National Review, May 26, 2024
Sunday is the 100th anniversary of Calvin Coolidge’s signing the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which brought the Ellis Island immigration wave to an end. In my New York Post op-ed, I argue that the official narrative that the law was execrable needs to be retired: “It was precisely the two-generation-long pause in immigration brought about by the bill that made the earlier Great Wave a success.”
I conclude:
The 1924 law bore the marks of the obsolete racial fixations of its time, but had astonishingly positive consequences for all Americans.
The 1965 law was well-intentioned, but has caused immigration to spin out of control.
We should be able to combine the best of the two approaches to bring an end to this latest Great Wave, and give America another much-needed breather.
On my podcast this week, NumbersUSA founder Roy Beck spoke especially about the boon that the 1924 immigration restriction was for black Americans, something he also addressed in the Detroit News.
Of course, most of the other commentary on today’s centenary was the usual stuff about how wicked our forebears were, such as the Washington Post piece which also warned that “U.S. immigration politics have again taken a dark, xenophobic turn.” (Trump’s name appears seven times in an op-ed about a 100-year-old law.)
The Wall Street Journal, which you might expect would jump on that bandwagon, given its repeated support for a five-word constitutional amendment proclaiming “There shall be open borders,” chose instead to run a more sober piece, albeit arguing for a gimmicky plan to sell U.S. citizenship.
(For comic relief, peruse unhinged pieces from the Cato Institute and the World Socialist Web Site — complete with the obligatory Hitler references. And both got the date wrong, apparently cribbing from Wikipedia.)
But for all the racialist gibberish that really did surround the 1924 law, the real issue was numbers. The House sponsor of the bill, Representative Albert Johnson (R., Wash.), responding to the vogue at the time of imputing differences among races from skull shapes, memorably said, “So far as we are concerned, we do not care whether they are round heads, longheads, or bone heads. We are going to cut down the number who come here.”
Coolidge biographer Amity Shlaes, no immigration restrictionist, put her finger on the real issue in a way that is relevant today. As she wrote of the 1924 law in City Journal last year:
Certainly, there were many racists or racialists in the U.S. who supported Johnson-Reed because it accorded with their theories. But the majority of supporters simply wanted their country to change more slowly.
Wanting to change more slowly is the core of the conservative temperament — in the immigration context you could call it demographic conservatism. As Burke wrote about the inevitability of change, “All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees.”
The 1924 immigration law sought to do just that, and succeeded for decades. Given that we now have the highest foreign-born share of the population ever recorded, it’s time for a return to demographic conservatism.