What was the immigration restriction act of 1924

The Immigration Act of limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the national census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia. In , the U. Congress enacted the first widely restrictive immigration law.

The uncertainty generated over national security during World War I made it possible for Congress to pass this legislation, and it included several important provisions that paved the way for the Act. The Act implemented a literacy test that required immigrants over 16 years old to demonstrate basic reading comprehension in any language.

It also increased the tax paid by new immigrants upon arrival and allowed immigration officials to exercise more discretion in making decisions over whom to exclude. The Philippines was a U. China was not included in the Barred Zone, but the Chinese were already denied immigration visas under the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The literacy test alone was not enough to prevent most potential immigrants from entering, so members of Congress sought a new way to restrict immigration in the s. Dillingham introduced a measure to create immigration quotas, which he set at three percent of the total population of the foreign-born of each nationality in the United States as recorded in the census.

This put the total number of visas available each year to new immigrants at , What did advocates for the act expect when the law was signed? What has it looked like in reality? The system they come up with is still really interesting to think about because it's very much the one we have today.

They get rid of the quotas, and they prioritize family reunification. The people who get top priority for visas are people who already have family in the U. This is what the Trump administration wants to end. Just to give you a sense of just how little [the lawmakers] predicted what would happen: [reunification] was actually a compromise to nativists who wanted to keep America white. Yet because of family reunification, once you do get enough people here who are outside Europe, their numbers actually grew and grew and grew and grew.

A bunch of presidents kept adding these special carve-outs for different refugee populations, like the Cubans and Vietnamese. Over time, the entire stream of immigrants just becomes much, much less European, much less white. That is not something that I think almost anyone who was involved in the debate would have expected. In fact, they kept downplaying how much the law would change the actual demographics of the U.

What's interesting to me is that no one quite knew what standing for the principle [of racial equality] would lead to in terms of what this country looked like. At the end of this whole journey in , [advocates] have to make a bunch of compromises and they added a numerical cap for the very first time on immigration from the Western hemisphere.

So until that point—incredible to imagine right now because we are so fixated on securing the border—there was no numerical cap to how many people could come from Latin America and Canada. It was just totally open. That was, again, a foreign policy decision. It was an idea that you had to be friendly to your neighbors. That just changed the nature of how we thought about Mexican immigrants forever, and which we are still living in the shadow of.

The law is lauded as a civil rights achievement by some, in that it basically bans racial discrimination in immigration laws and gets rid of these old ethnic quotas. But it really transforms our whole notion of our neighbors and our relationship to them as sources of immigration.

What were you most surprised to discover while researching and writing your book? I got into this whole project for very personal reasons.

I wanted to understand why my family had been allowed to come to this country [from Taiwan and China]. I so bought into this idea of America as a nation of immigrants that I hadn't even really seriously considered a possibility that my parents would have been rejected. What was surprising to me was just to learn how easily that could have happened—and not just for me and my family but every family I know in America, basically, that's not from Europe. I now wonder, who among us would just not be here if not for the Immigration Nationality Act?

What is it like to release your book as the COVID outbreak has led to a spike in Anti-Asian sentiment and a resurgence of xenophobia? When I started this book it was early , before President Trump was elected. I never imagined how timely it would be. It really started as an exploration of, in a way, family history through American political history. Knowing that history, knowing how recent [Asian Americans'] arrival is as a large racial group in this country, helps me to process what's happening now.

Because I think part of what the xenophobia is revealing is just how tenuous, in a way, the Asian American political category can be. Designed to limit all immigration to the U. The Act also tightened the national origins quota system. Under this system, the number of immigrants allowed to come to the U. The previous quota was based on population data from the census, but the Act based the quota on the census, which effectively lowered the quota numbers for non-white countries.

The system also considered the national origins of the entire American population, including natural-born citizens, which increased the number of visas available to people from the British Isles and Western Europe. Finally, the Act excluded any person ineligible for citizenship, formalizing the ban on immigration from Asia based on existing laws that prohibited Asian immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens.