Immigration Laws In The Early 1900s
The United States has always been a country of immigrants. It was founded by immigrants from Europe who were escaping religious oppression to start a new life on a distant continent, far away from the old world and its problems. This country continued to be a destination for many immigrants. They have traveled here for reasons similar to those of the first settlers. The U.S. had imposed immigration restrictions before, but in the early to mid 1900s, some changes were made that drastically altered the amount of immigrants allowed into the country. Collectively, these laws were called the National Origins Formula, and they imposed a new quota system that not only limited the amount of immigration, but gave some countries more freedom than others.
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Were these laws a fair way to deal with immigration? Delving into the reasons and feelings behind them, a few common themes begin to emerge.
The Emergency Quota Act, the first and arguably most important act, was enacted a few years after the end of World War 1, in 1921. It set the first percentage-based immigration quota, at three percent of the people of a nationality who were currently living in the U.S. during the census of 1910. This was called an emergency act because at the time, there was a high unemployment rate in the united states due to the fact that the war had just ended, and production of war materials had slowed down. This, coupled with the greatly increasing amount of immigration from Europe, led congress to pass this act. The second act, the Immigration act of 1924, basically served to make the 1921 act permanent. The two most important things it did was drop the acceptable immigrant rate to two percent of people already living in the U.S., and use the census of 1890 instead of a more recent one, in order to fine-tune how many of each nationality would be allowed. The final part of the National Origins Formula was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. This law consolidated U.S. Immigration policy into one place, and classified immigrants into three categories: people exempt from the quotas, people who counted as part of the quota, and refugees.
These three acts were important because they did not just put a cap on the number of immigrants allowed into the country, they specifically targeted certain areas of the world due to how the quota system worked. They each used data from a specific U.S. census to modify the amount of immigrants from different areas that would be allowed in, even though the percentage remained the same. The 1921 act came about partially because of America’s overwhelming fear of communism at the time. Americans wanted a way to stop the spread of communism and make sure it never reached the U.S., or as Richard Adler says, “The Red Scare (1919-1920) represented a symptom of the growing concern that revolutions taking place in Europe could spread to American shores. The Immigration Act of 1921...reflected that fear.” Since there were fewer Southern and Eastern Europeans in the U.S. compared to Northern and Western Europeans, the quota system made it so that people from that part of the world would have a lower immigration limit. This appeared to be the area that communism was spreading to. The feeling of contempt for Southern and Eastern Europeans did not just come from the Red Scare. Intelligence tests concluded that those immigrants had inferior intelligence compared to the Average American, and were therefore undesirable. Madison Grant, an American anthropologist, even wrote a book about the superiority of people from Northern and Eastern Europe, claiming that they had better physical and mental characteristics. This was a popular belief at the time that would be encouraged by Eugenicists, but they will be discussed later. The Formula did not just make it harder for some Europeans to come to the U.S. Since the 1800s, America had been restricting immigration from Asia. A notable example of this is the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The exclusion of Chinese people continued into the 20th century and stayed for most of the time that the National Origins Formula was in effect. Japanese immigration, on the other hand, had been controlled by the Gentleman’s Agreement, which was a joint effort by the U.S. and Japanese governments. Japan had been voluntarily trying to prevent people from moving to the U.S. When the 1924 law came around, it got rid of the Gentleman’s Agreement and specifically prohibited people of Japanese descent from immigrating, as part of the asiatic barred zone. They did not get any quota at all. This caused some controversy among Americans as well as the Japanese government, who were not too happy with the change. A representative of the government wrote an irritated letter to the Secretary of State, asking why the attitude towards Japan had changed so suddenly. Apparently they had also heard about discrimination against Japanese citizens already in the U.S., and saw the new act as a way of limiting the Japanese government’s ability to protect people from such discrimination. At home, there were some people against the new policy, but not for the right reasons. In his address The Square Deal in the Pacific, Samuel Hume wrote about the hypocritical reasons Californians had for wanting to exclude the Japanese. “It is generally admitted that the Japanese who came into the state prior to 1924 proved themselves a hard-working, industrious, frugal, law-abiding, and home-loving people...yet these very virtues, which Americans themselves value so highly, constitute for many of our citizens their principal indictment against the Japanese.” He then went on to say something hypocritical himself; that the Mexicans and Filipinos who had been migrating to California, unrestricted, were worse than the Japanese and they had brought “social problems” with them. This type of discussion comes up with alarming frequency in regards to American immigration laws. Scholars, politicians, researchers, and other Americans often favored a certain nationality over another, and claimed that there was evidence for a certain group of people being better than another.
It is natural to want to be surrounded by people who are the same race or have similar qualities or ideas, and it was a major driving force behind American Immigration laws. This is reflected in the process that an immigrant had to go through, under the 1924 act, in order to get a visa. They had to fill out an application and answer a series of questions about their job, identity, moral character, and state if they are subject to a quota or not. They would also have to provide a copy of their criminal record, military record, and birth certificate. In his analysis of the 1924 act shortly after it was passed, John Trevor concludes, “...it is the undoubted purpose of the Law to put an end, once and for all, to the immigration of those elements of foreign populations who may be classified as socially inadequate, criminal, anarchists or agents of revolutionary organizations.” Was there really a consistent way for immigration officers to determine if somebody was an anarchist? If someone was not outspoken about it, they could never know. What exactly were the grounds upon which a person could be called socially inadequate? Leaving legislation wide open to interpretation can be a dangerous thing, especially if the people enforcing the laws do not all have the same expectations or methods of evaluating prospective immigrants.
It is worth mentioning that when it came time for the final act in 1952 that continued the immigration policy, president Eisenhower vetoed it. He felt that it still unnecessarily limited immigration from Eastern Europe, which he proclaimed in part of his veto message to congress. “Today, we are "protecting" ourselves, as we were in 1924, against being flooded by immigrants from Eastern Europe. This is fantastic...The countries of Eastern Europe have fallen under the communist yoke...We do not need to be protected against immigrants from these countries--on the contrary we want to stretch out a helping hand...to welcome and restore them against the day when their countries will, as we hope, be free again.” American’s expectations of people from other cultures and backgrounds were likely to dictate how they felt about which nations should be restricted and which should be given favorable status. People did not simply have a bias against certain races or cultures for no reason, however. One of the things that may have convinced them was eugenics. Eugenics is the philosophy that human society can be improved if people were selectively bred, meaning, some people should be encouraged to reproduce while others should not. American eugenicists convinced lawmakers that certain types of people were genetically superior, and others were not. They encouraged uneasiness towards immigrants because they taught that certain traits were undesirable or bad for American society, so it was a good idea to block out people who had those negative traits. These theories appealed to Americans who had met foreign, non-Anglo-Saxon people and were not sure what to think of them. Congress was just as susceptible to this as the average citizen. In her 1995 article about biological determinism, Lynn Getz wrote, “In shaping immigration policy that would affect Europeans, Asians, and Mexicans throughout the 1920s and beyond, the Congress of the United States relied upon the race-based assumptions of eugenicists.” It may be recalled that the National Origins Formula did not prevent Mexicans from entering the States, or give them a quota. However, one proposed reason they were not restricted is quite negative. Eugenicists had the same dislike for Mexicans as they did for everyone else, but they were not as focused on stopping them. Employers in the southwest regarded mexican laborers as a temporary force that would go back to their homeland when they were done working. In fact, that was the only thing they saw them as; people whose purpose was to labor in the fields or the factory. They believed the Eugenicist’s wild theories that Mexicans were specially made for that type of work, and treated them as second-rate citizens. Eugenicists tried to turn racism into a science. Some made broad claims; for example, Charles Davenport, a Eugenicist leader, made the assumption that someone with dark skin would be more inclined to criminal activity. These people had been urging congress to restrict certain people from immigrating for a long time, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 represented one of their victories. Twentieth-Century Eugenics still has ripple effects in the world today; it re-emerges from time to time, but perhaps more subtly than before. The Formula may not have been the ideal solution to regulate immigration into the U.S., and it had some issues with bias, but it would be wrong to ignore a couple of the other reasons for the passage of those laws. Some industries relied heavily on immigrants to fill jobs, such as the mining and manufacturing industries. One of the reasons, it was argued, that immigration should be restricted or reduced, was because immigrant workers helped to perpetuate unsatisfactory work conditions. When the worksite started to get dangerous or unstable, American workers would complain. If there were plenty of newly-arrived immigrants around, however, employers could just hire them to replace their other, more skilled workers. The new immigrants would not be used to what normal working conditions were like in the U.S., and so they would be happy to work in unsafe situations or for lower pay. This effect was very prevalent in the mining industry. In their extensive book on the problems that immigration presented, Jeremiah Jenks and W. Lauck concluded that, “There seems to be a direct causal relation between the extensive employment of recent immigrants in American mines and the extraordinary increase in recent years in the number of mining accidents.” Inexperienced immigrant workers caused problems for everyone, because by being willing to accept lower payments and not participating in labor unions, they helped bring down the standard of living.
Wrapping up, the National Origins Formula were a series of laws that marked a big change in United States Immigration policy.
By introducing the quota system, they made it possible to control the amount of people who would be allowed in from each country. Digging deeper, it can be concluded that these laws had some considerable racial and cultural bias. Most of the time this was intentional. The government, spurred on by people like eugenicists and nativists, wanted to invite some types of people into the country and leave others out. They had a variety of reasons for wanting to exclude certain people. Some groups were considered a threat to the American social structure, and were unwelcome because of their different ways of going about life. Others were seen as radicals, communists, or other undesirable people who were feared or hated by the average American; sometimes simply because the media painted them that way, or the government did not approve of them. Not all of people’s fears were unfounded, but a great many of them did not really pose much of a threat to the United States. Some of the feelings of resentment towards newcomers were more unintentional, and came about because of years of nativism, and being immersed in popular culture at the time, which has a very big effect on how people think. The National Origins Formula was not completely bad or unnecessary, and there were some legitimate reasons behind them. The laws were simply implemented in an unfortunately discriminatory way that caused some strife, and backlash among the international community. Constantine Panunzio sums it up rather nicely in his article on immigration policy. “Viewing the immigration policy as a whole, the results it has produced, and the proposals for alteration, it would seem as if most of the difficulties are due to the fact that the methods it employs are fundamentally negative and discriminatory.” The Formula laws did not embody the American ideals of freedom and equality as
well as they could have.
Were these laws a fair way to deal with immigration? Delving into the reasons and feelings behind them, a few common themes begin to emerge.
The Emergency Quota Act, the first and arguably most important act, was enacted a few years after the end of World War 1, in 1921. It set the first percentage-based immigration quota, at three percent of the people of a nationality who were currently living in the U.S. during the census of 1910. This was called an emergency act because at the time, there was a high unemployment rate in the united states due to the fact that the war had just ended, and production of war materials had slowed down. This, coupled with the greatly increasing amount of immigration from Europe, led congress to pass this act. The second act, the Immigration act of 1924, basically served to make the 1921 act permanent. The two most important things it did was drop the acceptable immigrant rate to two percent of people already living in the U.S., and use the census of 1890 instead of a more recent one, in order to fine-tune how many of each nationality would be allowed. The final part of the National Origins Formula was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. This law consolidated U.S. Immigration policy into one place, and classified immigrants into three categories: people exempt from the quotas, people who counted as part of the quota, and refugees.
These three acts were important because they did not just put a cap on the number of immigrants allowed into the country, they specifically targeted certain areas of the world due to how the quota system worked. They each used data from a specific U.S. census to modify the amount of immigrants from different areas that would be allowed in, even though the percentage remained the same. The 1921 act came about partially because of America’s overwhelming fear of communism at the time. Americans wanted a way to stop the spread of communism and make sure it never reached the U.S., or as Richard Adler says, “The Red Scare (1919-1920) represented a symptom of the growing concern that revolutions taking place in Europe could spread to American shores. The Immigration Act of 1921...reflected that fear.” Since there were fewer Southern and Eastern Europeans in the U.S. compared to Northern and Western Europeans, the quota system made it so that people from that part of the world would have a lower immigration limit. This appeared to be the area that communism was spreading to. The feeling of contempt for Southern and Eastern Europeans did not just come from the Red Scare. Intelligence tests concluded that those immigrants had inferior intelligence compared to the Average American, and were therefore undesirable. Madison Grant, an American anthropologist, even wrote a book about the superiority of people from Northern and Eastern Europe, claiming that they had better physical and mental characteristics. This was a popular belief at the time that would be encouraged by Eugenicists, but they will be discussed later. The Formula did not just make it harder for some Europeans to come to the U.S. Since the 1800s, America had been restricting immigration from Asia. A notable example of this is the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. The exclusion of Chinese people continued into the 20th century and stayed for most of the time that the National Origins Formula was in effect. Japanese immigration, on the other hand, had been controlled by the Gentleman’s Agreement, which was a joint effort by the U.S. and Japanese governments. Japan had been voluntarily trying to prevent people from moving to the U.S. When the 1924 law came around, it got rid of the Gentleman’s Agreement and specifically prohibited people of Japanese descent from immigrating, as part of the asiatic barred zone. They did not get any quota at all. This caused some controversy among Americans as well as the Japanese government, who were not too happy with the change. A representative of the government wrote an irritated letter to the Secretary of State, asking why the attitude towards Japan had changed so suddenly. Apparently they had also heard about discrimination against Japanese citizens already in the U.S., and saw the new act as a way of limiting the Japanese government’s ability to protect people from such discrimination. At home, there were some people against the new policy, but not for the right reasons. In his address The Square Deal in the Pacific, Samuel Hume wrote about the hypocritical reasons Californians had for wanting to exclude the Japanese. “It is generally admitted that the Japanese who came into the state prior to 1924 proved themselves a hard-working, industrious, frugal, law-abiding, and home-loving people...yet these very virtues, which Americans themselves value so highly, constitute for many of our citizens their principal indictment against the Japanese.” He then went on to say something hypocritical himself; that the Mexicans and Filipinos who had been migrating to California, unrestricted, were worse than the Japanese and they had brought “social problems” with them. This type of discussion comes up with alarming frequency in regards to American immigration laws. Scholars, politicians, researchers, and other Americans often favored a certain nationality over another, and claimed that there was evidence for a certain group of people being better than another.
It is natural to want to be surrounded by people who are the same race or have similar qualities or ideas, and it was a major driving force behind American Immigration laws. This is reflected in the process that an immigrant had to go through, under the 1924 act, in order to get a visa. They had to fill out an application and answer a series of questions about their job, identity, moral character, and state if they are subject to a quota or not. They would also have to provide a copy of their criminal record, military record, and birth certificate. In his analysis of the 1924 act shortly after it was passed, John Trevor concludes, “...it is the undoubted purpose of the Law to put an end, once and for all, to the immigration of those elements of foreign populations who may be classified as socially inadequate, criminal, anarchists or agents of revolutionary organizations.” Was there really a consistent way for immigration officers to determine if somebody was an anarchist? If someone was not outspoken about it, they could never know. What exactly were the grounds upon which a person could be called socially inadequate? Leaving legislation wide open to interpretation can be a dangerous thing, especially if the people enforcing the laws do not all have the same expectations or methods of evaluating prospective immigrants.
It is worth mentioning that when it came time for the final act in 1952 that continued the immigration policy, president Eisenhower vetoed it. He felt that it still unnecessarily limited immigration from Eastern Europe, which he proclaimed in part of his veto message to congress. “Today, we are "protecting" ourselves, as we were in 1924, against being flooded by immigrants from Eastern Europe. This is fantastic...The countries of Eastern Europe have fallen under the communist yoke...We do not need to be protected against immigrants from these countries--on the contrary we want to stretch out a helping hand...to welcome and restore them against the day when their countries will, as we hope, be free again.” American’s expectations of people from other cultures and backgrounds were likely to dictate how they felt about which nations should be restricted and which should be given favorable status. People did not simply have a bias against certain races or cultures for no reason, however. One of the things that may have convinced them was eugenics. Eugenics is the philosophy that human society can be improved if people were selectively bred, meaning, some people should be encouraged to reproduce while others should not. American eugenicists convinced lawmakers that certain types of people were genetically superior, and others were not. They encouraged uneasiness towards immigrants because they taught that certain traits were undesirable or bad for American society, so it was a good idea to block out people who had those negative traits. These theories appealed to Americans who had met foreign, non-Anglo-Saxon people and were not sure what to think of them. Congress was just as susceptible to this as the average citizen. In her 1995 article about biological determinism, Lynn Getz wrote, “In shaping immigration policy that would affect Europeans, Asians, and Mexicans throughout the 1920s and beyond, the Congress of the United States relied upon the race-based assumptions of eugenicists.” It may be recalled that the National Origins Formula did not prevent Mexicans from entering the States, or give them a quota. However, one proposed reason they were not restricted is quite negative. Eugenicists had the same dislike for Mexicans as they did for everyone else, but they were not as focused on stopping them. Employers in the southwest regarded mexican laborers as a temporary force that would go back to their homeland when they were done working. In fact, that was the only thing they saw them as; people whose purpose was to labor in the fields or the factory. They believed the Eugenicist’s wild theories that Mexicans were specially made for that type of work, and treated them as second-rate citizens. Eugenicists tried to turn racism into a science. Some made broad claims; for example, Charles Davenport, a Eugenicist leader, made the assumption that someone with dark skin would be more inclined to criminal activity. These people had been urging congress to restrict certain people from immigrating for a long time, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 represented one of their victories. Twentieth-Century Eugenics still has ripple effects in the world today; it re-emerges from time to time, but perhaps more subtly than before. The Formula may not have been the ideal solution to regulate immigration into the U.S., and it had some issues with bias, but it would be wrong to ignore a couple of the other reasons for the passage of those laws. Some industries relied heavily on immigrants to fill jobs, such as the mining and manufacturing industries. One of the reasons, it was argued, that immigration should be restricted or reduced, was because immigrant workers helped to perpetuate unsatisfactory work conditions. When the worksite started to get dangerous or unstable, American workers would complain. If there were plenty of newly-arrived immigrants around, however, employers could just hire them to replace their other, more skilled workers. The new immigrants would not be used to what normal working conditions were like in the U.S., and so they would be happy to work in unsafe situations or for lower pay. This effect was very prevalent in the mining industry. In their extensive book on the problems that immigration presented, Jeremiah Jenks and W. Lauck concluded that, “There seems to be a direct causal relation between the extensive employment of recent immigrants in American mines and the extraordinary increase in recent years in the number of mining accidents.” Inexperienced immigrant workers caused problems for everyone, because by being willing to accept lower payments and not participating in labor unions, they helped bring down the standard of living.
Wrapping up, the National Origins Formula were a series of laws that marked a big change in United States Immigration policy.
By introducing the quota system, they made it possible to control the amount of people who would be allowed in from each country. Digging deeper, it can be concluded that these laws had some considerable racial and cultural bias. Most of the time this was intentional. The government, spurred on by people like eugenicists and nativists, wanted to invite some types of people into the country and leave others out. They had a variety of reasons for wanting to exclude certain people. Some groups were considered a threat to the American social structure, and were unwelcome because of their different ways of going about life. Others were seen as radicals, communists, or other undesirable people who were feared or hated by the average American; sometimes simply because the media painted them that way, or the government did not approve of them. Not all of people’s fears were unfounded, but a great many of them did not really pose much of a threat to the United States. Some of the feelings of resentment towards newcomers were more unintentional, and came about because of years of nativism, and being immersed in popular culture at the time, which has a very big effect on how people think. The National Origins Formula was not completely bad or unnecessary, and there were some legitimate reasons behind them. The laws were simply implemented in an unfortunately discriminatory way that caused some strife, and backlash among the international community. Constantine Panunzio sums it up rather nicely in his article on immigration policy. “Viewing the immigration policy as a whole, the results it has produced, and the proposals for alteration, it would seem as if most of the difficulties are due to the fact that the methods it employs are fundamentally negative and discriminatory.” The Formula laws did not embody the American ideals of freedom and equality as
well as they could have.