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Immigration to the U.S.A. from  1910  to 1965

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/brief-history-us-immigration-policy-colonial-period-present-day#civil-war-postbellum-expansion

 

Dillingham Commission, World War I, and the National Origins Act: 1910–1930

Progressives and nativists bolstered their anti-immigration position by using the Dillingham Commission report as evidence that “‘new immigrants’ were fundamentally different from old immigrants who came from Western and Northern Europe.”79 The Dillingham Commission was staffed with members who had previously supported immigration restrictions, with the single exception of one member named William S. Bennet, of New York.80 Its members cherry-picked data to reach the predetermined conclusion that immigrants from Northern and Western Europe were innately superior to those from Southern and Eastern Europe. When data revealed large numbers of Northern and Western Europeans seeking welfare in American cities, the Dillingham Commission returned the data “for further information or for corrections.”81 Despite its methodological flaws, policy­makers embraced the report and its recommendations because it confirmed their prejudices.

Citing concerns about the intelligence of new immigrants and how well they would assimilate, the Americanization movement started as a collective of private nonprofit organizations that backed civics classes, language lessons, and the destruction of the “hyphenated American.” This movement eventually morphed into a series of government programs that wrote school curricula to push for immigrant assimilation, including banning the German language from being spoken in public schools.82 These anti-German laws actually slowed assimilation but were very popular, especially during World War I.83 Politically, anti-immigration sentiment prompted Congress to pass the restrictive Immigration Act of 1917—overruling President Woodrow Wilson’s veto. This act sanctioned legal immigrants’ detention and deportation if they committed a deportable crime within five years of their arrival. It also imposed literacy tests and other restrictive measures aimed at limiting immigration flows from African and Asian countries.84

After the end of World War I, the demobilization of four million soldiers and the anticipation of a wave of post-war migration caused Congress to consider further immigration restrictions.85 Restrictionists and eugenicists strengthened their position during this time by providing their own dubious accounts of immigration’s role in American history.86 Others used improperly administered intelligence tests to prove the intellectual inferiority of black Americans and new immigrants, biasing their results by intentionally surveying a disproportionate number of immigrants and blacks who were mentally handicapped for their final report and then omitting that crucial detail in their conclusions.87 With support mounting, Congress passed restrictive legislation again in 1921.

The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 broke with previous immigration laws by establishing a cap on the number of quota admissions equal to roughly 358,000 for immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, exempting immediate relatives. This was the first American immigration law that substantially emphasized family-based immigration over economic immigrants. Of the total quota admissions, the bill allocated 55 percent to Northern and Western European countries. The bill’s provisions favored family members of U.S. citizens by exempting admissions of certain immediate relatives. Before 1921, immigration laws pertained primarily to which immigrants to exclude, while any immigrant not specifically excluded could migrate. However, beginning in 1921 and continuing until today, the opposite has been the status quo: federal agencies decide which immigrants to admit and deny entry to those not explicitly approved.
The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act, refined the system that had been established in 1921. The new law reduced the annual quota from roughly 358,000 to about 164,000. The law also established per country cap allocations that awarded 82 percent of the world quota to immigrants from Western and Northern European countries, 14 percent to immigrants from Eastern and Southern European countries, and a mere 4 percent to immigrants from the remaining Eastern Hemisphere.88 Like the 1921 act, the 1924 act did not put restrictions on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. The 1924 act also categorized wives and children as nonquota admissions, exempting them from the quota caps. Under the 1924 act, there were three categories of aliens: quota immigrants entering under immigration statutes as permanent residents, nonquota immigrants entering as spouses and unmarried children of quota immigrants, and nonimmigrants entering temporarily.89

Few politicians opposed the 1921 Emergency Quota and 1924 National Origins acts. These laws were politically popular because of widespread notions of eugenics, nationalism, and xenophobia. For example, even popular books, such as The Melting Pot Mistake by New York University sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild, defended the new restrictionist regime by using the crudest elements of nationalism, eugenics, and xenophobia.90 Former state senator Edwin E. Grant, a Democrat, summed up these sentiments when he wrote, “the prosperity made possible by our forefathers has lured the parasites of Europe—the scum that could have so well been eliminated from the melting-pot.”91

Since eugenics was a significant motivation, it is initially perplexing that the Immigration Act of 1924 established quotas based on the country of origin rather than the immigrants’ race or genetics, especially considering how the latter characteristics were most important to the progressive demographic central planners of the time. A proponent of the law, Fairchild noticed this peculiarity and commented that:

The question will probably at once arise, why, if this legislation was a response to a demand for racial discrimination, was it expressed in terms of nationality? The answer is simple. As has already been shown, our actual knowledge of the racial composition of the American people, to say nothing of the various foreign groups, is so utterly inadequate that the attempt to use it as a basis of legislation would have led to endless confusion and intolerable litigation. So Congress substituted the term nationality, and defined nationality as country of birth. It is clear, then, that “nationality,” as used in this connection, does not conform exactly to the correct definition of either nationality or race. But in effect it affords a rough approximation to the racial character of the different immigrant streams.92
The 1924 Immigration Act did not place numerical quotas on immigrants from countries in the Western Hemisphere.93 As a result, immigration from Mexico and Canada spiked as immigrants from these regions replaced Asian and European immigrant laborers. In response, immigration restrictionists argued that Mexicans could not legally immigrate because they were ineligible for citizenship as “mixed breeds”—a legal argument based on a statute that limited immigration to only those who could naturalize.94 Specifically, economist Roy L. Garis reasoned that “to admit peons from Mexico… while restricting Europeans and excluding Orientals is not only ridiculous and illogical—it destroys the biological, social, and economic advantages to be secured from the restriction of immigration.”95 Eventually, the federal government resolved this disagreement by classifying Mexicans as white.96 The Supreme Court, however, decided not to confer the racial status of “white” to high-caste Hindus, in United States v. Bhaghat Singh Thind, even though racial theorists deemed Asian Indians to be Aryans.97

Regardless of the motivations behind the 1924 Immigration Act, it created a complex quota system that was tough to impose and took years to establish, in part due to the Bureau of Immigration’s lack of administrative capacity.98 For example, the 1924 Immigration Act required the prescreening of immigrants at embassies and consulates abroad, implementing a visa system, and deporting illegal arrivals.99 To enforce the law, Congress also created the U.S. Border Patrol. Additionally, Congress allowed Immigration Bureau agents to arrest illegal border crossers without obtaining warrants, to board and search vessels, and to access private lands within 25 miles of the border.100 Despite these powers, an estimated 175,000 illegal entries occurred annually.101 When the act went into force as it was intended to be in 1929, Congress allowed illegal immigrants who were eligible for naturalization and who were present since 1921 to regularize their status.102

The Great Depression, World War II, and Post-War Recovery: 1930–1965

The 1924 act significantly reduced the number of legal immigrants entering the United States. Five years before the act, an average of 554,920 legal immigrants arrived each year; during the five years after the act, the average number of legal immigrants arriving each year dropped to 304,182. By 1932, the inflow of legal immigrants had fallen to 35,576. Throughout the entire decade of the 1930s, legal immigration averaged 69,938 annually. The number of immigrants arriving in the United States dropped by 90 percent from 1924 to 1940. The annual immigrant inflow in 1924 was equal to 0.63 percent of the total U.S. population. By 1940, that figure had collapsed to 0.05 percent of the population.

In 1933, an Executive Order merged the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization into the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) with the Department of Labor. As the country entered the Great Depression, Secretary of Labor William N. Doak thought that deporting illegal immigrants would create jobs for natives.103 As a result, the federal government deported more than one million Mexicans and persons of Mexican ancestry in what was euphemistically known as “repatriation,” even though approximately 60 percent of the deportees were U.S. citizens, having been born in the United States to Mexican parents.104 Despite its intended goal, the repatriation efforts increased unemployment rates for native-born Americans.105 Although Congress passed no additional significant immigration restrictions during the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover did establish new administrative barriers by instructing immigration officials to interpret existing public charge statutes to exclude non-wealthy immigrants.106

Before World War II, politicians and bureaucrats applied immigration laws selectively to meet the demands of labor unions, denaturalize and deport political activists, and prosecute criminals.107 In 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act that forced noncitizens to register with the federal government, provide fingerprints, and notify the government in the event of an address change. The law also made prior involvement in the Communist, Fascist, or Nazi political parties grounds for deportation.108 In the same year, the Department of Justice took over the INS.109 Congressman Thomas F. Ford (D‑CA) noted that “the mood in the House is such that if you brought in the Ten Commandments today and asked for their repeal, and attached to that request an alien law, you could get it.”110 Under these conditions, and just two months after the United States entered into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, establishing concentration and detention camps for Japanese and Germans inside the United States.111

World War II Refugee Policy and Reform

Historically, the United States was a refuge for displaced persons and those fleeing persecution. These refugees included, but were not limited to, expelled British political and religious dissidents, Jews escaping the pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia, and Europeans escaping nationalist uprisings. However, the 1920s immigration laws did not allow exceptions to the quotas for refugees.112 As Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany in the 1930s, a refugee crisis mounted that Western countries mostly ignored or actively worsened. The lack of a humanitarian response caused the U.S. commissioner overseeing the League of Nations to resign in protest, stating, “when domestic policies threaten the demoralization and exile of hundreds of thousands of human beings, considerations of diplomatic correctness must yield to those of common humanity.”113

Even after the Nazi government indicated at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee on behalf of refugees that it would allow 40,000 refugees to leave with some of their assets, thus reducing the likelihood that immigrants would become a public charge, few countries were eager to accept them.114 In the United States, Congress was so indifferent to the refugee crisis that it defeated a 1939 proposal that would have facilitated the migration of 20,000 children from Nazi Germany, even though all of the children had U.S. family sponsors.115

The federal government did allow about 127,000 German Jews to enter the United States between 1933 and 1940. However, the quota for German immigrants, as set by the 1920s immigration laws, was underfilled by about 110,000 for the entirety of the 1930s.116 That many more German Jews could likely have escaped Germany before World War II if the meager quota were fully utilized. One estimate reported by author and Holocaust historian Henry L. Feingold was that 62,000 to 75,000 Jewish refugees could have left Europe between 1940 and 1942, but enforcement of the U.S. public charge rule blocked them.117 By the time World War II began in 1939, approximately three-fifths of the Jews in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia had escaped, but about 250,000 to 300,000 people were still left behind.118 If the pre-1920s immigration laws had been in effect, then there is little doubt that virtually all German Jews—and many others from Eastern Europe—could have escaped to the United States before the outbreak of the war.

The voyage of the St. Louis neatly summarizes the tragedy of U.S. immigration policy. The St. Louis sailed from Europe in 1939 with 900 Jewish passengers. The Cuban government denied the ships’ passengers the ability to disembark, prompting the St. Louis to sail to the United States, where the U.S. government denied the refugees entry. Without a port to dock at, the St. Louis returned to Europe, where European countries admitted some of the refugees. Ultimately, 254 of the 900 passengers perished during the war.119 The disconnect between the actions and words of Western governments prompted Hitler to remark that “it is a shameful example to observe today how the entire democratic world dissolves in tears of pity, but then, in spite of its obvious duty to help, closes its heart to the poor, tortured people.”120

The postwar revelation of the Holocaust shamed the United States for its pre-war anti-refugee policy and generated political support for the passage of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. These two pieces of legislation helped facilitate the post-war immigration of refugees.121 As a result of these and other provisions, the United States admitted more than a half million refugees between 1945 and 1953.122 Another motivating factor for liberalizing refugee flows after World War II was the realization that the United States could use refugee policy to increase its international prestige relative to that of the Soviet Union in order to combat Soviet propaganda.123 Congress made the first moves in this direction during World War II when it lifted the ban on Chinese immigrants and established a meager quota in 1943 to limit the effectiveness of Japanese propaganda.124