The Last Time We Restricted Immigration

 

Sunday, May 26, will be the 100th anniversary of the Johnson–Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which set quotas on the number of immigrants, especially limiting immigration from southern and eastern Europe. It also authorized the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol and allowed entry to the U.S. only to those who first obtained a visa from an American consulate abroad. This infamous law banned immigration from Asia and capped the total annual immigration quota for the rest of the world at 165,000—an 80% reduction of the yearly average before 1914. Each European national group was limited by an annual quota, eventually based on each national group's share in the 1920 census. Revised somewhat by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, it was finally completely replaced by the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. 

Prior to the 1920s, immigration from Europe had been relatively unrestricted. The Naturalization Act of 1790 had declared only people of European descent eligible for naturalization as U.S. citizens. (After the Civil War, eligibility was eventually extended to people of African descent in the Naturalization Act of 1870.) 

Meanwhile, my paternal grandparents were among the millions of Italians and other southern and eastern Europeans who came to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A bill to limit southern and eastern European immigration (e.g., Italians and Jews) had passed both houses of Congress in 1896, but it was vetoed by President Grover Cleveland. World War I led to some greater restrictions on immigration. In the increasingly isolationist and xenophobic  post-war period, the movement to restrict immigration increased in intensity.

Representative Albert Johnson (R-WA), a eugenics advocate, and Senator David Reed (R-PA) were the two main architects of the 1924 act, which found support among  nativist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, and labor groups life the American Federation of Labor which wanted to reduce cheap immigrant labor that could compete with workers already here. Opposition was minimal. Only a handful of Senators and Representatives voted against it - most notably the Jewish freshman NY Representative Emmanuel Celler. He and Senator Philip Hart (D-MI) would have the honor of correcting that historic injustice by their successful co-sponsoring of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. 

My maternal grandparents first came to America in 1920, in the aftermath of the Great War, when anti-immigrant feeling was already on the rise. They settled in Manhattan's "Little Italy," and there my mother was born in 1922. For whatever reason, my grandparents and their younger children then returned to Italy, and my mother had happy memories of her early childhood years back in Catania. My grandmother, however, wanted to reunite the family and sought to return to America, which they were able to do because my mother was a natural-born American citizen. She was, in effect, what is nowadays called an "anchor baby," her American citizenship officially recognized by my grandmother's Kingdom-of-Italy Passport (photo), on which my mother was included.

The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 was a great injustice. It represented the temporary triumph of one of the more lamentable aspects of our American political tradition, which has, perhaps understandably at times, tried to make the U.S. into an ethno-national state (which in fact most nation-states naturally are, but which the U.S has never actually been). The contrary tradition, which sees American identity as primarily civic rather than ethnic, has long recognized that immigration's inevitably disrupting effects have been overwhelmingly outweighed by the benefits brought about by immigration - benefits both for the immigrants themselves and for the dynamism of American society.

The best that might be said for the immigration policy that was adopted 100 years ago is that, by temporarily reducing immigration, it created a kind of breathing space for assimilation and mutual acceptance to occur more easily. That may have accelerated the Americanization process for my parents's and grandparents' generations, fostering a degree of civic unity which would prove especially beneficial as American society struggled to cope with the strains of the Great Depression and the overwhelming challenge of fighting and winning the Second World War. The unique formative experiences of my "Boomer Generation" built upon that civic unity experienced by the victorious "Greatest Generation." 

The U.S. is certainly a more just society now than it was 100 years ago, and the repeal of the discriminatory quota system was one momentous measure of that evolving change. That said, the lesson of the past should serve as a vivid reminder that the inevitably disruptive aspects of absorbing a multitude of immigrants must be acknowledged and addressed - preferably by more just and inclusive policies than those adopted a century ago. The lesson of the past, which may be being replayed in the present, is that it is not an adequate response or politically satisfactory strategy simply to ignore the disruptive dimensions of large-scale immigration and pretend it isn't so.

The massive immigration of the 19th century was not always well received or popular, but there were few if any legal barriers to immigration then. American society was still open in ways it no longer is. (There was still a "frontier" until late in the century.) Catholic and jewish immigrants may not have been highly desired by those already here, but their labor was needed for America's expansion and economic development.  The situation is somewhat different now, and the U.S. feels a greater need to police its borders and regulate immigration. And yet the county is still very dependent upon immigrant labor. In fact, it could be argued that the present system which encourages massive illegal immigration meets those economic needs, but in a particularly perverse way by depriving workers who are undocumented of any protection against the employers who exploit their situation to get cheaper labor. Since cheaper labor also benefits consumers, it can be argued that consumers (that is, most U.S. residents) are also accomplices of a sort in the present unjust system.