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The 'Immigration Act of 1924', which included the 'National Origins Act', 'Asian Exclusion Act' or the 'Johnson-Reed Act', was a United States federal law that limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890, according to the Census of 1890. It excluded immigration to the US of Asians. It superseded the 1921 Emergency Quota Act. The law was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s, as well as East Asians and Asian Indians, who were prohibited from immigrating entirely. It set no limits on immigration from Latin America.
The Act passed with strong congressional support in the wake of intense lobbying. ^[1] There were only six 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, who served for almost 50 years, made the repeal of the Act into a personal crusade. 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. But most proponents of the law were rather concerned with upholding an ethnic status quo and avoiding competition with foreign workers.^[2]

The act was also strongly supported by Samuel Gompers, well-known union leader and founder of the AFL. Gompers was himself a Jewish immigrant, despite the accusations by many Jews of the time that the quotas were based purely on anti-Semitism.
The act halted "undesirable" immigration with quotas. The act barred specific origins from the Asia-Pacific Triangle which included Japan, China, the Philippines, Laos, Siam (Thailand), Cambodia, Singapore (then a British colony), Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma (Myanmar), India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and Malaysia. It barred these immigrants because they, being non-white, were not eligible for naturalization, and the Act forbade the further immigration of any persons ineligible to be naturalized..Guisepi, Robert A. World History International. "Asian Americans." 2007. January 29, 2007. [1]
As an example of its effect, in the ten years following 1900 about 200,000 Italians immigrated every year. With the imposition of the 1924 quota, only 4,000 per year were allowed. At the same time, the annual quota for Germany was over 57,000. 86% of the 165,000 permitted entries were from the British Isles, France, Germany, and other Northern European countries.
The quotas remained in place with minor alterations until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Contents

See also

External links

Further Reading

References

See also

★ National Origins Formula

★ List of United States Immigration Acts

★ National Origins Quota of 1924

External links

★ Statistics of who was allowed in after the Immigration Act of 1924

★ "'Shut the Door': A Senator Speaks for Immigration Restriction" — transcript of speech given before Congress by Sen. Ellison D. Smith, April 9, 1924

★ Eugenics Laws Restricting Immigration

Further Reading

★ Daniels, Roger: The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion. Berkley and others: University of California Press, 1977. -covers the development of the anti-Japanese movement in California from late 19th Century to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924

★ Aristide Zolberg, ''A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America'', Harvard University Press 2006, ISBN 0674022181

★ ''U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues: A Documentary History'', hg. von Michael Robert Lemay, Elliott Robert Barkan, Greenwood Press 1999, ISBN 0313301565

References

1. John B. Trevor Sr. An Analysis of the American Immigration Act of 1924.
2. Eckerson, Helen F. (1966) "Immigration and National Origins" ''Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science'' 367(The New Immigration): pp. 4-14, p.6