang, The   Ins   on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917–1954 (New York, 2017); Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2017); Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley, 2010).

Kevin Kenny, “Mobility and Sovereignty: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Immigration Restriction,” Journal of American History , 109 (Sept. 2022), 284–97; Seema Sohi, “Barred Zones, Rising Tides, and Radical Struggles: The Antiradical and Anti-Asian Dimensions of the 1917 Immigration Act,” ibid ., 298–309; Mireya Loza, “‘Let Them Bring Their Families’: The Experiences of the First Mexican Guest Workers, 1917–1922,” ibid ., 310–23. Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921); Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924). Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 22 Stat. 58, chap. 126 (1882). Immigration Act of 1882, 22 Stat. 214 (1882).

Kenny, “Mobility and Sovereignty,” 284–97.

Sohi, “Barred Zones, Rising Tides, and Radical Struggles.” Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917).

Loza, “‘Let Them Bring Their Families.’” Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917).

Adam Goodman, “Defining American: The Bureau of Naturalization's Attempt to Inculcate ‘the Soul of America’ in Immigrants during World War I,” Journal of American History , 109 (Sept. 2022), 324–35. Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924). Ashley Johnson Bavery, “Militarizing the Northern Border: State Violence and the Formation of the U.S. Border Patrol,” Journal of American History , 109 (Sept. 2022), 362–74; Romeo Guzmán, “Paper Trails: Repatriates, Mexican Consuls, and Transnational Mobility during the Great Depression,” ibid ., 336–47.

Goodman, “Defining American.” Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Bavery, “Militarizing the Northern Border.” Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Guzmán, “Paper Trails.” Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917); Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924); U.S. Congress, House, “A Bill to Provide for the Deportation of Certain Undesirable Aliens,” 66 Cong., 2 sess. Cus. 172-74 593 1920 H. R. 11118 May 10, 1920.

Alexandra Minna Stern, “From ‘Race Suicide’ to ‘White Extinction’: White Nationalism, Nativism, and Eugenics over the Past Century,” Journal of American History , 109 (Sept. 2022), 348–61; Yael Schacher, “Return of the Repressed: Asylum in the 1920s and Today,” ibid ., 375–87; Carl D. Lindskoog, “Migration, Racial Empire, and the Carceral Settler State,” ibid ., 388–98.

Stern, “From ‘Race Suicide’ to ‘White Extinction.’” Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 79 Stat. 911 (1965). Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Schacher, “Return of the Repressed.” Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917).

Lindskoog, “Migration, Racial Empire, and the Carceral Settler State.” Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921); Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Erica Lee, “Epilogue: A New Era of Anti-Immigrant Hate and Immigration Restriction,” Journal of American History , 109 (Sept. 2022), 399–407.

Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921); Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924). John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1869–1925 (New Brunswick, 2002), 332.

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Regions & Countries

Chapter 1: the nation’s immigration laws, 1920 to today.

Fifty years ago, the U.S. enacted a sweeping immigration law, the Immigration and Nationality Act, which replaced longstanding national origin quotas that favored Northern Europe with a new system allocating more visas to people from other countries around the world and giving increased priority to close relatives of U.S. residents.

Just prior to passage of the 1965 law, residents of only three countries—Ireland, Germany and the United Kingdom—were entitled to nearly 70% of the quota visas available to enter the U.S. ( U.S. Department of Justice, 1965 ). 4 Today, immigration to the U.S. is dominated by people born in Asia and Latin America, with immigrants from all of Europe accounting for only 10% of recent arrivals.

The 1965 law undid national origin quotas enacted in the 1920s, which were written into laws that imposed the first numerical limits on immigration. Those laws were the culmination of steadily tightening federal restrictions on immigration that began in the late 1800s with prohibitions or restrictions on certain types of immigrants, such as convicts, in addition to a ban on Chinese migrants and later virtually all Asian migrants.

This chapter explores the history of immigration law in the U.S., focusing on provisions of major legislation from the 20th century onward. Accompanying this chapter is an interactive timeline (below) of U.S. immigration legislation since the 1790s.

New Restrictions in the 1920s

The visa arrangement in place when the 1965 law was passed was a legacy from half a century earlier. At that earlier time, a giant wave of immigration that began in the late 1800s had raised the nation’s population of foreign-born residents to a then-record high of 13.9 million in 1920, making up a near-record 13% of the U.S. population ( Gibson and Jung, 2006 ; Passel and Cohn, 2008 ). 5  The first arrivals in this wave were mainly Northern Europeans, but by the early 1900s most new arrivals came from Italy, Poland and elsewhere in Southern and Eastern Europe ( Martin, 2011 ).

Nationality quotas were imposed only on Europe, not on countries in the Western Hemisphere. There were no quotas for Asia, because immigration from most countries there already was prohibited through other restrictions imposed in 1875 and expanded in later decades.

These laws were passed against a backdrop of growing federal regulation of immigration, which was mainly controlled by states until a series of Supreme Court rulings in the late 1800s declared that it was a federal responsibility. Aside from country limits, federal laws already in place barred immigration by criminals, those deemed “lunatics” or “idiots,” and people unable to support themselves, among others ( U.S. Department of Homeland Security ). These laws also required that immigrants older than 16 prove they could read English or some other language. The federal immigration bureaucracy, created in 1891, grew in the 1920s with creation of the Border Patrol and an appeals board for people excluded from the country ( U.S. Department of Homeland Security ).

Immigration slowed sharply after the 1920s. But there were some exceptions to U.S. immigration restrictions. For example, because of labor shortages during World War II, the U.S. and Mexico signed an agreement in 1942 creating the Bracero program to allow Mexican agricultural workers to enter the U.S. temporarily. The program lasted until 1964.

Longstanding bans on immigration from Asia were lifted in the 1940s and 1950s. A prohibition on Chinese immigration enacted in 1882 was repealed in 1943. The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act included the first quotas, though small, allowing immigrants from Asian nations, and created a preference system among quota visas that included highly skilled workers for the first time.

President Harry S. Truman, who opposed national origin quotas, appointed a commission to review the nation’s immigration policy after Congress passed the 1952 law over his veto. The commission’s report criticized the national origin quotas for perpetuating racial and national discrimination. The commission recommended that national origin quotas be replaced by higher limits with priority status based on granting asylum, reunifying families and meeting the nation’s labor needs ( President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization, 1953 ). Congress did not act on those recommendations, but in 1953 it did approve a commission proposal for separate quotas for refugees (Martin, 2011).

The 1965 Law Brings Major Change

It was not until 1965, when amendments were passed to the Immigration and Naturalization Act, that the old national origins system was abolished.

Instead, the new law emphasized visas for family and employment categories, but exempted spouses, parents and minor children of U.S. citizens from those visa limits. That exemption, and other priority given to family members of U.S. residents, meant that about three-quarters of visas were set aside for relatives of those already in the U.S.—putting the emphasis in U.S. immigration policy on family reunification.

Most remaining visas were for employment purposes, given to people with certain job skills and their family members. The Labor Department was required to certify that an American worker was not available to fill the job of the visa seeker and that U.S. workers would not be harmed if the visa were issued (Martin, 2011).

The 1965 law also included a quota for refugees, who were granted 6% of annual visas, compared with 74% for families; 10% for professionals, scientists and artists; and 10% for workers in short supply in the country ( Kritz and Gurak, 2005 ). Later, the Refugee Act of 1980 separated refugee admissions from the overall quota system, expanded the definition of a refugee and set up comprehensive procedures for handling refugees.

Scholars attribute passage of the 1965 law in part to the era’s civil rights movement, which created a climate for changing laws that allowed racial or ethnic discrimination, as well as to the growing clout of groups whose immigration had been restricted (Martin, 2011). The economy was healthy, allaying concerns that immigrants would compete with U.S.-born workers ( Reimers, 1992 ). Some, however, say that geopolitical factors were more important, especially the image of the U.S. abroad in an era of Cold War competition with Russia ( FitzGerald and Cook-Martin, 2015 ). Labor unions, which had opposed higher immigration levels in the past, supported the 1965 law, though they pushed for changes to tighten employment visas. And political players changed: President Lyndon B. Johnson lobbied hard for the bill, and a new generation of congressional leaders created a friendlier environment for it (Martin, 2011).

Its sponsors praised the law for its fairness but downplayed its potential impact on immigration flows. “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” Johnson said in remarks at the signing ceremony . “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

Laws Since 1965

In the 1970s and early 1980s, new laws mainly focused on the growing flow of refugees from Southeast Asia. Since then, concerns about unauthorized immigration have guided the nation’s immigration policy agenda. In 1986, Congress addressed the growing issue of unauthorized immigration with the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which offered temporary protection from deportation and legal permanent resident status to millions of people who had lived in the country since the 1980s. Roughly 2.7 million people were given legal status under the law’s general legalization or its special program for farmworkers.

The Immigration Act of 1990 increased the number of visas for legal immigrants coming for family and employment reasons and created a new category of visas for “diversity immigrants.” Among other provisions, it also created a new type of relief from deportation for nationals of countries undergoing armed conflicts, environmental or health disasters, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions,” known as “temporary protected status,” which has been used mainly by Central American immigrants.

The primary emphasis of more recent immigration legislation has been to reduce government benefits to immigrants, increase border security and provide broader reasoning for excluding immigrants on terrorism grounds ( Migration Policy Institute, 2013 ).

Notable exceptions to that pattern were President Barack Obama’s two recent executive actions on unauthorized immigration—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012 and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) in 2014. DACA allowed young adults, ages 15 to 30, who had been brought illegally to the U.S. as children to apply for deportation relief and a temporary work permit. In 2014, the president eliminated the age limits for DACA eligibility. Under DAPA, some unauthorized immigrants with U.S.-born children were allowed to apply for deportation relief and a work permit. The 2014 actions are on hold because of a legal challenge filed by 26 states ( Lopez and Krogstad, 2015 ).

• Although these three nations were allowed 108,931 visas out of the total quota-visa allotment of 158,561, not all visas were used, and the three nations represented 57% of actual immigrants admitted under the national origins quotas in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1965. ↩
• From 1860 to 1920, the foreign-born share of the population fluctuated between 13% and 15%. ↩
• The 1921 law had set quotas based on the 1910 foreign-born population of each nationality. ↩
• Massey and Pren (2012) argue that the end of the Bracero program caused the surge in unauthorized immigration. ↩

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December 2019

The Effects of Immigration on the Economy: Lessons from the 1920s Border Closure

This paper is now published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

A common refrain in discussions of immigration policy is the concern that high rates of immigration result in fewer job opportunities and lower wages for U.S. workers. As economic historians, we seek to study the effects of past immigration restrictions in order to produce hard evidence that might inform policy moving forward. What happens to regional labor markets when immigration is cut? Do immigration quotas improve labor market prospects or raise wages for U.S.-born workers? These are important questions that demand rigorous evaluation.

In a new working paper (PDF)  with Philipp Ager of the University of Southern Denmark, Elior Cohen of UCLA, and Casper W. Hansen of the University of Copenhagen, we measure exposure of U.S. regional labor markets to national immigration quotas set in the 1920s—quotas that ultimately cut immigration to the U.S. by more than 80 percent. We find that these strict immigration quotas did not result in higher wages for U.S.-born workers. Instead, wages fell for U.S. workers in labor markets that were most affected by the decline in immigrant numbers while ongoing industrial and labor market transitions were accelerated. In rural areas, the farming industry moved toward automation. In urban areas, labor markets moved toward higher-skilled manufacturing.

While some of these effects are what policymakers at the time intended, others—for example the decrease in wages—are not. The closing of the border to mass migration in the 1920s was one of the most fundamental changes to U.S. immigration policy in the past century. Our analysis of the effects of these changes provides an important cautionary tale of how immigration policies can produce unintended consequences for U.S. workers and labor markets.

Our research setting

Before 1920, immigration from Europe to the U.S. was almost entirely unrestricted. In the 1920s, Congress passed a series of immigration quotas. The quotas were applied on a country-by-country basis and therefore restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe more than immigration from Northern and Western Europe. Ultimately, immigration to the U.S. fell from around 1 million people a year to 150,000 people a year.

Because immigrants from certain countries tend to settle in areas with established networks of others from their home country, some U.S. labor markets were more “exposed” to the 1920s immigration quotas than others. Labor markets that had larger clusters of Russians or Italians, for example, were more affected by the policy than areas with clusters of Irish and Germans. All of this gave us a valuable setting for understanding how immigration quotas have historically affected exposed regional economies.

Unintended consequences of the 1920s quotas—and different effects in rural and urban areas

Our paper is a case study that examines the regional labor market effects of one period of severe immigration restrictions. While the labor market and economic conditions of today are of course very different than those of 100 years ago, the research illustrates how policies to reduce immigration can have unintended consequences.

In the 1920s, policymakers reduced immigration with several cultural and economic goals in mind. One economic goal was to reduce the number of low-skilled workers in the U.S. economy, therefore allowing manufacturing to evolve in the direction of higher-skilled, higher productivity manufacturing activity. Another was to boost wages of U.S.-born workers—and in particular white U.S.-born workers. Jeremiah Jenks, an economist at Cornell and member of the bipartisan Dillingham Commission for the study of immigration in Congress, wrote in 1912 that “it is undoubtedly true that the availability of the large supply of recent immigrant labor has prevented an increase in wages which otherwise would have resulted during recent years from the increased demand for labor.”

The first goal of the commission was achieved. In urban areas exposed to the immigration quotas, many foreign-born workers were replaced by U.S.-born workers who were higher-skilled. The new arrivals filled only 50 percent of low-skilled blue-collar positions previously held by immigrants, contributing—as policymakers wanted—to a shift toward more skill-intensive manufacturing practices. However, policymakers did not anticipate that it would be Mexican migrants (who were unrestricted by the quota policy) and not U.S. workers that would ultimately move in to those vacant low-skilled positions in U.S. cities.

The post-quota job prospects were less optimistic for U.S.-born workers in rural areas. In rural areas, new quotas resulted in fewer workers, but those workers were not replaced with U.S.-born workers. Instead, land owners largely invested in capital and technology to replace them, forcing many U.S.-born workers to move out of rural areas.

An additional unintended consequence was the effect on wages, as we find that the immigration quotas established in the 1920s didn’t boost wages for workers anywhere. In both the urban and rural areas that lost the largest number of immigrant workers, occupation-based earnings of the U.S.-born actually declined after border closure by 0.5 percent for every 1 percentage point difference in quota exposure in urban areas and by 0.3 percent for every 1 percentage point difference in quota exposure in rural areas. Ironically, the new workers that moved in to U.S. cities post-quota created more competition than the immigrant workers policymakers had tried to expel, thereby pushing down wages for workers who’d been there all along.

Taken together, our findings suggest that policymakers debating immigration quotas or other restrictions—for example the debate around the 2017 RAISE Act—need to consider the possibility of unintended consequences. Though some argue that immigrants “take jobs” from U.S. workers, and therefore U.S. workers will benefit if immigration is restricted, our research suggests the economic effects of restricting immigration are not so straightforward. While lost immigrant workers can be replaced by new workers (for example through outsourcing), they can also be replaced by new capital (for example through automation), which in turn might also replace U.S.-born workers.

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Immigration in The 1920s

25 million "new immigrants".

The 1920s unfolded at the tail end of the greatest wave of immigration in American history. Between 1880 and 1920, more than 25 million foreigners arrived on American shores, transforming the country. The immigrant surge of the late-19th and early-20th centuries was distinctive in its size, its demographics, and its impact upon American culture and society. More than 80% of the arrivals after 1890 were so-called "New Immigrants," natives of Southern and Eastern Europe, culturally and ethnically perceived to be quite different from the Germans and Britons who'd embodied the bulk of the immigration into the United States in earlier periods . Italians, Poles, Jews, and Slavs—ethnic groups rarely encountered en masse earlier in American history—arrived in large numbers. They also departed in large numbers. The New Immigrants were distinctive from earlier migrants in that most didn't want to stay. These immigrants, mostly male and mostly young, hoped to earn enough money during a temporary stay in America to be able to afford an increased standard of living upon returning to their homeland. 

Something between 50% and 80% of the New Immigrants are believed to have eventually returned to their countries of origin. The exceptions were Jews (who mostly came from Russia, and only 4% of whom repatriated) and Irish (9%), two groups that tended to stay in America permanently because they faced religious persecution, political oppression, and economic privation back home.

Heyday of the Urban Ethnic Enclave

Despite high rates of repatriation among the New Immigrants as a whole, enough migrants put down roots in America to boost the foreign-born population of the country to record levels—just under 15% in the Censuses of 1920 and 1930. 

While the vast majority of the population of the United States—always more than 85%—remained native-born citizens, an especially heavy concentration of immigrants in major cities created the feeling of a foreign takeover. By 1920, 42% of New Yorkers, 42% of San Franciscans, and 41% of Chicagoans were foreign-born.

Immigrants in these bustling cities tended to congregate together with their countrymen: the 1920s were the heyday of the urban ethnic enclave. Immigrants, many speaking little or no English, settled together with their compatriots and forged close-knit communities, often boasting ethnic shops, ethnic markets, ethnic banks, ethnic clubs, ethnic cinemas, and even ethnic radio stations, broadcasting in the mother tongue. 

These invaluable, if insular, community institutions only lost their grip on ethnic populations when overwhelmed by the spread of American mass culture during the 1920s. The chain store, the bank branch, the national radio broadcast, and the Hollywood motion picture created, in some cases for the first time, a real common ground that crossed ethnic boundaries in America's cities.

The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance

The patterns of migration and settlement common to the New Immigrants were in some ways mirrored by those of American Blacks. Employment opportunities created by World War I spurred the "Great Migration," the mass movement of African Americans out of the rural South and into the urban North. 

In the cities of the North, Blacks built their own ethnic communities, not unlike those of their immigrant counterparts. New York's Harlem became the center of African-American cultural life in the United States, with a literary, artistic, musical, and political scene so vibrant it became known as the Harlem Renaissance. 

African Americans rallied around Marcus Garvey—himself an immigrant from Jamaica—to create the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the most assertive Black political movement seen to date in the United States. Musical geniuses like Louis Armstrong developed a new form of popular music—jazz—that many consider, to this day, to be America's greatest contribution to human culture. 

And a cadre of talented writers— Langston Hughes , Claude McKay , and Zora Neale Hurston prominent among them—forever changed American literature .

Nativist Backlash

The development of large, thriving communities of immigrants and minorities generated a considerable backlash among native-born Americans who feared they were losing their cities to "undesirable" newcomers. 

Prior to the coming of the New Immigrants, a large majority of the American population—more than 60%—could trace their ancestry back to either the British Isles or to Germany. These old-line Americans, mostly fair-skinned and Protestant, tended to view the darker-complected, mostly Catholic or Jewish New Immigrants as not just different but "inferior"—members of lesser races, likely lacking the Anglo-Saxon temperament many believed necessary to maintain a free society. 

The New Immigrants, in the prejudiced imagination of many native-born Americans, lacked self-discipline and work ethic, lived immoral lifestyles, and couldn't be trusted not to throw their votes—should they attain citizenship—to corrupt machine politicians or radical troublemakers. The New Immigrants generated a renewed nativism in hostile reaction to their arrival on American shores.

Americanization Campaigns Stir the Melting Pot

The most benign strain of that nativist sentiment came in the form of aggressive "Americanization" campaigns, efforts to remake the immigrants into good Americans through work, education, and social reform. 

Henry Ford was a leading exponent of the movement, declaring that "these men of many nations must be taught American ways, the English language, and the right way to live." 

Ford forced immigrant workers at his automotive factories to attend lengthy Americanization courses, in which they were schooled in the English language and Ford's conservative ideology. At the end of each course, Ford even organized an ornate pageant in which workers clad in outlandish versions of their countries' native costume descended into a giant melting pot, only to climb out the other side wearing suits and waving American flags. 

Ford's Americanization program was backed by coercion, as the company's Sociological Department investigated the home lives of its workers. Any Ford employee who failed to maintain a middle-class American lifestyle that met Ford's standards could lose his job.

Slamming the Door: National Origins and Immigration Restriction

Other nativists lacked Ford's hope that the New Immigrants could be remade into good Americans, and focused their efforts on blocking immigration altogether. 

Prior to 1921, with one exception—the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 —immigration into the United States had never been systematically restricted by federal law. That changed with the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the 1924 Immigration Act, which imposed for the first time, a limit on the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States. 

The two laws were targeted squarely at the New Immigrants: they established a new National Origins system that created different quotas for immigrants from each country, pegged to those countries' representation in the population of the United States in either 1910 (the 1921 law) or 1890 (the 1924 law). Because countries like Italy and Poland had contributed a tiny proportion of America's population before 1890, they received miniscule quotas. 

The effect was startling. Prior to the quota, immigrants were arriving at a rate of more than 850,000 per year, with just under 700,000 of those coming from Southern and Eastern Europe and only 175,000 coming from Northern and Western Europe. The strict 1924 act imposed a very mild restriction on immigration from Northern and Western Europe, still allowing 140,000 arrivals per year from those countries. But immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was limited to just 22,000 per year, a 97% reduction from pre-restriction levels.

While the immigration restriction acts of 1921 and 1924 well reflect the nativist, anti-immigrant attitudes of many Americans during the Roaring '20s, it's important to note that the laws' practical effects weren't as great as one might expect. Because of difficulties in determining the precise proportions of the 1890 population that belonged to each country, the law didn't take effect until 1929, at which point the economic collapse brought about by the onset of the Great Depression naturally reduced the immigrant flow to a trickle.

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• Can Indians Become American Citizens? more... less... " Annotation: In 1923, the Supreme Court ruled that Asian Indians were ineligible for citizenship, even though they were considered “Caucasians.” Bhagat Singh Thind (1892-1967), who was born in Punjab, migrated to the United States in 1913. He attended University of California at Berkeley, and eventually earned a Ph.D. He also served in the U.S. Army during World War I and applied for U.S. citizenship in 1920. Despite a Civil War era law that allowed aliens who had served in the U.S. military to become naturalized citizens, he was turned down. "
• Ellis Island Immigration Oral Histories more... less... "The project is one of the world’s largest and most diverse chronicles of the immigrant experience. It includes nearly 2,000 interviews from passengers, families, immigration officials, military personnel, detainees, and former island employees. The recordings are filled with tales of joy, sorrow, and hope, and cumulatively, they paint an expansive and complex picture of our ancestry and culture. Available to researchers, students, educators, and the general public, the Oral History Project is a unique national totem, and an incredible resource for anyone interested in connecting with the voices that built America."
• DPLA: Primary Source Set: Immigration and Americanization, 1880-1930 more... less... "Between 1880 and 1930, approximately 28 million immigrants entered the United States. In contrast to earlier waves of immigrants, most of whom had originated in western and northern Europe, this group arrived from eastern and southern Europe. As they entered through Ellis Island in New York Harbor and made their way into various new lives—in cities and rural areas coast to coast, from urban tenements to Midwestern farms to seaside towns— they encountered mixed reactions from existing Americans. They also entered into a political climate that was charged by the sweeping immigration restrictions placed on the Chinese in 1882 through the Chinese Exclusion Act. While some Americans favored immigration, many opposed it, and responded during the 1920s by pressing for a tightening of the nation’s borders. This set of photographs, plays, and primary sources allows users to immerse themselves in the debates that surrounded turn-of-the-century immigration and to consider the nature of Americanization."
• Immigration to the United States,1789-1930 more... less... "This digital collection of historical materials from Harvard's libraries, archives, and museums documents voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the start of the Great Depression." Most materials cover the 19th century.
• Letter from the attorney for Warren Wong more... less... transmitting an application for return permit for Warren Wong to the Commissioner-General of Immigration
• Not All Caucasians Are White more... less... "In its decision in the case of U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), the Supreme Court deemed Asian Indians ineligible for citizenship because U.S. law allowed only free whites to become naturalized citizens. The court conceded that Indians were “Caucasians” and that anthropologists considered them to be of the same race as white Americans, but argued that “the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences.”" - History Matters at GMU
• Summary of testimony and exhibits in the case of Goon Yuey Wah and Goon Yuck Wah more... less... applicants for admission as the sons of Goon Mar San, alleged native born citizen of the United States
• Telegram stating that Goon Yuey Wah and Goon Yuck Wah were denied
• Who Was Shut Out?: Immigration Quotas, 1925–1927 more... less... "This table shows the annual immigration quotas under the 1924 Immigration Act. " History Matters at GMU
• “I Was More of a Citizen” more... less... "In this interview for the radio program “Nosotros Trabajamos en la Costura”(We Work in the Garment Industry), garment worker Luisa Lopez told how she faced discrimination from European immigrant workers when she went to work in garment factories in the 1920s. Yet sometimes alliances crossed ethnic lines: Lopez found an ally in an Italian-American socialist. " History Matters - GMU
• “Shut the Door”: A Senator Speaks for Immigration Restriction more... less... "During congressional debate over the 1924 Act, Senator Ellison DuRant Smith of South Carolina drew on the racist theories of Madison Grant to argue that immigration restriction was the only way to preserve existing American resources. Although blatant racists like Smith were in the minority in the Senate, almost all senators supported restriction, and the Johnson-Reed bill passed with only six dissenting votes. " GMU - History Matters
• “The Senate’s Declaration of War” more... less... "...Japan Times & Mail editorial, entitled “The Senate’s Declaration of War,” denounced the 1924 immigration law and speculated on the reasons for the decision. The paper suggested that the Senate “deliberately” sought to “insult” the Japanese."
• An “Un-American Bill” more... less... "For example, on April 8, 1924, Robert H. Clancy, a Republican congressman from Detroit with a large immigrant constituency, defended the “Americanism” of Jewish, Italian, and Polish immigrants and attacked the quota provisions of the bill as racially discriminatory and “un-American.” " - GMU - History Matters

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U.S. Immigration Timeline

By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 23, 2022 | Original: December 21, 2018

The United States has long been considered a nation of immigrants, but attitudes toward new immigrants by those who came before have vacillated over the years between welcoming and exclusionary. Thousands of years before Europeans began crossing the vast Atlantic by ship and settling en masse, the first immigrants arrived in North America from Asia. They were Native American ancestors who crossed a narrow spit of land connecting Asia to North America at least 20,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age .

By the early 1600s, communities of European immigrants dotted the Eastern seaboard, including the Spanish in Florida, the British in New England and Virginia, the Dutch in New York, and the Swedes in Delaware. Some, including the Pilgrims and Puritans, came for religious freedom. Many sought greater economic opportunities. Still others, including hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, arrived in America against their will.

Below are the events that have shaped the turbulent history of immigration in the United States since its birth.

White People of 'Good Character' Granted Citizenship

January 1776: Thomas Paine publishes a pamphlet, “ Common Sense ,” that argues for American independence. Most colonists consider themselves Britons, but Paine makes the case for a new American. “Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe,” he writes.

March 1790: Congress passes the first law about who should be granted U.S. citizenship. The Naturalization Act of 1790 allows any free white person of “good character,” who has been living in the United States for two years or longer, to apply for citizenship. Without citizenship, nonwhite residents are denied basic constitutional protections, including the right to vote, own property, or testify in court.

August 1790: The first U.S. census takes place. The English are the largest ethnic group among the 3.9 million people counted, though nearly one in five Americans are of African heritage.

Irish Immigrant Wave

1815: Peace is re-established between the United States and Britain after the War of 1812 . Immigration from Western Europe turns from a trickle into a gush, which causes a shift in the demographics of the United States. This first major wave of immigration lasts until the Civil War .

Between 1820 and 1860, the Irish —many of them Catholic—account for an estimated one-third of all immigrants to the United States. Some 5 million German immigrants also come to the United States, many of them making their way to the Midwest to buy farms or settle in cities including Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati.

1819: Many of newcomers arrive sick or dying from their long journey across the Atlantic in cramped conditions. The immigrants overwhelm major port cities, including New York City , Boston , Philadelphia and Charleston. In response, the United States passes the Steerage Act of 1819 requiring better conditions on ships arriving to the country. The Act also calls for ship captains to submit demographic information on passengers, creating the first federal records on the ethnic composition of immigrants to the United States.

1849: America’s first anti-immigrant political party, the Know-Nothing Party forms, as a backlash to the increasing number of German and Irish immigrants settling in the United States.

1875: Following the Civil War, some states passed their own immigration laws. In 1875 the Supreme Court declares that it’s the responsibility of the federal government to make and enforce immigration laws.

Chinese Exclusion Act 

1880: As America begins a rapid period of industrialization and urbanization, a second immigration boom begins. Between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants arrive. The majority are from Southern, Eastern and Central Europe, including 4 million Italians and 2 million Jews . Many of them settle in major U.S. cities and work in factories.

1882: The Chinese Exclusion Act passes, which bars Chinese immigrants from entering the United States. Beginning in the 1850s, a steady flow of Chinese workers had immigrated to America.

They worked in the gold mines,and garment factories, built railroads and took agricultural jobs. Anti-Chinese sentiment grew as Chinese laborers became successful in America. Although Chinese immigrants make up only 0.002 percent of the United States population, white workers blame them for low wages.

The 1882 Act is the first in American history to place broad restrictions on certain immigrant groups.

1891: The Immigration Act of 1891 further excludes who can enter the United States, barring the immigration of polygamists, people convicted of certain crimes, and the sick or diseased. The Act also created a federal office of immigration to coordinate immigration enforcement and a corps of immigration inspectors stationed at principle ports of entry.

Ellis Island Opens

January 1892 : Ellis Island , the United States’ first immigration station, opens in New York Harbor. The first immigrant processed is Annie Moore, a teenager from County Cork in Ireland. More than 12 million immigrants would enter the United States through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954.

1907 : U.S. immigration peaks, with 1.3 million people entering the country through Ellis Island alone.

Photos: Immigration at Ellis Island

February 1907: Amid prejudices in California that an influx of Japanese workers would cost white workers farming jobs and depress wages, the United States and Japan sign the Gentlemen’s Agreement. Japan agrees to limit Japanese emigration to the United States to certain categories of business and professional men. In return, President Theodore Roosevelt urges San Francisco to end the segregation of Japanese students from white students in San Francisco schools.

1910: An estimated three-quarters of New York City’s population consists of new immigrants and first-generation Americans.

New Restrictions at Start of WWI

1917: Xenophobia reaches new highs on the eve of American involvement in World War I . The Immigration Act of 1917 establishes a literacy requirement for immigrants entering the country and halts immigration from most Asian countries.

May 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924 limits the number of immigrants allowed into the United States yearly through nationality quotas. Under the new quota system, the United States issues immigration visas to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States at the 1890 census. The law favors immigration from Northern and Western European countries. Just three countries, Great Britain, Ireland and Germany account for 70 percent of all available visas. Immigration from Southern, Central and Eastern Europe was limited. The Act completely excludes immigrants from Asia, aside from the Philippines, at the time an American colony.

1924 : In the wake of the numerical limits established by the 1924 law, illegal immigration to the United States increases. The U.S. Border Patrol is established to crack down on illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican and Canadian borders into the United States. Many of these early border crossers were Chinese and other Asian immigrants, who had been barred from entering legally.

Mexicans Fill Labor Shortages During WWII

1942: Labor shortages during World War II prompt the United States and Mexico to form the Bracero Program , which allows Mexican agricultural workers to enter the United States temporarily. The program lasts until 1964.

1948: The United States passes the nation’s first refugee and resettlement law to deal with the influx of Europeans seeking permanent residence in the United States after World War II.

1952: The McCarran-Walter Act formally ends the exclusion of Asian immigrants to the United States.

1956-1957 : The United States admits roughly 38,000 immigrants from Hungary after a failed uprising against the Soviet Union . They were among the first Cold War refugees. The United States would admit over 3 million refugees during the Cold War.

1960-1962 : Roughly 14,000 unaccompanied children flee Fidel Castro ’s Cuba and come to the United States as part of a secret, anti-Communism program called Operation Peter Pan.

Quota System Ends

1965: The Immigration and Nationality Act overhauls the American immigration system. The Act ends the national origin quotas enacted in the 1920s which favored some racial and ethnic groups over others.

The quota system is replaced with a seven-category preference system emphasizing family reunification and skilled immigrants. Upon signing the new bill, President Lyndon B. Johnson , called the old immigration system “un-American,” and said the new bill would correct a “cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.”

Over the next five years, immigration from war-torn regions of Asia, including Vietnam and Cambodia , would more than quadruple. Family reunification became a driving force in U.S. immigration.

April-October 1980 : During the Mariel boatlift , roughly 125,000 Cuban refugees make a dangerous sea crossing in overcrowded boats to arrive on the Florida shore seeking political asylum.

Amnesty to Undocumented Immigrants

1986: President Ronald Reagan signs into law the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which grants amnesty to more than 3 million immigrants living illegally in the United States.

2001 : U.S. Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) propose the first Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would provide a pathway to legal status for Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the United States illegally by their parents as children. The bill—and subsequent iterations of it—don’t pass.

2012 : President Barack Obama signs Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) which temporarily shields some Dreamers from deportation, but doesn’t provide a path to citizenship.

2017: President Donald Trump issues two executive orders aimed at curtailing travel and immigration from six majority Muslim countries (Chad, Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia) as well as North Korea and Venezuela. Both of these so-called Muslim travel bans are challenged in state and federal courts.

2018: In April 2018, the travel restrictions on Chad are lifted. In June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court uphold a third version of the travel ban on the remaining seven countries.

Immigration Timeline, The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation . LBJ on Immigration, LBJ Presidential Library . The Nation's Immigration Laws, 1920 to Today, Pew Research Center . 1986: Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, Library of Congress .

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Immigration to the United States 1933–41

Many who sought a safe haven from persecution during the 1930s and 1940s found their efforts thwarted by the United States’ restrictive immigration quotas and the complicated, demanding requirements for obtaining visas. Public opinion in the United States did not favor increased immigration, resulting in little political pressure to change immigration policies. These policies prioritized economic concerns and national security.

America’s restrictive immigration laws reflected the national climate of isolationism, xenophobia, antisemitism, racism, and economic insecurity after World War I.

The United States had no designated refugee policy during the Nazi period. It only had an immigration policy. Those escaping Nazi persecution had to navigate a deliberate and slow immigration process. Strict quotas limited the number of people who could immigrate each year.

Though at least 110,000 Jewish refugees escaped to the United States from Nazi-occupied territory between 1933 and 1941, hundreds of thousands more applied to immigrate and were unsuccessful.

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1924 immigration act.

In 1924, the United States Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act , revising American immigration laws around individuals’ “national origins.” The act set quotas, a specific number of visas available each year for each country. The quotas, inspired in part by American proponents of eugenics , were calculated to privilege “desirable” immigrants from northern and western Europe. They limited immigrants considered less “racially desirable,” including southern and eastern European Jews. Many people born in Asia and Africa were barred from immigrating to the United States entirely on racial grounds.

The United States had no refugee policy, and American immigration laws were neither revised nor adjusted between 1933 and 1941. The Johnson-Reed Act remained in place until 1965.

Potential immigrants had to apply for one of the slots designated for their country of birth, not their country of citizenship. After Great Britain, Germany had the second highest allocation of visas: 25,957 (27,370, after Roosevelt merged the German and Austrian quotas after the Anschluss ). The total allowed was approximately 153,000.

The quota was the maximum number of people who could immigrate, not a target that State Department officials tried to reach. Unused quota slots did not carry into the next year.

Requirements for Immigrating to the United States

Most potential immigrants to the United States had to collect many types of documents in order to obtain an American immigration visa , to leave Germany, and to travel to a port of departure from Europe. Prospective applicants first registered with the consulate and then were placed on a waiting list. They could use this time to gather all the necessary documents needed to obtain a visa, which included identity paperwork, police certificates, exit and transit permissions, and a financial affidavit. Many of these papers—including the visa itself—had expiration dates. Everything needed to come together at the same time.

At the beginning of the Great Depression in 1930, President Herbert Hoover issued instructions banning immigrants “likely to become a public charge.” Immigration fell dramatically as a result. Though Franklin D. Roosevelt liberalized the instruction, many Americans continued to oppose immigration on economic grounds (that immigrants would “steal” jobs). Immigrants therefore, had to find an American sponsor who had the financial resources to guarantee they would not become burden on the state. For many immigrants, obtaining a financial sponsor was the most difficult part of the American visa process.

Potential immigrants also needed to have a valid ship ticket before receiving a visa. With the onset of war and the fear that German submarines would target passenger vessels, shipping across the Atlantic became extremely risky. Many passenger lines stopped entirely or at least reduced the number of vessels crossing the ocean, making it more difficult and expensive for refugees to find berths.

Waiting Lists and the Refugee Crisis

In quota year 1939, the German quota was completely filled for the first time since 1930, with 27,370 people receiving visas. In quota year 1940, 27,355 people received visas. The fifteen unused visas were likely the result of a clerical error. It is difficult to estimate how many of these were refugees escaping Nazi persecution. Until 1943, “Hebrew” was a racial category in American immigration law. In 1939–1940, more than 50% of all immigrants to the United States identified themselves as Jewish, but this is likely a low number, since some refugees probably selected a different category (such as “German”) or did not consider themselves Jewish, even if the Nazis did.

Popular Opinion about Refugees in the United States

In spite of the urgency for refugees to escape, American popular opinion was against accepting more new arrivals. A Gallup poll taken on November 24–25, 1938, (two weeks after Kristallnacht ) asked Americans: “Should we allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live?” 72% responded “no.”

After war began in Europe in September 1939, and especially after the German invasion of Western European countries in the spring of 1940, many Americans believed that Germany and the Soviet Union were taking advantage of the masses of Jewish refugees to send spies abroad. The State Department cautioned consular officials to exercise particular care in screening applicants. In June 1941, the State Department issued a “relatives rule,” denying visas to immigrants with close family still in Nazi territory.

Aid and Assistance to Refugees

Despite public antipathy to revising American immigration laws, some private citizens and refugee aid organizations stepped in to assist the thousands attempting to flee. Jewish and Christian organizations provided money for food and clothing, transit fare, employment and financial assistance, and help finding affidavits for prospective immigrants without family in the United States. These private organizations enabled thousands to escape who otherwise would not have been able to compile their paperwork and pay for their passage.

Trapped in Nazi-Occupied Territory

On July 1, 1941, the State Department centralized all alien visa control in Washington, DC, so all applicants needed to be approved by a review committee in Washington, and needed to submit additional paperwork, including a second financial affidavit. At the same time, Nazi Germany ordered the United States to shut down its consular offices in all German-occupied territories. After July 1941, emigration from Nazi-occupied territory was virtually impossible.

Between 1938 and 1941, 123,868 self-identified Jewish refugees immigrated to the United States. Many hundreds of thousands more had applied at American consulates in Europe, but were unable to immigrate. Many of them were trapped in Nazi-occupied territory and murdered in the Holocaust .

Series: The United States and the Holocaust

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How German Atheists Made America Great Again

Taken together, two new books tell the century-long story of the revolutionary ideals that transformed the United States, and the counterrevolutionaries who fought them.

By S. C. Gwynne

S.C. Gwynne is the author of “Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War.”

AN EMANCIPATION OF THE MIND: Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America, by Matthew Stewart

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SECOND AMERICAN REPUBLIC: Reconstruction, 1860-1920, by Manisha Sinha

What was the Civil War about? In a word, slavery.

What actually caused the war, however, is a vastly more difficult idea. Try this explanation on for size: The driving force in American politics in the decades after the American Revolution was the rise of an arrogant, ruthless, parasitic oligarchy in the South, built on a foundation of Christian religion and a vision of permanent, God-ordained economic inequality.

Though much of the South was poor, this new aristocracy was vastly rich. Two-thirds of all estates in the United States worth more than $100,000 were in the hands of Southern white men. Their goal in seceding was to undo the basic ideals of the American republic and keep their wealth.

These counterrevolutionaries — for that is what they were — insisted that men were by divine design unequal , both racially and economically. To fight this notion and crush what amounted to an existential threat to democracy, the antislavery movement needed ideas as much as, ultimately, guns.

That’s the narrative that frames Matthew Stewart’s engaging and often surprising new book, “An Emancipation of the Mind. ” The title refers to the rise of new ways of thinking in the antislavery movement, what Stewart calls “the philosophical origins of America’s second revolution.”

The most significant ideas that Stewart traces are religious. From 1770 to 1860, religion in America underwent a massive shift. The number of churches exploded, North and South. Soon, most of these churches, using clear and manifold endorsements of slavery from the Bible (“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ”), were promoting and actively defending the slave republic.

As the antislavery crowd soon learned, it was impossible to spin “slavery is sin” arguments against biblical literalism. Ending slavery, Stewart says, “was hardly part of God’s plan.” This wasn’t just a Southern opinion: Three out of five clerics who published pro-slavery books and articles were educated at Northern divinity schools. Two decades before the outbreak of war, abolitionism was still a skulking pariah, a despised minority in the North as well as the South.

The abolitionists clearly needed help. Enter the Germans, specifically the freethinking Germans whose radical republican philosophy underpinned the failed European revolutions of 1848. “Freidenkers’’ like the theologian David Friedrich Strauss and the philosopher and anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach formulated ideas of the laws of nature and “nature’s God” that were at odds with the tenets of Christianity.

A large group of German intellectuals, fresh from the battles of 1848, arrived on American shores, joined the abolitionist movement and radicalized it. As he did in his 2014 book “Nature’s God,” which traced the way that the heretical philosophies of Spinoza and Lucretius influenced American founders like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, Stewart here argues convincingly that these philosophers found willing listeners in the persons of Abraham Lincoln, who kept Strauss and Feuerbach on his shelf; Frederick Douglass, who saw American Christianity as “the bulwark of slavery”; and the abolitionist firebrand Theodore Parker, whose lectures reached as many as 100,000 people a year in the 1850s.

Wasn’t much of this simply revolutionary atheism? Yes, it was, and it’s a bit of a shock to find out how close Lincoln and Douglass were to these ideas, though they paid lip service to more conventional Christian beliefs when translating them for the public.

The other big idea here — also with help from the Germans, especially Karl Marx (a great admirer of Lincoln, who, Stewart argues, liked him too) — has to do with the economics of slavery. “At the root of the ills of the slave system,” writes Stewart, “lies the extreme economic inequality that it inevitably produces — not just between races but among the white population.”

Between 1852 and 1862, Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote 487 articles for The New York Daily Tribune; Lincoln likely read them . They explained the war as “nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor.”

After the war came Reconstruction. How do you deconstruct Reconstruction? Very, very carefully. It’s one of the toughest, most maddeningly complicated tasks in the writing of American history. That’s because Reconstruction — the word we use to denote the failed post-Civil War attempt to build a more inclusive country — unfolded in different ways in different states, on different timetables and with a wildly proliferating cast of players.

In her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic,” the historian Manisha Sinha not only has taken on this vast subject, but has greatly expanded its definition, both temporally and spatially. Her Reconstruction embraces the Progressive Era, women’s suffrage, the final wars against Native Americans, immigration and even U.S. imperialism in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries. She covers these difficult issues with remarkable skill and clarity.

In Sinha’s telling, the achievements of Reconstruction — we are in the latter 1860s and early 1870s here — are truly amazing. The federal decision to use the Army against recalcitrant ex-Confederates to secure rights for Black people resulted, she writes, in “a brief, shining historical moment when abolition democracy triumphed in much of the South and across the rest of the nation,” which “meant the inauguration of a progressive, interracial democracy.”

These years saw the passage of constitutional amendments that guaranteed citizenship, equal protection under the law and the vote for Black men. They also saw the rise of a powerful Freedmen’s Bureau, Black voting on a massive scale and the election of thousands of Black representatives to national, state and local office. More than 600 Black politicians were elected in the South to state legislatures alone.

Black Americans and freedpeople, Sinha reminds us, were themselves behind much of this change, a process she calls “grass-roots reconstruction.” As she laid out in her 2016 book “ The Slave’s Cause ,” and shows more briefly here, they documented atrocities and pushed to have them exposed, filed petitions, swore out affidavits at the risk of their lives and formed political organizations and lobbies.

But the Second American Republic would soon come crashing down, the victim of another violent counterrevolution whose principal weapons were racial terror and political assassination. In its place rose a New South, where class distinctions were shored up, where the government was by and for white men and where the belief that Black people were inferior to white people was firmly in place. Instead of economic freedom, Americans got debt peonage, stolen wages, criminalized self-employment and a convict leasing system. The great flowering of education during Reconstruction was trampled too as terrorists burned down more than 600 Black schools.

Sinha tells these stories well. She also pushes out beyond the conventionally defined subjects of Reconstruction. In her account, the ascendancy of Jim Crow and the conquest of the West, among other forms of repression, are profoundly connected, and not only because the government failed to protect Black liberty as well as Indigenous land rights and sovereignty. The Army that was raised to fight Southern counterrevolutionaries was redeployed in the West to subjugate Indians. The literacy requirements used to disenfranchise Black Americans in the South also proved effective in targeting immigrants and working-class people in the North.

Still, the ideals of the Second Republic did not completely wither on the vine. Sinha convincingly advances her vision of Reconstruction all the way forward to 1920, when the 19th Amendment granted women’s suffrage. That landmark event was inspired by the marquee equal rights amendments of the Reconstruction era, which, Sinha writes, “bequeathed a legacy of political activism and progressive constitutionalism” on the movement, a breath of air that gave America new life.

AN EMANCIPATION OF THE MIND : Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America | By Matthew Stewart | Norton | 374 pp. | $32.50

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SECOND AMERICAN REPUBLIC : Reconstruction, 1860-1920 | By Manisha Sinha | Liveright | 562 pp. | $39.99