Discriminatory 1924 Immigration Act Passed
The 1924 Immigration Act, enacted on this day, is notorious in American history for its “national origins” quota system. By using the 1890 census as its baseline, the system favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe, to the disadvantage of Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa (Latin Americans were unaffected by the law). The quota for each country was 2 percent of the number of people in the U.S. who were recorded as being from that country in the 1890 census.
Between 1900 and 1910, for example, about 100,000 people immigrated to the United States each year from Italy. After 1924, the number fell to 4,000 per year. Spain was limited to 131 immigrants and Greece 100 per year. The law built on the 1921 National Origins Quota Act. The 1924 bill passed the Senate by a vote of 62 to 6.
One section of the law effectively banned all immigration from Asia and is often referred to as the Oriental Exclusion Act.
Because the law was passed in 1924 it is often viewed as a symptom of the nativist, anti-immigration feelings in the country. But in fact, the country and Congress had been debating immigration restriction since at least the mid-19th Century. In 1907 Congress created the Dillingham Commission, a joint committee of the Senate and the House, to study the immigration issue. The commission took over three years, heard from 300 witnesses,spent about $1 million and in 1911 issued 41 reports. In short, anti-immigrant feeling had existed in the U.S. for almost a century by 1924, and the major issue was not whether to restrict immigration but what method should be used to achieve restriction.
Although immigration restriction had a long history, the 1924 Immigration Act and the famous Sacco and Vanzetti case remain in the popular mind as symbols of the anti-immigration attitudes of the 1920s.
The national origins quota was finally eliminated with the Immigration Act of 1965, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law on October 3, 1965, in a ceremony at the Statue of Liberty.
Learn more about the 1924 Immigration Act here.
Read more: Margaret Sands Orchowski, Immigration and the American Dream: Battling the Political Hype and Hysteria (2008)
Learn more about the history of immigration policy: Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (2008)
Read about the racist foundations of the national origins quota: Madison Grant, Passing of the Great Race (1916)
See a timeline on U.S. immigration history here
Hear President Johnson sign the 1965 Immigration Act: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQNP5XKMNls