100 Years Since America’s Biggest Immigration Clampdown, Have We Learned Anything?
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Today in the Washington Monthly, I wrote about the hard lesson the 2024 election taught us about immigration: while “overall, immigration is good … too much immigration in a short period causes acute disruptions.” As with inflation, federal officials need to move quickly to contain sudden spikes in migration lest the public recoils at the chaotic effects.
But have we learned anything from the hard right turn America took 100 years ago, with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924?
Tonight at 6:30 PM ET, on behalf of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum, I am moderating a discussion about the legacy of Calvin Coolidge’s immigration law. The event will take place at the museum in Northampton, Massachusetts, but you can watch the livestream by clicking here.
I am looking forward to learning more about the impacts of the law from our panelists tonight. But I have some initial thoughts to share, after highlighting what is leading the Washington Monthly website:
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As GOP Senators Choose Their Leader, Trump Demands They Bend the Knee: Contributing Writer Peter M. Shane urges the incoming Republican-led Senate to resist the president-elect’s pressure to cede its advise and consent responsibilities. Click here for the full story.
The Hard Lesson We Learned About Immigration: My analysis of how the immigration issue complicated the Democratic campaign this year. Click here for the full story.
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The Immigration Act of 1924 severely clamped down on immigration from southern and eastern Europe, by setting quotas limiting annual immigration from a particular country to two percent of the number of people from that country already in America. It also imposed a near-total ban on immigration from Japan, adding to an existing ban on most other Asian countries.
Coolidge signed it reluctantly after publicly criticizing the Japan provision, presciently worrying about the damage it would do to diplomatic relations. But, like many other Americans, Coolidge supported policies restricting immigration from countries such as Germany and Italy, out of concern that so-called “hyphenated Americans” resisted assimilation, promoted socialism, and engaging in political violence.
Coolidge’s predecessor Warren Harding, in an address to Congress in December 1922 (eight months before he died of a heart attack, elevating Coolidge to the presidency) said:
Abusing the hospitality of our shores are the advocates of revolution, finding their deluded followers among those who take on the habiliments of an American without knowing an American soul. There is the recrudescence of hyphenated Americanism which we thought to have been stamped out when we committed the Nation, life and soul, to the World War.
Using plainer language, Coolidge made a similar argument shortly after his swearing-in:
American institutions rest solely on good citizenship. They were created by people who had a background of self-government. New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.
Coolidge was consistent in his support for assimilation. In a 1925 speech, praising the diverse (albeit segregated) fighting force of the Great War, Coolidge argued:
No man’s patriotism was impugned or service questioned because of his racial origin, his political opinion, or his religious convictions. Immigrants and sons of immigrants from the central European countries fought side by side with those who descended from the countries which were our allies; with the sons of equatorial Africa; and with the Red men of our own aboriginal population, all of them equally proud of the name Americans.
We must not, in times of peace, permit ourselves to lose any part from this structure of patriotic unity. I make no plea for leniency toward those who are criminal or vicious, are open enemies of society and are not prepared to accept the true standards of our citizenship … Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine.
But that didn’t fully square with the 1924 law’s bias against southern and eastern Europeans.
Those immigrants were also associated with alcohol consumption, and the 1920s was the era of prohibition. One congressman framed the debate over the 1924 bill this way:
On the one side is beer, Bolshevism, un-assimilating settlements, and many flags. On the other side, is constitutional government, one flag, the Stars and Stripes and American institutions.
Where did this harsh sentiment come from? American had long been a nation of immigrants without strict border regulations.
No major immigration restrictions had been enacted until the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, a racist reaction to Chinese laborers who had largely settled in California, willing to work hard for low wages. (President Chester Arthur vetoed a bill with a 20-year ban on Chinese immigration, concerned about disrupting economic trade with China. After a public outcry, he signed a 10-year ban.)
Criticism of the hyphenated went back to the late 19th century, but it intensified in the 1910s. However, immigrant communities tended to vote Democratic. And President Woodrow Wilson vetoed legislation that would have imposed literacy tests on potential immigrants. In a 1915 veto message, Wilson said:
[The bill] seeks to all but close entirely the gates of asylum which have always been open to those who could find nowhere else the right and opportunity of constitutional agitation for what they conceived to be the natural and inalienable rights of men; and it excludes those to whom the opportunities of elementary education have been denied, without regard to their character, their purposes, or their natural capacity.
Restrictions like these, adopted earlier in our history as a Nation, would very materially have altered the course and cooled the humane ardors of our politics. The right of political asylum has brought to this country many a man of noble character and elevated purpose who was marked as an outlaw in his own less fortunate land, and who has yet become an ornament to our citizenship and to our public councils.
Wilson also vetoed a 1916 immigration bill that not only imposed a literacy test, but banned immigration from most Asian countries, and banned entry by a long list of “undesirables” including “idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons” and “persons who are members of or affiliated with any organization entertaining and teaching disbelief in or opposition to organized government.” But this veto was overridden in early 1917. The era of restriction was beginning.
At this point, we were at war with Germany, which rankled many German-Americans who embraced isolationism. An Italian-American anarchist group was involved in a spate of bombings, which would continue to intensify, culminating in a deadly 1920 attack on Wall Street. Coinciding with the 1917 Communist revolution in Russia, the violence fueled a blacklash dubbed the “Red Scare.”
In the 1920 election, the post-war chaos propelled the Republican Warren-Coolidge ticket into the White House. With Wilson sidelined, harsher immigration laws were assured.
And what happened? The law, by letter and spirit, worked as intended. Steadily over the next 35 years, the share of foreign-born in America plummeted from about 12 percent to 5 percent.
But America was not the better for it. The Great Depression came anyway. Widespread “repatriation drives” of Mexican immigrants during the downturn only made economic matters worse, as with reduced population came reduced demand. The 1924 law did not ban immigration from the Western Hemisphere, but deportation of Mexicans still happened, led by local governments with informal federal assistance.
At the onset of World War II, thousands of Jewish refugees were trying to escape Nazi Germany. But the quota system made it impossible for most to enter America, and Congress refused to reform the law. Deteriorated relations with Japan, sparked by the law’s ban on Japanese immigration, contributed to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Public sentiments toward immigrants eventually improved. In 1965, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson shepherded an end to the nationality-based quota system. In 1986, Republican President Ronald Reagan enacted an amnesty for undocumented immigrants. The share of foreign-born in America is up to about 14 percent.
In this (*shudder*) era of Trump that began in 2016, we have returned to a politics of restrictionism. But the reasons are hard to explain.
Setting aside the pandemic period (during which bigotry towards Asians spiked), the past eight years has been marked by low unemployment and low crime, so there’s little reason to scapegoat immigrants for economic distress.
The intense Islamophobia that followed the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks has subsided. We haven’t even had a foreign terrorist attack on American soil during the Biden presidency. (There were three during the first Trump presidency, which he contemporaneously blamed on immigration laws. During this campaign he falsely said no such attacks happened on his watch.)
As I noted in my column today, most Americans don’t even want the mass deportations Trump has promised. To the extent Americans are frustrated with immigration as of late, it’s because the sudden influx of asylum-seekers feeling pandemic-ravaged autocracies proved challenging for cities to manage. But with crossings down following Biden’s crackdown, such disruptions have waned.
Have we learned anything about immigration over the past 100 years? Yes. Our laws are no longer explicitly racist or ableist. We are far more accepting, even celebratory, of ancestries from other countries.
But even though not every American, or even every Trump voter, subscribes to Trump’s nativist bigotry, we have retained considerable capacity to tolerate—and empower–it. The legacy of 1924 carries on.
Best,
Bill
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