The 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts a Century Later: Roots and Long Shadows

Maddalena Marinari, The 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts a Century Later: Roots and Long Shadows, Journal of American History, Volume 109, Issue 2, September 2022, Pages 271–283, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaac232

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Incensed over rumors that the new constitution of the League of Nations might “limit the right of any nation to decide who shall be admitted into its life,” Prescott Hall, one of the most prominent advocates for immigration restriction in the United States, wrote a scathing article in 1919 arguing that any such clause represented a threat to the soul of the nation. “Immigration restriction,” he wrote, “is a species of segregation on a large scale, by which inferior stocks can be prevented from both diluting and supplanting good stocks.” The connection between eugenics and immigration policy was well established by 1919. Hall's words exemplified much of the rhetoric that would soon contribute to the passage of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924. Through these laws, Congress imposed a ban on most immigration from Asia, devised a quota system based on national origins to restrict immigration from eastern and southern Europe, hardened the boundaries between legality and illegality, and expanded several categories for exclusion and deportation. By the mid-1920s, immigration laws had become tools of social engineering and nation building that intersected with the dispossession and coerced assimilation of Native Americans, the segregation and disfranchisement of Black Americans, the invasive policing of welfare recipients and impoverished communities, and imperial projects at home and abroad. These histories can no longer be understood in isolation. 1

This special issue brings together leading scholars of migration, ethnicity, and race to examine how U.S. immigration policy became a site for reimagining the attributes of citizenship, to explore the intellectual milieu in which ideas about immigration restriction emerged, and to reexamine the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts a century after their passage within the framework of settler colonialism, empire building, and white supremacy. In doing so, these authors challenge the traditional chronology of the rise of federal immigration restriction both by connecting the 1921 and 1924 acts to the longer history of restrictions on free Blacks and Native Americans prior to 1882 and by reassessing the role that the passage the 1917 Immigration Act played in creating the quota system in the 1920s. Several of the authors also reframe the history behind many of the contested immigration topics today, such as border enforcement, unauthorized immigration, and asylum. Many of the essays demonstrate that demographic anxieties, the merging of anti-Black racism with xenophobia, tensions between inclusion and exclusion, and the bureaucratization of naturalization and immigration that began in the nineteenth century profoundly shaped the immigration system that emerged in the 1920s. Other contributors make a persuasive case for recognizing the intersection between foreign policy and immigration, particularly during World War I. The articles also point to the long-term impact of the legal, bureaucratic, and ideological infrastructure created by the 1921 and 1924 quota acts, especially the racial connotations of the debate over temporary versus permanent immigrants, the use of immigration laws to shape the racial makeup of U.S. society, and the connection between war and migration throughout the twentieth century. 2

The 1921 and 1924 immigration acts represented the culmination of over forty years of debate about immigration restriction and Americans' expectations about which immigrants should be allowed in the country. As this special issue shows, the 1917 Immigration Act represented a pivotal moment in this history. Also known as the Literacy Act or the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, this law imposed a literacy test on all arriving immigrants who were over age sixteen, introduced new categories of inadmissibility, and excluded immigrants from most of Asia and the Pacific Islands. When the act failed to curb immigration from eastern and southern Europe in significant numbers, restrictionists pushed for the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, also known as the Per Centum Law. This law, initially meant as a temporary measure in response to fears of an impending influx of migrants from Europe at the end of World War I, introduced quantitative restriction of European immigrants for the first time. It limited the number of immigrants admitted annually from any country in the Eastern Hemisphere to 3 percent of the number of residents from that country living in the United States at the time of the 1910 census. This guaranteed that immigrants from northern and western Europe received higher quotas than those coming from eastern and southern Europe. The Immigration Act of 1924, often referred to as the Johnson-Reed Act, reduced the yearly quota to 2 percent of each country's representation in the 1890 census, when even fewer immigrants from eastern and southern Europe resided in the United States. Legislators believed that the quota system guaranteed that the racial makeup of the United States would remain intact. This rationale also applied to the provision in the law that denied entry to all immigrants who were not eligible to naturalize, further expanding the so-called Asiatic barred zone created in 1917 to exclude all immigrants from Asia except for those from the Philippines. 3

Although legislators ultimately exempted immigrants from the Americas from the quota system, they also created the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924 to monitor crossings along the southern border and prevent irregular immigration through the Canadian border. Much of the immigration system devised in the 1920s remained in place until 1965, when Congress repealed the quota system in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Also known as the Hart-Celler Act, it replaced the quota system with a global cap on immigration, including from the Western Hemisphere for the first time, and created a preference system that gave priority to immigrants with family ties in the Unites States, professionals and skilled workers, and refugees. Although the act eliminated national origin, race, and ancestry as a basis for immigration, the preference system nonetheless introduced new forms of inequality that affect immigration to this day. 4

The 1917, 1921, and 1924 acts sent the unequivocal message that the United States welcomed only immigrants with desirable political beliefs, socioeconomic backgrounds, cultures, sexual orientations, and nationalities. For many Americans, the most desirable immigrants hailed from northern and western Europe. Although several factors have shaped U.S. immigration policy—including foreign policy, economics and labor priorities, and national security—a preoccupation with the racial makeup of immigrants has remained constant. 5

The historical and legislative context in which the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts unfolded is imperative to understanding the laws' origins, content, and ramifications. During the second half of the nineteenth century, immigration to the United States shifted away from northern and western Europe to southern and eastern Europe, Asia, and Mexico. These immigrants belonged to a movement of millions of migrants around the globe who left their countries to escape stagnant economies, political unrest, persecution, and the pressures of population growth, and to take advantage of the demand for unskilled labor in rapidly industrializing nations such as the United States. The movement to regulate and restrict this mass migration was just as global in its scope. In the United States, Americans of northern and western European ancestry regarded the “new” immigrants as biologically and culturally inferior and unassimilable. These perceptions stemmed from the United States' first decades as a nation, when race emerged as a key marker of eligibility for citizenship. In the 1790 Nationality Act, Congress restricted naturalization to “any free white person,” creating the legal category of aliens ineligible for citizenship. In 1922, in Ozawa v. United States, the Supreme Court reaffirmed this legal category, noting that “the federal and state courts, in an almost unbroken line, have held that the words ‘white person’ were meant to indicate only a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race.” Congress did not abolish all racial restrictions on naturalization until 1952. 6

Congress passed the first restrictive federal immigration law in 1875 to “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.” The Page Act primarily targeted the immigration of Asian women who were suspected of coming to the United States for “lewd and immoral purposes.” The law built on a long history of immigration restrictions at the state level and intersected with bilateral trade treaties among the United States, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe that had regulated the movement of people through the stipulation of a reciprocal liberty for persons seeking to enter or trade in either country. Passed in the name of safeguarding public morals, the Page Act proved an effective way to restrict admission of Chinese women and thereby control local Chinese communities by skewing sex ratios and preventing Chinese American men from having children in the United States. The act introduced gender as a mechanism of federal immigration control and represented an early experiment in engineering the composition of U.S. society. The commitment to family reunification that emerged as a central tenet of U.S. immigration policy at the end of the nineteenth century would not apply to all immigrants. 7

Seven years later, Congress expanded federal authority over immigration by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1882 Immigration Act. Together, these acts explicitly put the federal government in charge of U.S. immigration policy and introduced nationwide systems of management and deportation even though they were quite ineffective initially because of limited funding, a threadbare bureaucracy, and the lack of a fully developed registration system. The Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese laborers, skilled and unskilled, from entering the country for ten years, excluded the wives of Chinese laborers, and reaffirmed that those already in the United States could not naturalize. The law was originally enacted for only ten years, but Congress renewed it for another ten years in 1892. These Chinese exclusion laws were part of a global trend among white settler societies to restrict the movement of migrants of color. These countries wanted Asian workers but did not want to alter the racial makeup of their societies. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act discriminated by class as well as race, exempting merchants, students, teachers, and tourists. These exemptions established an important precedent for prioritizing immigrants with desirable skills and knowledge and signaled the centrality of these migrants to U.S. efforts to expand its spheres of influence in Asia. Diplomats and entrepreneurs regarded these migrants as people with whom they could establish economic relations or on whom they could rely to convey a positive image of the United States in Asia. 8

The general Immigration Act of 1882, meanwhile, established the first guidelines for federal oversight of immigration and formalized the criteria, long enforced at the state level, for excluding certain categories of immigrants. Borrowing directly from state im migration laws, the federal law imposed a head tax of fifty cents on each incoming immigrant, and targeted for exclusion the “convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” The likely-to-become-a-public-charge ( Lpc ) rule would develop into a particularly capacious category that federal immigration authorities used to exclude people deemed undesirable, including the poor, many Black or other racialized migrants, individuals with disabilities, and women traveling alone or unaccompanied with children, on the logic that such people would become burdens to the state. Immigration authorities also effectively used the Lpc provision to bar those who engaged in sex acts or with sexual orientations arbitrarily deemed perverse. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as the historian Julio Capó notes, immigration officials routinely used the Lpc provision to exclude a broad range of people deemed undesirable because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. 9

Between 1871 and the outbreak of World War I, 23.5 million immigrants from Asia and Europe arrived in the United States in search of economic opportunities, social mobility, or safety. As the United States admitted these immigrants, policy makers passed more laws to decide who could enter the country and naturalize. Critics of immigration wanted restriction rather than admission to become the norm. In 1902, Congress made Chinese exclusion permanent (at least until 1943, when foreign policy priorities during World War II made it untenable). As the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe continued to rise at the turn of the twentieth century, Congress expanded the categories of excludable immigrants to include anarchists, polygamists, prostitutes, vagrants, and epileptics and began targeting immigrants with disabilities. Lamenting the costs of institutional care and decrying the supposed threat that immigrants with intellectual and physical disabilities posed by passing on heritable characteristics, legislators effectively criminalized these immigrants by conflating illness, disability, and poverty. The desire to keep out immigrants with disabilities fit within a larger trend in the United States toward the increasing segregation of individuals with disabilities into institutions and the sterilization of the “unfit” and “degenerate” under state eugenic laws. Nativism and xenophobia also intersected with industrial strife, labor unrest, and the end of western expansion. Contemporaries feared that the closing of the frontier represented a threat to the growth of American democracy, self-sufficiency, ingenuity, and individualism. Despite evidence to the contrary, many Americans blamed immigrants for crime, immorality, corruption, religious extremism, and political radicalism. Anxieties about foreign radicalism also ignited anti-Catholic nativism and anti-Semitism across the country. 10

World War I was a pivotal turning point in the confluence of U.S. foreign policy ambitions and nativist agendas. Congress narrowly passed the 1917 Immigration Act over President Woodrow Wilson's veto as advocates for immigration restriction exploited the climate of xenophobia caused by the war. Fearmongers argued that, unless Congress acted, poor and subversive immigrants from Europe would flood the country at the end of the war. The 1917 Immigration Act introduced a literacy test for immigrants over sixteen years old, increased the head tax to $8, and identified additional categories of excludable immigrants, provisions aimed primarily at southern and eastern European immigrants. The so-called Asiatic barred zone created by the act extended the racial policies of the Chinese exclusion acts to other Asian immigrants. The zone exempted the U.S. territory of the Philippines and Japan, with emigration regulated through the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907. The 1917 Immigration Act captured many of the contradictions echoed in the quota acts of 1921 and 1924. The first restrictive general immigration law, it also exempted individuals fleeing religious persecution from the literacy test, excepted Asian migrants with desirable professional qualifications and family ties in the United States, and created exceptions for Europeans in the country illegally. Although the 1917 Immigration Act identified stowaways—the majority hailing from Europe—as an excludable category, it also warranted that they, “if otherwise admissible, may be admitted at the discretion of the Secretary of Labor.” Like the restrictive laws that followed, the 1917 Immigration Act demonstrated how U.S. immigration laws can simultaneously be inclusive and exclusive. 11

The virulent nativism and the increasing popularity of the eugenics movement during World War I also led to increased scrutiny of immigrants with disabilities. As early as 1907, the Immigration Restriction League had criticized the existing immigration legislation as barring only “the most obviously diseased, decrepit, feeble-minded and generally unfit aliens.” Although that was hardly the case, restrictionists used the outbreak of World War I to renew their calls for further restrictions on immigrants with disabilities. The 1917 Immigration Act added “constitutional psychopathic inferiority” as a category of exclusion. This broad category included “various unstable individuals on the border line between sanity and insanity, such as … persons with abnormal sex instincts.” The act encouraged officials to exclude immigrants with “any mental abnormality whatever … which justifies the statement that the alien is mentally defective.” By the end of World War I, the rules for the exclusion of immigrants with physical and mental disabilities were so vague and expansive that virtually any immigrant could be excluded. 12

The 1917 Immigration Act paved the way for a rapid succession of immigration laws that tightened the nation's borders against immigrants perceived as belonging to inferior races, yet it failed to reduce immigration as drastically as supporters of immigration restriction had hoped. Immigration numbers began to fall significantly only after the passage of the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, which imposed the first numerical limits on European immigration based on national origins. Three years later, the Immigration Act of 1924 expanded the ban on Asian immigrants by excluding those who were ineligible for citizenship, introduced a yearly cap of 165,000 on immigration from outside the Americas, and made the national origins system permanent. After much debate, the national origins quotas were calculated at 2 percent of the total number of foreign-born persons from each nation recorded in the 1890 census, before eastern and southern European immigration reached its peak. As a result, the 1924 Immigration Act meant that even Asian immigrants previously allowed into the country—the Japanese in particular—would no longer be admitted to the United States and that immigrants from northern and western Europe would receive priority. The quota system promised to reduce immigration to the United States by 80 percent when compared to immigration before World War I. The peak year had been 1907, when 1.2 million migrants had arrived. 13

Like many of the immigration laws that preceded and followed it, the Immigration Act of 1924 revealed the contradictions between the calls for restriction and the demands for family reunification and certain types of highly valued labor. The law exempted immigrants from the Americas from the national origins quota system and made exceptions for highly skilled immigrants, domestic servants, and the wives and unmarried minor children of U.S. citizens. Because of these exemptions, regular immigration increased during the Great Depression, even as deportations reached new highs. By the end of the 1930s, despite repeated calls for the suspension of immigration, the number of admitted immigrants slowly began to rise, particularly because of the family exemptions that critics of immigration restriction had won. Meanwhile, migrants from Mexico offset the lost Asian and European labor in a country that still desperately needed workers in factories, mines, and agricultural fields, but they were racialized as permanently temporary labor. Within days of the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, Congress created the Border Patrol to police migrants' movement along the borders and, in 1929, passed the Undesirable Aliens Act to control and criminalize Mexican migration. The act made unlawful entry a misdemeanor and reentering the United States after a deportation a felony. Immigration to the United States did decrease in the wake of the 1924 Immigration Act, but it did not stagnate. Instead, it changed form, composition, and legal expression. 14

Except for important revisions in 1952, the immigration system created in the 1920s remained in place until 1965, when Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Hailed as a major piece of civil rights reform, the act abolished the national origins system, formalized a preference system that gave priority to family reunion and to immigrants with skills desirable in the United States, and set aside a small numerical allotment for refugees. The act also set the stage for many of the immigration debates dividing the country today. It completely, albeit unintentionally, reshaped the demographics of the United States. Despite the intention to maintain the predominantly European ancestry of the U.S. population through emphasis on family reunion, immigration to the United States shifted away from Europe to Latin America, Asia, and Africa during the final decades of the twentieth century. Many of these immigrants entered the country thanks to their qualifications as highly skilled migrants and then took advantage of the family reunion provisions to send for members of their families, many entering the country outside the yearly quotas. In 1920, 13.2 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born; by 1965, that percentage had dropped to just under 5 percent and over three-quarters of the foreign-born were from Europe and Canada. In 2015, fifty years after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, half of all immigrants in the United States hailed from Latin America and the Caribbean and 27 percent from Asia. The admission of refugees during this period further contributed to these demographic shifts. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ultimately created the most diverse society in U.S. history, a development that has resulted in repeated calls for immigration restriction characterized by the same xenophobic and nativist rhetoric that preceded the passage of the two quota acts in the 1920s. 15

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 also led to a rise in unauthorized immigration. The introduction of uniform quotas for each nation—presented by restrictionists as an egalitarian remedy to the discriminatory national origins quotas—and the first imposition of a yearly cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, a year after the end of the bracero program, resulted in an increase in undocumented immigration. The ostensible egalitarianism of uniform quotas meant that big countries such as China, India, or Mexico, with large numbers of potential immigrants, received the same yearly quota allotment as tiny countries such as Denmark, Iceland, or Ireland, which also had smaller numbers of people who wanted to leave. These changes resulted in long waiting periods for many of the immigrants from new sending countries and new significant restrictions on immigrants from the Americas. In response, many migrants crossed the U.S.-Canada or U.S.-Mexico borders without authorization or entered the country with tourist, student, or other temporary visas and remained in the United States once their visas had expired. 16

The articles in this special issue are organized around three central themes: roots, natures, and consequences. Kevin Kenny, Seema Sohi, and Mireya Loza explore the roots of the immigration laws passed in the 1920s. Together, their essays reframe the periodization of U.S. immigration restriction that presents the 1921 and 1924 acts as the beginning of a restrictive immigration regime. While Kenny traces the origins of immigration restriction to earlier debates about the mobility of enslaved and Indigenous people in the nineteenth century, Sohi and Loza make a powerful case for considering the Immigration Act of 1917 not as a building block toward the creation of the immigration regime ratified in the 1920s but as a bridge between the two immigration acts passed in 1882 and the two acts passed in the 1920s that further racialized Asian immigrants and reshaped the debate over temporary and permanent immigrants. 17

Kevin Kenny's opening article powerfully connects slavery, Indian removal, and state policies regulating mobility to trace the constitutional and statutory origins of immigration restriction in the nineteenth century. He explains how immigration policy moved from the local to the national level before 1882 and offers readers a clear understanding of how “police power” encompassed huge swaths of people whose mobility was constitutionally and politically assigned to state control. Kenny's article demonstrates how, throughout the antebellum era, state laws regulating immigration intersected with laws regulating the movement of African Americans, both free and enslaved. The existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery, as Kenny shows, dictated immigration policy and informed Supreme Court decisions on that policy throughout the nineteenth century. 18

Seema Sohi makes a compelling argument that the 1917 act, usually regarded as a failure, not only represented the culmination of previous legislative efforts but also laid the groundwork for key legislative developments in the 1920s and beyond. She also shows how intertwined the histories of Asian and European restrictions were. Much of the literature on the 1917 Immigration Act focuses on the impact of the act on southern and eastern Europeans, whom legislators regarded as undesirable, potential anarchists, and certainly “not white,” according to the racial logic of the time. Sohi demonstrates that legislators worried about the political activism among Asian migrants as much as, if not more than, the political activism among European migrants. While proponents of the bill hoped that the literacy test would drastically reduce immigration from eastern and southern Europe, they also sought to draw an explicit connection between anti-Asian sentiment and the antiradical politics of the era. Doing so allowed politicians to broaden the net of anti-Asian exclusion to include South Asians. While their rhetoric echoed the anti-Asian language used to justify the exclusion of the Chinese and Japanese who had come before them, legislators also emphasized South Asians' political activism to legitimize their exclusion. 19

Mireya Loza explores another unintended consequence of the 1917 Immigration Act. The confluence of World War I, the passage of the 1917 act, and the return home of many Mexican nationals who did not want to risk being drafted into the U.S. Army created far-reaching anxieties about labor shortages in agriculture, railroads, mining, and construction. Leaders from each of these industries pressured the secretary of labor to find a way to work around the 1917 Immigration Act and create a guest worker program expansive enough to include entire families, not just men as the bracero program later would. This World War I precedent helped influential agribusinesses to make a case to exempt Mexicans from the quota systems passed in 1921 and 1924 and sent the message that Mexicans could be valued as workers but not as potential citizens. 20

The next three articles focus on the creation of apparatuses and institutions that emerged from increasingly restrictive immigration laws and shaped the future of immigration restriction. Adam Goodman examines the passionate debates over citizenship tests that vexed the nation during the first two decades of the twentieth century. His essay contributes to an emerging body of scholarship that seeks to connect more explicitly debates over immigration restriction and naturalization reform. It is not by chance that the 1924 Immigration Act was the first immigration law that explicitly linked the ability to immigrate to the ability to naturalize. Ashley Johnson Bavery and Romeo Guzmán focus on the impact of immigration control on two different groups, bureaucrats and immigrants. Bavery explores how the Border Patrol's efforts to contain illegality along the northern border after the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act set an important precedent for how it would soon operate along the southern border, a history that remains largely absent in the literature. Guzmán, conversely, shifts the focus to the migrants affected by the new regulations to provide a new perspective on the strategies that migrants deployed to navigate those new requirements. 21

Adam Goodman considers World War I as a pivotal moment in national debates about immigration, labor, and belonging. In 1914, amid calls for “100 percent Americanism” and complaints about the low naturalization rates among immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, bureaucrats at the recently established Bureau of Naturalization launched a multiyear effort to create a citizenship textbook. Although the textbook never came to fruition, the agency's efforts to define and impose a homogenous national identity revealed the dynamic and contested nature of citizenship during the war years and shaped how Americans and politicians during the 1920s and beyond thought about who could become a citizen. Moreover, the textbook project helped the fledgling bureau gain a foothold in the burgeoning administrative state, expanding the federal government's authority over immigration and naturalization. The 1924 Immigration Act permanently connected immigration and naturalization by barring the entry of immigrants ineligible for citizenship. To end a decade-long debate over racial eligibility to citizenship, the act declared that any person ineligible to naturalize was now ineligible to immigrate. The rationale and rhetoric behind this decision echoed many of the discussions underlying the textbook project. 22

Ashley Johnson Bavery demonstrates that current tools of border politics and policing—especially the rhetoric of criminality and disorder justifying the use of state violence—have a long history. In the years immediately after the 1924 Immigration Act, border patrolmen on the U.S.-Canada border modeled their force on the U.S. Army and initiated coercive practices to manufacture an immigration crisis that justified their permanent placement on the border. Bavery's article shows how the policies and practices set in place along the northern border, in cities such as Detroit and Buffalo, to contain illegality after the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act influenced the U.S. Border Patrol's role as the focus shifted to the southern border at the beginning of the Great Depression. By the 1930s, the tactics developed along the northern border would inform border policing on the U.S.-Mexico divide and reinforce the centrality of race in policing Latinx migrants. 23

Using a transnational lens, Romeo Guzmán focuses on how Mexican migrants responded to restrictions in the 1930s. Shifting perspectives, he approaches Mexican migrants as Mexican nationals residing abroad rather than as Mexican immigrants. The Mexican state, through its consular officials, acknowledged its citizens abroad as transnational subjects who needed help navigating the U.S.-Mexico border after the passage of immigration laws in 1917, 1924, and 1929. By focusing on this transnational consular-migrant network, Guzmán reveals a new story of restriction that examines how Mexican nationals responded to restriction by using their citizenship and connection to the Mexican state to understand and adapt to U.S. immigration law. He also emphasizes the Mexican state's role in helping migrants develop mechanisms to manage the crisis brought on by immigration laws that, in the 1930s, would lead to the voluntary and forced departure of approximately half a million ethnic Mexicans. 24

The last three articles focus on the long-term impact of the immigration system created in the 1920s. Beginning with white nationalists' current efforts to revise and appropriate the history of U.S. immigration to create a narrative of “white extinction,” Alexandra Minna Stern's groundbreaking essay examines the echoes of white nationalist narratives of racial extinction today. Focusing on a largely ignored aspect of immigration history, Yael Schacher explores how the exemptions in immigration law challenge its exclusionary message yet also demonstrate that the lack of clear guidance for these exemptions created a level of uncertainty and unpredictability that left migrants vulnerable to rejection and exploitation. Building on recent trends in the historiography of the carceral state, Carl Lindskoog chronicles the evolution of immigrant incarceration as an instrument of removal, elimination, and social control from the nineteenth century to the present. 25

Alexandra Minna Stern analyzes the continuities and discontinuities in xenophobia, white nationalism, antisemitism, and eugenic thought over the past century. She delves deeply into contemporary demographic anxieties about an increasingly multicultural country, which have led to the revival of early twentieth-century xenophobes such as Madison Grant. This revival builds on white nationalists' fixation on the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which they regard as the demographic point of no return and the pinnacle of an insidious Jewish-engineered plot to destroy the United States. Stern's article ends with a close examination of Harry H. Laughlin, an influential eugenicist appointed by Rep. Albert Johnson (co-author of the 1924 restriction act) to serve as a eugenics expert to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization after he testified before the committee in June 1920. Laughlin's nativist policy proposals reverberate to this day, particularly in the restrictionist efforts of Stephen Miller, special adviser on immigration to former president Donald J. Trump. 26

Yael Schacher uses the passage of the 1917 Immigration Act to challenge our understanding of the history of asylum in the United States. Her article shows that, although Congress formalized the application process for asylum only in the late twentieth century, immigrants have been seeking asylum in the United States in different ways for over a century. The passage of the 1917 Immigration Act marked a pivotal moment in this history. Schacher's essay focuses on an exception to the literacy test in the 1917 immigration law for those seeking admission “to avoid religious persecution,” which restrictionists of the 1920s believed was a loophole that allowed for the admission of Jewish and Syrian refugees. It recovers the stories of the claims of Jewish and Syrian women refugees who were victims of sexual violence and resorted to the religious exemption to make a case for asylum because U.S. immigration policy did not recognize sex or gender as an independent ground for persecution. 27

Carl Lindskoog argues that immigration restriction and enforcement in the 1920s are a critical chapter in America's history of migration, race, and empire. His essay cogently shows that the passage of the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts along with the creation of the Border Patrol in 1924 and the criminalization of border crossing in 1929 built on earlier efforts to use incarceration to eliminate Indigenous people from their lands and control free and enslaved African Americans and Chinese immigrants. Lindskoog's tracing of the government's use of immigration detention back to its nineteenth-century origins is a critical addition to our understanding of the history of incarceration as a tool of removal, elimination, and social control used by American officials. He reveals settler colonialism as a process that seeks to eliminate Indigenous people so that the land can be permanently occupied by the white settler population and that seeks to marginalize and render permanently exploitable other nonwhite groups on whose labor it relies. Broadening the lens also allows Lindskoog to capture the challenges to such a system through campaigns of civil disobedience, protests, and attacks against racist policies that enable this violence. 28

Erika Lee's epilogue connects the historical developments traced in the contributions to this special issue to the present and demonstrates how restrictionists can successfully exploit a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic to advance an agenda that has been over a century in the making. What is happening today has long historical antecedents, but the scale of the attacks against legal and irregular immigration is new. A century ago, much of the infrastructure, bureaucracy, and technologies of control were still in development. Today, immigration is under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, the largest bureau in U.S. history, which draws on huge budgets and deploys vast personnel. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the largest police force in the country. 29

The scholarship on the 1921 and 1924 immigration acts is rich, vibrant, and growing. This special issue offers only a sample of these developments, and it therefore presents an opportunity to reflect on topics that deserve more attention: the role of the courts in immigration legislation, the experiences of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, as well as more attention to disability and sexuality and gender as they intersected with immigration, are just a few that stand out. Our hope is that this special issue will generate many other possible avenues of research. 30

A century after the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, “an acrid odor of the 1920s is again in the air.” Today's pervasive anti-immigrant rhetoric, the xenophobic attacks against Asian Americans, and the relentless push for more restrictive and dehumanizing immigration laws all have origins in the rhetoric, violence, and restrictionism that culminated in the passage of the 1924 act. Then, as now, immigration restriction intersected with the systematic marginalization, segregation, and criminalization of other “undesirable” groups in U.S. society and was an integral component of larger debates about citizenship and belonging. As many of the articles demonstrate, the histories of anti-Black racism, anti-Asian xenophobia, and anti-Semitism have always been profoundly intertwined. 31

Taken together, the essays presented here demonstrate that it is impossible to understand the 1920s, and U.S. history more generally, without immigration history. We hope that this special issue will move this history to the forefront of any discussion or teaching of the 1920s and the impact those years have had on our present moment. The right to enter and the right to safety are once again in question and are increasingly urgent issues as global pandemics, climate change, and international conflicts put receiving countries to the test.

Notes

I wish to thank Erika Lee, Kevin Kenny, Hardeep Dhillon, Torrie Hester, Jane Hong, Ben Irvin, and the anonymous readers for the JAH for their feedback on this introduction.

Footnotes

Prescott F. Hall, “Immigration Restriction and World Eugenics,” Journal of Heredity, 10 (March 1919), 126. Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921); Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921); Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924). For recent scholarship that challenges the persistent assumption that these two laws marked the beginning of immigration restriction in U.S. history, see Torrie Hester, Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy (Philadelphia, 2017); Adam Goodman, The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Princeton, 2020); Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York, 2016); Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill, 2003); Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, Mass., 2018); and Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Y. Hsu, and María Cristina García, eds., A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924–1965 (Urbana, 2019). Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917).

Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917). Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921). Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 79 Stat. 911 (1965).

Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917). Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921). Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Nationality Act of 1790, 1 Stat. 103, chap. 3 (1790). Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178, 197 (1922). Amanda Frost, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers (Boston, 2021); Kunal Madhukar Parker, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (Cambridge, Eng., 2015).

Page Act of 1875, 18 Stat. 477, chap. 141 (1875). Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Princeton, 2012), 54; Hirota, Expelling the Poor; Gerald L. Neuman, “The Lost Century of American Immigration Law (1776–1875),” Columbia Law Review, 93 (Dec. 1993), 1833–1901; George Anthony Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion (Urbana, 1999); Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). Kerry L. Abrams, “Poligamy, Prostitution, and the Federalization of Immigration Law,” Columbia Law Review, 105 (April 2005), 641–716. On the intersection of gender and naturalization, see Candice Lewis Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (1998; Berkeley, 2018).

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 22 Stat. 58, chap. 126 (1882). Immigration Act of 1882, 22 Stat. 214 (1882). Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York, 2005); Marylin Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, Eng., 2008); Erika Lee, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian Exclusion in the Americas,” Pacific Historical Review, 76 (Nov. 2007), 537–62; Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question: Gold Rushes and Global Politics (New York, 2022); Elliott Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era to World War II (Chapel Hill, 2014). Jane H. Hong, Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (Chapel Hill, 2019).

Immigration Act of 1882, 22 Stat. 214 (1882). Deirdre M. Moloney, National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy since 1882 (Chapel Hill, 2012). Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2009); Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis, 2002). Julio Capó Jr., “Queer Border Crossings,” Modern American History, 2 (no. 1, 2019), 59–63.

Douglas C. Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Chicago, 2016); Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disabled upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (Columbus, 2018); Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore, 2003); Nancy J. Hirschmann, Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging (Philadelphia, 2014); Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York, 2019); Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley, 2006); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley, 2015); David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, “The Eugenic Atlantic: Race, Disability, and the Making of an International Eugenic Science, 1800–1945,” Disability and Society, 18 (Dec. 2003), 843–64; Peter Schrag, Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism and Immigration (Berkeley, 2010). Lee, America for Americans. Katherine Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Cambridge, Mass., 2018). “Table 1: Nativity of the Population and Place of Birth of the Native Population: 1850 to 1990,” in “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 2000,” by Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Feb. 2006, p. 26, https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2006/demo/POP-twps0081.pdf. Andrew Kohut, “From the Archives: In '60s Americans Gave Thumbs-up to Immigration Law that Changed the Nation,” Sept. 20, 2019, Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/04/50-years-later-americans-give-thumbs-up-to-immigration-law-that-changed-the-nation/.

Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917). On the intersection between war and migration throughout the twentieth century, see Maddalena Marinari, “Migration, War, and the Transformation of the U.S. Population,” in Cambridge History of America and the World, vol. IV: 1945–Present, ed. David C. Engerman, Max Friedman, and Melani McAlister (Chicago, 2021), 419–39; Ellen Wu, “It's Time to Center War in U.S. Immigration History,” Modern American History, 2 (July 2019), 215–35. Maddalena Marinari, Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965 (Chapel Hill, 2020); Daniel J. Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, 2002); Zolberg, Nation by Design. For the act's provisions on disability, see Baynton, Defectives in the Land. For the act's effect on immigrants espousing ideologies regarded as threats to American democracy, see Julia Rose Kraut, Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 2020).

Robert DeCourcy Ward, “The New Immigration Act,” North American Review, 185 (July 1907), 593. On the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907, see Eiichiro Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire (Oakland, 2019), 96–97. Douglas Baynton, “Defectives in the Land: Disability and American Immigration Policy, 1882–1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 24 (Spring 2005), 33.

Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917). Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921). Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924). U.S. Congress, House, “A Bill to Provide for the Deportation of Certain Undesirable Aliens,” 66 Cong., 2 sess. Cus. 172-74 593 1920 H. R. 11118 May 10, 1920. S. Deborah Kang, The Ins on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917–1954 (New York, 2017); Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2017); Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley, 2010).

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 79 Stat. 911 (1965).

Kevin Kenny, “Mobility and Sovereignty: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Immigration Restriction,” Journal of American History, 109 (Sept. 2022), 284–97; Seema Sohi, “Barred Zones, Rising Tides, and Radical Struggles: The Antiradical and Anti-Asian Dimensions of the 1917 Immigration Act,” ibid., 298–309; Mireya Loza, “‘Let Them Bring Their Families’: The Experiences of the First Mexican Guest Workers, 1917–1922,” ibid., 310–23. Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921); Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924). Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 22 Stat. 58, chap. 126 (1882). Immigration Act of 1882, 22 Stat. 214 (1882).

Kenny, “Mobility and Sovereignty,” 284–97.

Sohi, “Barred Zones, Rising Tides, and Radical Struggles.” Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917).

Loza, “‘Let Them Bring Their Families.’” Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917).

Adam Goodman, “Defining American: The Bureau of Naturalization's Attempt to Inculcate ‘the Soul of America’ in Immigrants during World War I,” Journal of American History, 109 (Sept. 2022), 324–35. Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924). Ashley Johnson Bavery, “Militarizing the Northern Border: State Violence and the Formation of the U.S. Border Patrol,” Journal of American History, 109 (Sept. 2022), 362–74; Romeo Guzmán, “Paper Trails: Repatriates, Mexican Consuls, and Transnational Mobility during the Great Depression,” ibid., 336–47.

Goodman, “Defining American.” Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Bavery, “Militarizing the Northern Border.” Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Guzmán, “Paper Trails.” Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917); Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924); U.S. Congress, House, “A Bill to Provide for the Deportation of Certain Undesirable Aliens,” 66 Cong., 2 sess. Cus. 172-74 593 1920 H. R. 11118 May 10, 1920.

Alexandra Minna Stern, “From ‘Race Suicide’ to ‘White Extinction’: White Nationalism, Nativism, and Eugenics over the Past Century,” Journal of American History, 109 (Sept. 2022), 348–61; Yael Schacher, “Return of the Repressed: Asylum in the 1920s and Today,” ibid., 375–87; Carl D. Lindskoog, “Migration, Racial Empire, and the Carceral Settler State,” ibid., 388–98.

Stern, “From ‘Race Suicide’ to ‘White Extinction.’” Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, 79 Stat. 911 (1965). Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Schacher, “Return of the Repressed.” Immigration Act of 1917, 39 Stat. 874 (1917).

Lindskoog, “Migration, Racial Empire, and the Carceral Settler State.” Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921); Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Erica Lee, “Epilogue: A New Era of Anti-Immigrant Hate and Immigration Restriction,” Journal of American History, 109 (Sept. 2022), 399–407.

Emergency Quota Act of 1921, 42 Stat. 5 (1921); Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924).

Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153 (1924). John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1869–1925 (New Brunswick, 2002), 332.