Immigration Act of 1924 - History

History

Restriction of Southern and Eastern European immigration was first proposed in 1909 by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Congressman Albert Johnson and Senator David Reed were the two main architects. In the wake of intense lobbying, the Act passed with strong congressional support. There were nine dissenting votes in the Senate and a handful of opponents in the House, the most vigorous of whom was freshman Brooklyn Representative Emanuel Celler. Over the succeeding four decades, Celler made the repeal of the Act his personal crusade.

Proponents of the Act sought to establish a distinct American identity by favoring native-born Americans over Southern and Eastern Europeans in order to "maintain the racial preponderance of the basic strain on our people and thereby to stabilize the ethnic composition of the population". Reed told the Senate that earlier legislation "disregards entirely those of us who are interested in keeping American stock up to the highest standard – that is, the people who were born here". Southern and Eastern Europeans, he believed, arrive sick and starving and therefore less capable of contributing to the American economy, and unable to adapt to American culture.

Some of the law's strongest supporters were influenced by Madison Grant and his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race. Grant was a eugenicist and an advocate of the racial hygiene theory. His data purported to show the superiority of the founding Northern European races. Most proponents of the law were rather concerned with upholding an ethnic status quo and avoiding competition with foreign workers. Samuel Gompers, a Jewish immigrant and founder of the AFL, supported the Act because he opposed the cheap labor that immigration represented, despite the fact that the Act would sharply reduce Jewish immigration.

Though the law's quota system targeted immigrants based on their nation of origin rather than ethnicity or religion, Jewish immigration was a central concern. Hearings about the legislation cited the radical Jewish population of New York's Lower East Side as the prototype of immigrants who could never be assimilated. The law sharply curtailed immigration from those countries that were the homelands of the vast majority of the Jews in America, almost 75% of whom came from Russia alone. Because Eastern European immigration only became substantial in the final decades of the 19th century, the law's use of the population of the United States in 1890 as the basis for calculating quotas effectively made mass migration from Eastern Europe, the home of the vast majority of the world's Jews, impossible.