Immigration Quota Law in effect
June is “Immigrant Heritage Month.” Throughout the month we will be posting materials relating to immigration and immigrant cultures of NYC.
New York Herald, 2 June 1921, p.5. Newspapers.com.
One hundred years ago today … The “Emergency Quota Act,” the US’s racist new immigration law, went into effect at midnight. The Act was largely a response to increasing arrivals post-World War I, aiming to restrict Jewish immigrants specifically, or Jewish and Eastern and Southern European immigrants in general–depending on which source one is reading. It imposed numerical limits on most countries, a 3%-of-population rule.
Asian countries were not included in the quotas; the 1917 Immigration Act had barred much of the Asian-Pacific region from immigration altogether.
Immigration went from 805,228 in 1920 to 309,556 in 1921.
Robert F. Zeidel, writing in the Smithsonian, recounts how the Dillingham Commision of 1907 developed the National Origins Formula that would form the basis of the 1921 law. The Commission’s 41-volume Reports of 1911 suggested a “limitation of the number of each race arriving each year to a certain percentage of that race arriving during a given period of years.”
Zeidel explains:
At the time, “race” was often equated to the modern meaning of ethnicity and sometimes drew its terminology from nationality, such as references to the “German race.” But, Jews were considered a distinctive race, subsumed within various nation-states.
William W. Husband, the Commission’s chief administrator, thereafter developed a quota scheme based on the 1910 census. Admission of immigrants belonging to a particular nationality would be limited to 5 percent of their total as reported in the census. Congress reduced that percentage to 3 in its temporary quota measure, passed in 1921.
The permanent measure, passed in 1924, lowered it to 2 percent and used the 1890 census as the benchmark. The changes were deliberately designed to exclude more southern and eastern Europeans, so-called new immigrants deemed “undesirable” by many contemporary Americans. Asians, deemed wholly “undesirable,” did not receive any quotas. (Intriguingly, the Quota Acts exempted immigrants from the Western Hemisphere.) These provisions would define American immigration policy until passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.
The racist sentiment that spported the bill is expressed by a cartoon by Hallahan that appeared in The Literary Digest, 7 May 1921, p. 13,
Illus. for article "an alien anti-dumping bill" in The Literary Digest, May 7, p. 13, reprinting a cartoon by Hallahan for Providence Evening Bulletin, showing funnel bridging Atlantic with top at Europe crammed with emigrants and bottom at U.S. with Uncle Sam permitting immigrants to trickle through. [New York: Funk & Wagnalls] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <Illus. for article "an alien anti-dumping bill" in The Literary Digest, May 7, p. 13, reprinting a cartoon by Hallahan for Providence Evening Bulletin, showing funnel bridging Atlantic with top at Europe crammed with emigrants and bottom at U.S. with Uncle Sam permitting immigrants to trickle through. [New York: Funk & Wagnalls] Photograph. Library of Congress.
Zeidel points out the ongoing significance of this history.
The experience and impact of the Dillingham Commission offers lasting lessons to a country that still argues about immigration. The chief one is that fear tends to override facts about immigration policy, even when facts are in abundance.
The Act is available to read in its entirety here.
– Jonathan Goldman, June 3, 2021
TAGS: racism, race, ethnicity, Jews, antisemitism, white supremacy, immigration