Immigration Act of 1921
The Immigration Act of 1921 was a significant piece of legislation in the United States, marking the introduction of annual immigrant nationality quotas for the first time. In response to a considerable influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe in the decades leading up to the law, there was growing public sentiment for stricter immigration control. This law set a cap on the number of immigrants allowed from each country based on their representation in the U.S. population as of the 1910 census, which aimed to favor northern and western European immigrants over their southern and eastern counterparts.
The Act came amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment influenced by economic downturns and fears of foreign ideologies, such as communism, during the post-World War I period. Organizations advocating for immigration restrictions gained political traction, reflecting broader societal ambivalence towards diverse groups, particularly Catholics, Jews, and Asians. While the Act was viewed as a necessary measure to preserve American social fabric, it was viewed as only a temporary solution, leading to even stricter restrictions in the subsequent Immigration Act of 1924. This legislation fundamentally reshaped the U.S. immigration landscape and set a precedent for future immigration policy.
Subject Terms
Immigration Act of 1921
The Law: U.S. federal law establishing immigration quotas
Also known as: Emergency Quota Act, Johnson Quota Act, Per Centum Law
Date: Enacted on May 19, 1921.
The Immigration Act of 1921 established annual immigrant nationality quotas for the first time in the United States. However, the restrictions seemed inadequate to many Americans, who felt that too many immigrants still managed to enter the United States. Pressure continued for stronger restrictions, lower quotas, and tighter borders, resulting in the Immigration Act of 1924.
For three centuries, immigration to North American had been essentially unrestricted. Although anti-immigrant sentiments were not unknown in American history, with a few exceptions these popular moods generally passed before manifesting in legal restrictions. However, a large influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920 sparked a backlash culminating in significant immigration restrictions in 1921.
Background
U.S. efforts to control immigration began in the mid-1870s with the introduction of restrictive legislation against Asians, motivated primarily by popular opposition to the influx of Chinese laborers on the West Coast. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, animosity was directed against not only Asians but newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, or anyone whose customs, language, and religion were different from those of the descendants of northern European and British immigrants who made up the bulk of American society. Congress also blocked entry to anarchists and communists on political grounds, and to criminals and people with mental or physical disabilities on grounds of genetic undesirability.
The last significant piece of immigration legislation passed before 1921 was the Immigration Act of 1917, which, over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, barred the immigration of a variety of categories of persons deemed undesirable, along with anyone from a sweeping stretch of southern and eastern Asia and the South Pacific, referred to in the law as the “Asiatic barred zone.” The law also established a literacy test for prospective immigrants.
Postwar Social Conditions
Immigration slowed during World War I, but the end of the war reopened the floodgates. In 1920, over 800,000 immigrants arrived in the United States. Postwar communist revolts in Europe provoked the first Red Scare from 1919 to 1920, as conservative Americans sought to stave off this latest threat to their way of life. In addition, the United States experienced an economic recession in 1920 and 1921, contributing to the nativist and isolationist worldview of Americans who wished to protect their jobs from immigrant competition. As a result of all these developments, anti-immigration organizations became increasingly influential in U.S. politics during the early 1920s.
The white supremacist Ku Klux Klan was one of the most widespread and active of these groups, distilling anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti–Roman Catholic, and anti-Semitic sentiment. Most Americans were less extreme, but they were ambivalent about accepting Roman Catholics, Jews, and Asians into mainstream society. Another group, the Immigration Restriction League (IRL), called for race-based immigration restrictions with limits on southern and eastern Europeans, who, according to restrictionists, would corrupt American democracy. Catholics and radicals were especially mistrusted.
Crafting the Legislation
Amid the rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment, Congress assembled in 1921 to craft an immigration law seen as necessary to preserve American society and culture from foreign corruption. Washington congressman Albert Johnson chaired the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, which favored an immigration quota according to which the number of immigrants from any one country would be capped at a percentage of people from that country already living in the United States. The 1910 census was favored as the baseline for calculating these numbers, because quotas under that census would allow a greater proportion of northern and western Europeans, whom many Americans preferred to southern and eastern Europeans or Jews trying to escape post–World War I persecution.
A competing bill was introduced in the Senate by William Dillingham of Vermont. Although less anti-Semitic and more receptive to business and agricultural interests that relied on cheap immigrant labor, the Senate recognized the national mood and therefore also favored the implementation of immigrant quotas by nationality. Dillingham’s bill maintained restrictions on Asians and did not restrict immigration within the Western Hemisphere, an aspect of the bill favorable to American business and agriculture. Using the 1910 census as a frame of reference, the Dillingham bill set a quota of 5 percent, meaning the number of immigrants admitted annually from a given country could equal no more than 5 percent of the number of people from that country in the U.S. population as of 1910. After an amendment to reduce the 5 percent quota to 3 percent (a number still regarded as too high by those who favored complete exclusion), the House and Senate passed the bill by wide margins, and President Warren G. Harding signed it into law.
Impact
The Immigration Act of 1921 was a watershed in U.S. immigration law, representing the first immigration quota and the first numerical limit on immigrants from Europe. According to the breakdown of the U.S. population in 1910, the annual ceiling for all immigration allowed in 1921 was set at 357,802 immigrants, less than half the number admitted in 1920. The proportion of southern and eastern Europeans admitted to the United States each year fell drastically under the law to less than half the annual total. In this sense the law achieved its goals, although it was considered only a stopgap measure, and its provisions would be tightened still further in 1924.
Bibliography
Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. Discusses the history of U.S. immigration policy, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Gerstle, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Presents an analysis of twentieth-century American society, noting the impact of nationalism, prejudice, and immigration policy on American history.
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925. New York: Atheneum, 1966. Presents a history of nativism, nationalism, and immigration restriction in the United States.
Zolberg, Aristide. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Discusses U.S. immigration policy from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, focusing on immigration restriction, types of migration, and the sociopolitical factors influencing immigration policy.