The border has never been more closed than it is today, thanks to the Biden administration’s decision to extend Title 42, a public-health-related immigration restriction put in place in March 2020 by then-President Donald Trump amid the coronavirus pandemic. Yet right-wing critics of President Biden assert that he is somehow encouraging border crossing by being insufficiently tough on immigration enforcement.
A migrant child peeks through the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Abram-Perezville, Texas, in March. Today’s quotas and other restrictions that target immigrants from Mexico and other nations with predominantly non-white populations have their roots in the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Julio Cortez/Associated Press, File
The roots of Biden’s policy headache lay in an immigration system built primarily around restricting the ability to migrate. More than that, the system was designed specifically to keep out people deemed racially undesirable. In fact, Wednesday marks 100 years since the enactment of one of the most restrictive immigration laws in U.S. history, one that inaugurated the contemporary era of immigration crises and expanded border security.
On May 19, 1921, President Warren G. Harding signed the Emergency Quota Act into law, ending the era of open immigration to the United States from Europe. The immigration quotas in the law were meant to be a temporary measure to slow immigration after World War I. The legislation and a subsequent 1924 law had a massive impact: From 1880 through 1920, 23.5 million people immigrated to the United States, but between 1921 and 1965, only 6 million more would come.
The 1921 Emergency Quota Act didn’t materialize out of nowhere; it built on previous immigration restrictions, often targeting people from Asia. The United States’ first federal immigration laws, the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, banned Chinese immigrants. These were followed by the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, which banned Japanese immigrants, and the creation of what was deemed an “Asiatic Barred Zone” in 1917 during World War I.
Even after the United States began restricting migration from Asia, the vast majority of immigrants from Europe remained free to come. However, as people arriving from southern and eastern Europe began to outpace those coming from northern Europe, critics proposed additional restrictions to curtail immigration.
The reason for their concern? Emerging ideas about race science and genetics that were driving the development of the field of “eugenics.” Newly arriving immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were considered suspect because of questions of ethnicity and race. On the Senate floor in 1896, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, R-Mass., spoke out against “a great and perilous change in the very fabric of our race.”
Scholars developed pseudoscientific theories of a racial hierarchy with the “Nordic race” at the top, high above southern and eastern Europeans, and followed by non-white people from the rest of the world. In his 1916 book “The Passing of the Great Race,” Madison Grant compared the Nordic race, whom he referred to as “the white man, par excellence,” to an endangered species that needed to be preserved. For Grant, the only way to do that was to create a protected area through immigration restrictions.
A 1924 photo shows the registry room at Ellis Island in New York Harbor, gateway to America for millions of immigrants. The country-specific immigration quotas set by the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 were based on pseudoscientific theories that put the “Nordic race” at the top of a racial hierarchy, far above southern and eastern Europeans, and followed by non-white people from the rest of the world. Associated Press, File
In the aftermath of World War I, people displaced by the widespread destruction in Europe set their sights on migrating to the United States to rebuild their lives. As Congress debated increasing immigration restrictions in April 1921, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes submitted a report from U.S. diplomats in Europe on who was planning to migrate. The report warned of “Jews of an undesirable type” and “Armenians, Jews, Persians, and Russians” who “cannot be regarded as desirable populations for any country.” It concluded that “our restriction on immigration should be so rigid that it would be impossible for most of those people to enter the United States.”
The idea of immigration restriction was broadly popular in Congress. The only debate in 1921 was about how strict the new law should be. Rep. Albert Johnson, R-Wash., who chaired the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, was a firm believer in the prevailing racial pseudoscience and even became the president of the Eugenics Research Association in 1923. Johnson’s initial draft of the 1921 Emergency Quota Act called for a complete ban on all immigration to the United States for one year.
The version that eventually passed was only slightly less draconian. The Emergency Quota Act created country-specific quotas, limiting future immigration by a numerical limit pegged to just 3 percent of the foreign-born population from each country present in the United States in the 1910 Census.
The 3 percent quotas appeared neutral on their face, but they were not. Because older immigrants from Northern Europe made up the majority of the 1910 U.S. population, 3 percent from those countries represented a far greater number than the 3 percent admitted from southern and eastern European countries, who constituted the majority of new immigrants but had much smaller numbers of residents in the 1910 Census.
For Italians and Greeks, for example, the new quotas represented a 99 percent reduction from the number of people who had migrated to the United States in the previous year. Monthly quotas would often be filled immediately by a single ship on the first day of the month. Over the summer of 1921, ships would position themselves off a U.S. port on the last day of the month, then race into harbor the next morning to unload passengers. On Aug. 31, the King Alexander and the Acropolis, two ships filled with Greek passengers, eyed each other warily off New York Harbor. At the stroke of midnight, they raced for Ellis Island. The King Alexander won by two minutes. Its passengers filled the Greek quota for the month, and the Acropolis was forced to sail back to Europe.
But countries with generous quotas – those deemed more ethnically desirable, from northern and western Europe – failed to meet them. The British quota of 77,342 was only half filled in 1921.
When the bill passed, Immigration Commissioner William Husband predicted the steady expansion of new security measures that would follow. He noted that the United States had no immigration restrictions at the land border with Mexico and expected “a situation to arise that might require additional safeguards on that border to prevent smuggling.”
In 1924, Congress made the emergency quotas permanent – and more restrictive – in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. A sponsor of that bill, Sen. David Reed, R-Pa., wrote a commentary in The New York Times that concluded, “Our incoming immigrants should hereafter be of the same races as those of us who are already here.” The next month, Congress established the U.S. Border Patrol to enforce the new racial entry restrictions at the borders.
The eugenics-inspired national-origin quotas remained in place for over 40 years. The 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act removed them but adopted hemispheric quotas that perpetuated strict limits on who could enter the United States. The law also put new restrictions on immigration from Mexico and the rest of the Americas, setting in motion the further expansion of the Border Patrol at the U.S.-Mexico border, which has continued through the present day.
The Emergency Quota Act began the era of treating immigration as a problem that could be solved with more restrictions and security. Although the pseudoscientific racial theories of the 1920s have long since been rejected, the immigration laws and border security infrastructure they spawned have remained. Nevertheless, despite the strict enforcement of these laws, the country finds itself grappling with the same questions about how to handle immigration as it faced in 1921. Given this reality, and the questionable effectiveness of this costly regime, it is worth considering whether immigration restrictions originally written to protect white supremacy continue to reflect the values, and serve the interests, of the United States.
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