{"id":56436,"date":"2024-05-28T10:00:02","date_gmt":"2024-05-28T15:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=56436"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:46","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:46","slug":"the-100-year-old-racist-law-that-broke-americas-immigration-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/the-100-year-old-racist-law-that-broke-americas-immigration-system\/","title":{"rendered":"The 100-Year-Old Racist Law that Broke America\u2019s Immigration System"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Immigration Act of 1924 is arguably the most restrictive and racist immigration law ever to have been passed by the United States Congress. It was not unprecedented in its restrictive nature: since 1882, Congress had imposed qualitative exclusions on persons deemed likely to become public charges, or otherwise morally or physically deficient. Nor was it unprecedented in its racism: notably, the Chinese and Asiatic exclusion laws of the 19th and early 20th century paved its way. Nevertheless, the 1924 Act marked a historical turning point in immigration policy. And this was because it imposed, for the first time, a numerical ceiling on the number of immigrants admitted into the country; and, in so doing, the law applied a racial hierarchy of desirability to all countries in the world.<\/p>\n

The principle of numerical restriction has remained a normative feature of American immigration policy for a century. The principle of racial desirability was formally repealed in 1965. But even so, it was reproduced in more subtle ways and continues to haunt immigration policy and political discourse to this day.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s hard for many Americans to imagine that before World War I, immigration into the US was basically unrestricted. That is, except for Chinese and other Asians. By 1919, passports were still a new feature of international travel, born of the war. As yet, however, there were no visas, no quotas, no green cards. Inspection was cursory. In fact, a bare 2 percent of those arriving at Ellis Island during its peak decades were turned away.<\/p>\n

But just a few years later, the Immigration Act of 1924 introduced a bold and new restrictive system.1<\/a><\/sup> The numerical limit was set at 150,000 immigrants a year, even though this was just 15% of pre\u2013World War I levels.<\/p>\n

The law was structured as a tripartite border policy, with different conditions imposed on migrants coming from across the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Western Hemisphere. The national origin quotas and Asiatic exclusion were the most odious discriminations of the law.<\/p>\n

For those coming from across the Atlantic, national origin quotas aimed to restrict immigration from eastern, southern, and central Europe. This was because restrictionists opposed the growing population of Jews, Italians, and Slavs\u2014who had, for decades, contributed their brawn and sweat to America\u2019s industrialization and urbanization\u2014as the \u201cdegraded races of Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

For those coming from across the Pacific, the law also excluded from immigration all persons \u201cineligible to citizenship.\u201d This was a legal euphemism for a concept of \u201cwhiteness,\u201d which the US Supreme Court had just constructed the previous year, so as to deny naturalized citizenship to all Asians in 1923.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

But for those migrating from countries within the Western Hemisphere, the new law imposed no numerical quotas, owing to diplomatic and agricultural interests. It went largely unremarked upon at the time, but was no less significant in long run.<\/p>\n

The Immigration Act of 1924 did not, of course, drop from the sky. It was the legislative triumph of several decades of nativist agitation and lobbying. The political history of the lead-up to the bill are instructive, then, both for historical context and for thinking about their afterlives in American politics.<\/p>\n\n

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Related readings<\/div>\n\n
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\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
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\n Interviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n Mae Ngai: \u201cWe\u2019ve Always Had Activists in Our Communities\u201d<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Jilene Chua <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

In his classic intellectual history of American nativism, Strangers in the Land<\/em> (1955), John Higham posited that nativist feeling increased during times of economic downturn and crises of national confidence. As such, he argued that the 1924 Act was a victory of racial nativism, especially scientific racism and eugenics: the decades-long project to establish the biological superiority of \u201cwhites,\u201d especially \u201cAnglo-Saxons\u201d and \u201cNordics.\u201d The act, according to Higham, was a triumph of the \u201cTribal Twenties.\u201d<\/p>\n

Higham\u2019s view\u2014that the 1924 Act was a triumph of eugenics, and, more generally, the unemployment theory of nativism\u2014have long been influential in both academic and popular writing.3<\/a><\/sup> But that is not the whole story.<\/p>\n

Certainly, scientific race theories of the late 19th century, including eugenics, were influential in the paving the way for the 1924 Act. Still, they were not the law\u2019s sole cause.4<\/a><\/sup> In the 1920s, it is true, a more modern bill was needed for regulating and restricting immigration, one based on countries and administered by states. The sublimation of eugenics into an immigration system of countries and national origins achieved two goals at once: the assimilation of European ethnics as white Americans; and the continued exclusion of Asians based on race.<\/p>\n

As for the unemployment theory, a closer examination is called for. In fact, historically, nativist surges occur not<\/em> during cyclical downturns, but, instead, in times of economic expansion and large-scale structural changes. These are times of both opportunity and precarity. New sectors of capital emerge, creating new jobs and stimulating immigration, while capital and jobs in older sectors decline. The pattern is manifest in the three great moments of structural economic change in modern US history:<\/p>\n