This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the worst laws in American history: the Immigration Act of 1924. The law ended an era in which most immigrants were presumed legal and moved to the opposite presumption: most potential immigrants were presumed barred from entering the United States. My Cato Institute colleague David Bier, a leading immigration policy expert, summed up some of its dire consequences:
It is often said that the United States had two “foundations”: the first was after the Revolutionary War, and the second was the abolition of slavery after the Civil War… But the third “foundation” occurred in 1924, and it changed the future of the United States. Almost like other foundings. Unlike the first two, America’s third founding was fundamentally illiberal, inspiring to Hitler and a rejection of America’s first two foundings.
The third statehood occurred on May 24, 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge signed the National Origins Quota Act, which established the first permanent cap on legal immigration. Prior to the 1924 Act, all potential immigrants were considered eligible to immigrate unless the government had evidence that they were ineligible. The 1924 law replaced this system with the Soviet-style “guilty until proven innocent” quota system we have today.
No single law has so radically transformed the demography, economy, politics, and freedoms of America and the world. It decimated America’s population of immigrants and their descendants by hundreds of millions, weakened economic growth and limited the country’s power and influence. Americans after 1924 could not associate, contract, and trade as freely with people born around the world as before.
These legal restrictions create a large and peaceful gap between Americans and their relatives, spouses, children, employees, friends, business partners, customers, employers, faith leaders, artists and other peaceful people who may contribute to our lives. An almost insurmountable bureaucracy. It makes the world a poorer and less free place for Americans and people around the globe, necessitating the creation of a massive law enforcement agency to enforce these restrictions….
After 1924, the number of new legal immigrants as a share of the U.S. population fell sharply before slowly recovering. If the United States granted legal permanent residence at the per capita rate it did between 1900 and 1914 (before World War I disrupted travel), an additional 164 million immigrants would be allowed to legally settle in the United States. Many of these immigrants will eventually return to their home countries, just as they did in large numbers before airlines shrunk the globe….
A century of freer immigration would make America a richer, freer, stronger, and more powerful nation, while also lifting hundreds of millions of people around the world out of poverty and liberating hundreds of millions more from tyranny. The impact is too great to summarize quickly, but Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh has written an excellent alternative history that explores the impact on American and world history if immigration had not been cut off. Some less obvious effects.
The most obvious harm caused by the Immigration Act of 1924 was that millions of would-be immigrants were trapped in lifelong poverty and oppression in their countries of origin. The most notorious examples are the Jews who fled Nazi Germany, such as Anne Frank and her family. But there are many, many other examples.
As David Beale has pointed out , the bill also does great harm to native-born Americans because it deprives immigrants of the economic growth, productivity, and innovation they bring and reduces America’s power and influence in the world. Immigrants contribute disproportionately to scientific innovation and entrepreneurship. More generally, immigration restrictions severely limit the economic and civil liberties of locals, as well as of potential immigrants themselves.
Ironically, the main groups excluded by the 1924 Act were immigrants from Eastern, Southern and Central Europe: Italians, Jews, Poles, Greeks, etc. Today, most Americans, including even the most conservative immigration restrictionists, consider these groups to be an undisputed part of the American mainstream. But at the time, nativist complaints against them were similar to those against Hispanic immigrants today. Jews, Italians, and others were considered unassimilable, prone to crime, competitors for jobs, threats to national security, agents of malign foreign governments, and a threat to American values and culture.
These claims were largely false at the time, were false in the 19th century against the Irish, and are false now against Hispanics and other immigrants. But they had a huge impact on American history and public policy and remain hugely influential today.
Some of the worst elements of the 1924 Immigration Act were eventually repealed, particularly the 1965 Immigration Act. But, as Beale points out, the 1965 Act and subsequent legislation still retained key features of its predecessor, such as “the presumption against legal immigration, lower overall caps, country-by-country caps, and preferences for family reunification.” . And we still have a system in which the vast majority of potential immigrants have little chance of being allowed to enter the country legally.
The 1924 Act was not the first major federal immigration restriction. This dubious distinction falls under the deeply racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned most Chinese immigrants and led to a horrific Supreme Court decision that gave the federal government general power to restrict immigration, even though it was not in the Constitution. No such powers are enumerated. But the 1924 Act extended the presumption of exclusion to more countries, making it applicable to immigrants from most parts of the world.
Conservative boston globe Columnist Jeff Jacoby has more thoughts on the horrors of the 1924 Act and its legacy.
