Immigration Act Of 1924 Quotes

The Klan capitalized on white fears of just about anyone they defined as nonwhite, non-American, and non-Protestant. For example, Klan members successfully lobbied for the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which limited immigration from select countries.

Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers. From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide. [Quoting President Lyndon B. Johnson’s remarks at the signing ceremony of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on Liberty Island in New York.]

The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the primary tool used by FDR to keep Jewish refugees from reaching US shores.

Standing at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, Johnson signed the Immigration Act on Oct. 3, 1965. It abolished the national origins formula that had been in place since 1924, meaning that preference was no longer given to immigrants from some European countries. “This system violated the basic principle of American democracy – the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man,” Johnson said. “It has been un-American in the highest sense.

Hitler had studied America from afar, both envying and admiring it, and attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock. He praised the country’s near genocide of Native Americans and the exiling to reservations of those who had survived. He was pleased that the United States had “shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” He saw the U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 as “a model for his program of racial purification,” historian Jonathan Spiro wrote. The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.

In 1924, riding a wave of anti-Asian sentiment, the US government halted almost all immigration from Asia. Within a few years, California, along with several other states, banned marriages between white people and those of Asian descent. With the onset of World War II, the FBI began the Custodial Detention Index—a list of “enemy aliens,” based on demographic data, who might prove a threat to national security, but also included American citizens—second- and third-generation Japanese Americans. This list was later used to facilitate the internment of Japanese Americans. In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Alien Registration Act, which compelled Japanese immigrants over the age of fourteen to be registered and fingerprinted, and to take a loyalty oath to our government. Japanese Americans were subject to curfews, their bank accounts often frozen and insurance policies canceled. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked a US military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. More than 2,400 Americans were killed. The following day, America declared war on Japan. On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, permitting the US secretary of war and military commanders to “prescribe military areas” on American soil that allowed the exclusion of any and all persons. This paved the way for the forced internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, without trial or cause. The ten “relocation centers” were all in remote, virtually uninhabitable desert areas. Internees lived in horrible, unsanitary conditions that included forced labor. On December 17, 1944, FDR announced the end of Japanese American internment. But many internees had no home to return to, having lost their livelihoods and property. Each internee was given twenty-five dollars and a train ticket to the place they used to live. Not one Japanese American was found guilty of treason or acts of sedition during World War II.

The third prong of this same project was immigration restriction. Progressives understood that if you kept these supposedly degraded people out in the first place, it would not be necessary to segregate them, sterilize them or restrict their marriage prospects. In 1924, progressives won a huge victory with the passage of the Immigration Act that sharply curtailed immigration by preferring northern Europeans or “Nordics” and discriminating against immigrants from Asia, Africa, South America, and even southern and central Europe.

The doors to the United States began to close in the 1920s. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which passed overwhelmingly with bipartisan support, was born from intense postwar isolationism and eugenic theories. The law capped the number of immigrants from outside the Western Hemisphere at about 154,000 people per year, a far cry from the more than 10 million who had arrived in the United States in the decade prior to World War I. The act also applied 'national origins' quotas and categorized applicants based on country of birth, not country of residence or citizenship. The quotas severely restricted persons from southern and eastern Europe, who had formed the majority of the immigrant population in recent decades, and kept most Asian and African people out entirely. Countries with large populations of Jews, Slavs, and people thought to be racially undesirable, poorer, and harder to assimilate were specifically targeted. Great Britain had the largest quota, and Germany was second, with a cap of 25,957.

Hoover appealed to Katsuji because he had signed an immigration bill in 1929 that allotted a maximum one hundred immigrants from Japan annually. It was a paltry number, but still, it was better than nothing, which had been Japan’s humiliating status since Congress passed the Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924, which abruptly ended Japanese immigration

Thanks in good part to that 1911 congressional report and to Lombroso, the United States passed the Immigration Act of 1924, more or less ending immigration for Southern Italians and Eastern European Jews. After the turn of the century, around two hundred thousand Italian immigrants were pouring into the country every year. After 1924, only four thousand were allowed in each year. A drop of over 90 percent. By

Harry H. Laughlin was highly important for the Nazi crusade to breed a “master race.” This American positioned himself to have a significant effect on the world’s population. During his career Laughlin would: ~ Write the “Model Eugenical Law” that the Nazis used to draft portions of the Nuremberg decrees that led to The Holocaust. ~ Be appointed as “expert” witness for the U.S. Congress when the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was passed. The 1924 Act would prevent many Jewish refugees from reaching the safety of U.S. shores during The Holocaust. ~ Provide the "scientific" basis for the 1927 Buck v. Bell Supreme Court case that made "eugenic sterilization" legal in the United States. This paved the way for 80,000 Americans to be sterilized against their will. ~ Defend Hitler's Nuremberg decrees as “scientifically” sound in order to dispel international criticism. ~ Create the political organization that ensured that the “science” of eugenics would survive the negative taint of The Holocaust. This organization would be instrumental in the Jim Crow era of legislative racism. H.H. Laughlin was given an honorary degree from Heidelberg University by Hitler's government, specifically for these accomplishments. Yet, no one has ever written a book on Laughlin. Despite the very large amount of books about The Holocaust, Laughlin is largely unknown outside of academic circles. The Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. gave this author permission to survey its internal correspondence leading up to The Holocaust and before the Institution retired Laughlin. These documents have not been seen for decades. They are the backbone of this book. The story line intensifies as the Carnegie leadership comes to the horrible realization that one of its most recognized scientists was supporting Hitler’s regime.

On July 1, President Calvin Coolidge signed the measure into law. With the act’s ratification, the country was set on a course to, by its own definition, “maintain the racial preponderance of the basic strain [of] our people” and “stabilize the ethnic composition of the population.” The act proved so restrictive for Asians and eastern Europeans that in 1924 more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Portuguese, Romanians, Chinese, and Japanese left the United States than arrived as immigrants

Weeks before Garvey’s final UNIA convention, delegates gathered for the Democratic National Convention of 1924 at that very same Madison Square Garden. The Democrats came within a single vote of endorsing the anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic platform promulgated by the powerful Ku Klux Klan. The platform would have been anti-immigrant, too, if Congress had not passed the Immigration Act on a bipartisan vote earlier in the year. It was authored by Washington State Republican Albert Johnson, who was well-schooled in anti-Asian racist ideas and well-connected to Madison Grant. Politicians seized on the powerful eugenicist demands for immigration restrictions on people from all countries outside of Nordic northwestern Europe. President Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts Republican who replaced Harding after his sudden death in 1923, happily signed the legislation before his reelection. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote as vice-president-elect in 1921. “The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.

The lynching of eleven Italian Americans in New Orleans in 1891; the Palmer Raids of 1919 targeting left-wing activists, with a special zeal for Italians; the Emergency Quota Act, signed into law by President Harding in 1921, effectively limiting the influx of Italian immigrants while still welcoming people from northern Europe, followed by the even more stringent Immigration Act of 1924, signed by Coolidge;

Quickly, many Mafia chieftains sail to America seeking asylum. They declare themselves refugees from fascism. This plea allows Mafiosi to circumvent the Immigration Act of 1924, which caps the number of foreign nationals into America at 150,000 per year. As the immigrants are refugees, U.S. officials do not inquire about the backgrounds of the Sicilians or their intended line of work.

The two countries not only turned their external gates into mechanisms of proper control but also shifted this first “line of defense” as far away from the countries’ borders as possible and into the countries of origin. Arguably, the model for this externalization of immigration control was the 1924 US Immigration Restriction Act, which made the departure of prospective immigrants for the United States conditional on a visa to be granted by an American consular office abroad and the granting of the visa conditional on passing a medical inspection—previously conducted at Ellis Island—in the country of origin.9 West Germany took steps in this direction, starting in 1957, by gradually introducing candidate interviews at diplomatic missions in Belgrade and Zagreb to assess eligibility for acceptance, an option that did not exist in other European countries where the FRG had no embassies or consulates.

Japanese paranoia stemmed partly from xenophobia rooted in racism. This combination wasn’t peculiar to Japan, as the Nazis were demonstrating in Germany. In the United States, the 1924 Exclusion Act remained in force, prohibiting all immigration from Asia. Some Western states didn’t think the Exclusion Act went far enough, because it hadn’t gotten rid of the Japanese who had immigrated before the United States slammed the door. Xenophobes argued that these immigrants were now breeding more Japanese, who were recognized, outrageously, as American citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Farmers in California and Arizona were especially hostile. Even before the Exclusion Act, these states had passed Alien Land Laws severely restricting the property rights of Japanese. Then in 1934 a group of farmers in Arizona’s Salt River Valley began agitating to kick Japanese farmers out, alleging that they had flooded into the region and were depriving farmland from deserving whites who were already hurting from the Depression. They also demanded that white landowners stop leasing acreage to Japanese farmers. The white farmers and their supporters held rallies and parades, blaring their message of exclusion. In the fall of that year, night riders began a campaign of terrorism. They dynamited irrigation canals used by Japanese farmers and threw dynamite bombs at their homes and barns. The leaders of the Japanese community tried to point out that only 700 Japanese lived in the valley and most had been there for more than twenty years. Three hundred fifty of them were American citizens, and only 125 worked in agriculture, mostly for American farmers. Facts made no impression on the white farmers’ racist resentments. Some local officials exploited the bigotry for political gain. The Japanese government protested all this. Hull didn’t want a few farmers to cause an international incident and pushed the governor of Arizona to fix the problem. The governor blamed the terrorism on communist agitators. Dynamite bombs continued to explode on Japanese farms through the fall of 1934. The local and state police maintained a perfect record—not a single arrest. In early February 1935 the Arizona legislature began considering a bill that would forbid Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing land. If they managed to grow anything, it could be confiscated. Any white farmer who leased to a Japanese would be abetting a crime. (Japan had similar laws against foreigners owning farmland.) American leaders and newspapers quickly condemned the proposed law as shameful, but farmers in Arizona remained enthusiastic. Japanese papers covered the controversy as well. One fascist group, wearing uniforms featuring skulls and waving a big skull flag, protested several times at the US embassy in Tokyo. Patriotic societies began pressuring Hirota to stand up for Japan’s honor. He and Japan’s representatives in Washington asked the American government to do something. Arizona politicians got word that if the bill passed, millions of dollars in New Deal money might go elsewhere. Nevertheless, on March 19 the Arizona senate passed the bill. On March 21 the state house of representatives, inspired more by fears of evaporating federal aid than by racial tolerance, let the bill die. The incident left a bad taste all around.

The 1882 Chinese Restriction Act was extended to an even broader act, encompassing a larger “Asiatic Barred Zone,” in 1917. The 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the Immigration Act of 1924 severely restricted the immigration of people from Africa and Eastern and Southern Europe and practically banned the immigration of Asians until 1965. “America must be kept American,” President Calvin Coolidge said when he signed the 1924 law. Of course, by then “American” included millions of Negro, Asian, Native, Middle Eastern, and Latinx peoples (who would, at least in the case of Mexican Americans, be forcibly repatriated to Mexico by the hundreds of thousands). But Coolidge and congressional supporters determined that only immigrants from northeastern Europe—Scandinavia, the British Isles, Germany—could keep America American, meaning White. The United States “was a mighty land settled by northern Europeans from the United Kingdom, the Norsemen, and the Saxon,” proclaimed Maine representative Ira Hersey, to applause, during debate over the Immigration Act of 1924.

The 1882 Chinese Restriction Act was extended to an even broader act, encompassing a larger “Asiatic Barred Zone,” in 1917. The 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the Immigration Act of 1924 severely restricted the immigration of people from Africa and Eastern and Southern Europe and practically banned the immigration of Asians until 1965.

Many laws passed by Congress have grandiose names and are hailed by their sponsors as far more important than they really are. In one case, however, legislators promised little of consequence for a law that reshaped the country. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act, abolished the national-origins immigration quotas set up in 1924 to preserve the European character of the American population. As we saw in the previous chapter, the promoters of the act insisted it would have little effect on the ethnic mix of the country, which was then nearly 90 percent white. By 2008, however, whites had already fallen to 65 percent of the population, and the Census Bureau was predicting they would become a minority in 2042—just 77 years after enactment. This would be a more dramatic long-term effect than perhaps that of any other legislation passed in the 20th century. Post-Hart-Celler immigration has also enormously increased the population of the United States, which is the only industrial nation that is growing like a developing country. In 2010, the population was expanding by about 7,500 people every day—nearly three million a year—and immigrants and their children accounted for 75 percent of the 27.3 million increase from 2000 to 2010. Growth at this rate requires enormous amounts of new infrastructure, including about 8,000 new schools every ten years. In 2008, the Census Bureau projected that the population would expand from 302 million to 439 million by 2050, assuming immigration continues at current rates. If immigration stopped after 2009, there would be much more moderate growth, with the population reaching 345 million rather than 439 million.

George Abramovich Koval … was an American who acted as a Soviet intelligence officer for the Soviet atomic bomb project. According to Russian sources, Koval's infiltration of the Manhattan Project as a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent "drastically reduced the amount of time it took for Russia to develop nuclear weapons." … Koval was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Sioux City, Iowa. … George Koval attended Central High School, a red-brick Victorian building better known as "the Castle on the Hill". Neighbors recalled that Koval spoke openly of his Communist beliefs. … He graduated in 1929 at the age of 15. … Abram Koval became the secretary for ICOR, the Organization for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union. Founded by American Jewish Communists in 1924, the group helped to finance and publicize the development of the "Jewish Autonomous Region" – the Soviet answer to Jewish emigration to the British Mandate of Palestine then being undertaken by the Zionist movement.

The findings set the stage for the 1924 Immigration Act, which restricted immigration to quotas based on the demographics of 1890—that is, before Poles, Jews, Greeks, Italians, and others outside of western Europe had arrived in great numbers. Their status contested, these groups were not always extended the protections accorded to unassailably “white” people, not then anyway.

1924 U.S. (Federal) Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, limits the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. It completely prohibits immigration from Asia.