The Most Consequential Law in American Social History Turns 100

Nativism and xenophobia are among the clearest throughlines in American history, but it wasn’t until 1924 that the U.S. Congress passed the first-ever all-encompassing law restricting immigration. That landmark piece of legislation turns 100 on Sunday.

The Johnson-Reed Act was the grand ambition of nearly a generation of eugenicists, white supremacists, and other anti-immigrant lobbyists who desperately feared the decline and collapse of America’s “racial stock” and worried over what its chief proponents called the “mongrelization” of the American people. After decades of significant migration from Eastern and Southern Europe, which significantly diversified cities across the United States, the political winds began to stiffen in favor of shutting off the flow and turning back the clock.

The law eliminated all immigration from Asia, instituted a quota system from European countries, and adjusted the “national origins” quotas to match the composition of the United States, circa 1880–before the Great Wave of non-WASP newcomers. Enforcing the law over the coming decades slowed immigration to a trickle and assured the preservation of a white majority through the heart of the twentieth century. It was easily the most consequential law in American social history, at least until it was overturned by the equally influential Hart-Celler Act of 1965. The shape and character of American demographics can’t be understood apart from studying these laws and their legacies.

I wrote about the Johnson-Reed Act marking its centennial for the Ashbrook Center, a nonprofit specializing in civic education. Ashbrook hosts an excellent cache of resources at teachingamericanhistory.org. Here is an excerpt of that piece.

On May 26, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act, the first federal law in American history designed to establish permanent, comprehensive restrictions on immigration.  It came at the end of a long, contentious process that debated the nature of American citizenship and identity along with the perceived merits and hazards of mass immigration.  The law is rightly regarded as one of the triumphs of American nativism and a pivotal moment in the history of U.S. immigration policy.

Aside from a brief allusion in Article 1, Section 9, to “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit” (i.e., enslaved Africans), the U.S. Constitution—including all amendments to date—is silent on the question of immigration.  The only constitutional guidance even on the crucial question of defining American citizenship was to empower Congress in Article 1, Section 8 “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Two years after the Constitution was ratified, Congress set about fulfilling this mandate by limiting eligibility for naturalization to “free white persons” of “good character” who had been in the United States as little as two years, adding that their children under the age of 21 would likewise be counted as naturalized citizens. (The 14^th and 15^th Amendments gave greater clarity to these matters.)

Anxieties about the perils of unfettered immigration and dangerous “aliens” were apparent from the beginning.  Worries over French radicalism led to the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, empowering the President to deport those deemed a threat to the “safety and security” of the nation.  These laws revealed deeper anxieties about national loyalty and the importance of preserving cultural uniformity, concerns that form a consistent throughline in the evolution of American debates over immigration to this day.

Early in the 19^th century, Americans began to sound the alarm over new arrivals—especially Irish Catholics.  These anxieties generated what historians call “nativism,” an impulse that would become a stable feature of American life and an impetus for immigration policy.  Erika Lee defines nativism as “the naming of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers and their descendants as ‘natives’ to the United States and the granting of special privileges and protections to them.”  As the U.S. grew in territory, population, and diversity, so would nativist ambitions to circumscribe the nation’s citizenship qualifications and terms of entry.

The most important early turning point in this evolution came in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law restricting free immigration to the United States (it remained in effect until 1943).  The law’s passage established the need for a federal administrative apparatus for managing the flow of people into the country most notably at key points of entry in San Francisco and New York City.  Little attention was given at this time to the nation’s northern or southern borders.

The 1880s also marked the beginning of the so-called “Great Wave” of immigration from Europe, a massive upsurge in foreign-born people pouring into the United States.  Between 1880 and 1924 roughly 25 million predominantly southern and eastern Europeans arrived in the U.S.; large populations of Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, and other Slavs, among them 3 to 4 million Jews.  These “huddled masses” would dramatically change the complexion and character of America’s cities.  They were outsiders by language, custom, and religion, prompting a rising chorus of critics who questioned whether they could ever assimilate to the America way of life.  Some wondered, moreover, if these new arrivals might be bringing strange diseases and radical ideas that could destabilize the country in permanent ways.

Read the rest here.

^{Calvin Coolidge, Library of Congress}