Summary
- The Immigration Act of 1924 ushered in a four-decade-long Great Pause in mass immigration. This allowed the United States to assimilate the 20-plus million immigrants who arrived during the “Great Wave” that had begun in the 1880s. And the Act fostered a national economic climate conducive to the flowering of the American Dream, especially for Black Americans. Economists have concluded that from 1940 to 1970, largely paralleling the Great Pause, the average real earnings of white men rose by 210 percent and those of Black men rose by 406 percent.
- Not only “progressives”, “liberals”, “conservatives”, and “racists” supported restrictionist policies. So did many Black leaders. A leading Black newspaper concluded that the dramatic decrease in immigration during the First World War “gave [Blacks] the opportunity to get a foothold in the economic world”, but that “there have been many grave doubts about their ability to keep this foothold when fierce competition set in again”. Another proclaimed that the war “showed us just how keen a competitor cheap European labor had been for” Black workers.
- Roy Beck, founder of NumbersUSA, recently set forth an audacious hypothesis that the 1924 Act “was the greatest federal action in U.S. history — other than the Civil War Constitutional Amendments — in advancing the economic interests of the descendants of American slavery, and perhaps of all American workers”. The Act led to a tighter labor market, resulting in an openness and even a desire by employers both North and South to recruit Black workers. This, in turn, opened the door for the Great Migration of millions of Blacks out of the South and helped pave the way for the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. And it turned America into a middle-class society for whites and for Blacks. Beck’s hypothesis is not only plausible, it is the most compelling reading of the historical evidence.
- But not only did the 1924 Act dramatically reduce immigration, it also established country-by-country immigration quotas in reaction to the vast increase in immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe since the 1880s. Sen. David Reed argued that “[i]t was natural that the[ new immigrants] should not understand our institutions” and that they were “wholly dissimilar to the native-born Americans … untrained in self-government”. Thus, “it was best for America that our incoming immigrants should hereafter be of the same races as those of us who are already here”. The debate over the 1924 Act focused to a large extent on often ugly racial rationales for restriction.
- In 1965, Congress, in its zeal to remove the demon of national origins quotas, restarted mass immigration. Congress could have easily accomplished the former without the latter, but it did not do so. The results have been disastrous for our country, with a 19 percent drop in the average real earnings of white men (from 1970 to 2014) and a 32 percent drop for Black men.
Introduction
May 26 marked the 100th anniversary of the enactment of the Immigration Act of 1924 (1924 Act). This epochal legislation ushered in a four-decade-long pause in mass immigration. Immigration averaged 820,239 a year from 1900 to 1909, and while it fell to an average of 634,738 from 1910 to 1919 (reflecting World War One’s disruption of migration). Sociologist and demographer E.P. Hutchinson has written that “By the close of the war in 1918, it became apparent from consular reports and other sources that a new and greater wave of immigration from Europe was in prospect, limited only by the carrying capacity of transatlantic shipping once peacetime travel facilities were restored.”1
In reaction, Congress passed and Presidents Warren G. Harding and then Calvin Coolidge signed into law the legislation popularly known as the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 (1921 Act) and the Immigration Act of 1924 (1924 Act). The 1921 Act set an immigration ceiling of 356,995 a year, though some countries and categories of immigrants were exempted from the ceiling, and the 1924 Act set an interim annual ceiling of 164,667 and a subsequent permanent annual ceiling of 153,714 (with slight modifications over the ensuing years), with again some countries and categories of immigrants being exempted.
Not only did the acts dramatically reduce immigration levels to the U.S., they also established within their numerical ceilings country-by-country quotas. A month before the 1924 Act’s enactment, a New York Times headline announced “AMERICA OF THE MELTING POT COMES TO END” and that the Act’s “Chief Aim”, according to Senate bill author David Reed (R-Penn.), was to “Preserve Racial Type as It Exists Here Today”. Recently, Muzaffar Chishti and Julia Gelatt wrote for the Migration Policy Institute that:
The Immigration Act of 1924 shaped the U.S. population over the course of the 20th century, greatly restricting immigration and ensuring that arriving immigrants were mostly from Northern and Western Europe … [and] played a key role in ending the previous era of largely unrestricted immigration. Its numerical limits on annual arrivals and use of national-origins quotas, aided by Great Depression-era restrictions, limited religious, ethnic, and racial diversity, and sharply reduced the size of the country’s foreign-born population for four decades … . The 1924 act achieved its goals of drastically curtailing immigration and shifting origins back to Northern and Western Europe.
Chishti and Gelatt concluded that “The 1924 act achieved its goals of drastically curtailing immigration and shifting origins back to Northern and Western Europe.” Nancy Ordover has similarly concluded that “the national origin quota has largely been viewed as a deliberate and successful attempt to keep out those who were not Anglo Saxon or Nordic.”2
Chishti, Gelatt, and Ordover expressed the conventional wisdom about the effects of the 1924 Act. Surprisingly, however, this conventional wisdom is wrong, or at least only partially true. This will be the subject of a forthcoming report.
But, in any event, the quotas remained in effect through June 1968, having been sunset by the Act of October 3, 1965 (1965 Act), which also, most likely unintentionally, reinstated the mass immigration that the 1921 and 1924 Acts had paused. Consequently, the 1965 Act reversed the effects of the 1921 and 1924 Acts, as did the subsequent “Immigration Act of 1990” to an even greater extent, for better or, as we shall see, for worse.
The Moral Low Ground
It is uncontestably true that the actual debate over the 1924 Act, in Congress and in the public square, focused to a large extent on often ugly racial rationales for restriction, rather than economic and other factors that had previously played a much more important role. Political science professor Daniel Tichenor at the University of Oregon has written that “if economic and national security were important concerns of early-twentieth-century immigration reformers, the primary intent and effect of their national origins quota system were manifestly racist”.3 Similarly, Vilja Lehtinen explained in his superb University of Helsinki master’s thesis that “Traditionally, immigration had been considered an economic question first and foremost … [but b]y the 1920s, other considerations (such as national unity) had eclipsed economic ones … while they still had a prominent position in the debate.”
Lamar Smith, then chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee, along with subcommittee counsel and my then colleague Ed Grant, concluded in a 1997 law review article that the 1924 Act was an “example[] of … imprudent law-making” — doing the right deed for the wrong reason. They wrote that:
[In the 1920s], sound justification was voiced for a “pause” in mass migration to the United States in order to permit the assimilation of the millions of new immigrants (and, by then, their children) into the American culture. In addition, there was legitimate concern that a disproportionate number of the new immigrants were arriving without the skills and education needed to assimilate well into the American society and economy. Leaders of labor unions and African-American organizations argued that the loose labor market brought about by the Great Wave harmed the economic prospects of native-born workers, encouraged strike-breaking, and perpetuated discrimination against the descendants of slavery.
But Smith and Grant concluded that “Racism, religious and ethnic bigotry, and bogus theories of eugenics infected the debate over immigration, even in the halls of Congress.” As a result, “These ‘national origins’ quotas eventually came to be seen as contrary to the American spirit. But, because legal immigration reform in the 1920s was accomplished (at least in part) for the ‘wrong reasons,’ it is now commonly thought that there were no good reasons for those enactments.”
And the late labor economist Vernon Briggs, Jr., similarly wrote that:
[T]he move to end mass migration in the 1920s sought to do more than simply reduce the supply of immigrants. It also embodied specific social objectives. It sought to affect future racial and ethnic composition of the small flow of immigrants who were permitted to enter by specifying who still could be admitted and who could not … . Thus, the legitimate concerns of a sovereign nation … became entangled with racist attitudes and discriminatory actions.4
As my colleague Mark Krikorian has written, “I think we can all agree that selecting immigrants based on national origin is an idea best left in the past … [b]ut … [that] doesn’t mean the pause itself was bad policy.”
How Did the Authors of the 1924 Act Frame Its Goals?
The authors of the 1924 Act, Sen. David Reed and Rep. Albert Johnson (R-Wash.), chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, were much more measured in their advocacy for, and explanation of the goals of, the Act.
David Reed
On April 27, 1924, a month before enactment, Sen. Reed wrote an apologia in the New York Times. He first focused on assimilation:
Until the years 1853-85 the sources from which the greater number of our immigrants came were the same sources from which our country was originally colonized, and as a result of this fact the immigrants were easily assimilated in our population upon their arrival here. Beginning about 1885, new types of people began to come. For the first time in our history men began to come in large numbers from Italy, Greece, Poland, Turkey in Europe, the Balkan States and from Russia. As these new sources of immigration began to pour out their masses of humanity upon our shores the old sources in Northwestern Europe seemed to dry up, and whereas in 1890 the natives of Southern and Eastern Europe constituted about 8 percent of our foreign-born population, in 1910 they constituted 39 per cent.
This change brought new difficulties in the problem of assimilation. These new peoples spoke strange languages. It was not to be expected that they would readily fuse into the population that they found here.
Reed argued that the new immigrants did not want to assimilate, writing that “America was beginning to smart under the irritation of … those groups of aliens, either in city slums or in country districts, who speak a foreign language and live a foreign life, and who want neither to learn our common speech nor to share our common life.”
He then addressed how this lack of assimilation, or even assimilability, might affect American democracy and the American ethos:
It was natural that they should not understand our institutions, since they came from lands in which popular government was a myth.
There has come about a general realization of the fact that the races of men who have been coming to us in recent years are wholly dissimilar to the native-born Americans, that they are untrained in self-government — a faculty that it has taken the Northwestern Europeans many centuries to acquire.
Thoughtful Americans have been despondent for the future of our country when the suffrage should be exercised by men whose inexperience in popular forms of government would lead them to demand too much of their Government, and to rely too heavily upon it, and too little upon their own initiative.
What to do? Reed’s prescription for America was written out in the 1924 Act:
From all this has grown the conviction that it was best for American that our incoming immigrants should hereafter be of the same races as those of us who are already here, so that each year’s immigration should so far as possible be a miniature America, resembling the national origins the persons who are already settled in our country.
[W]e have indulged the belief that upon their arrival here all immigrants were fused by the “melting pot” into a distinctive American type … . The “melting pot” is no longer necessary, for each year’s immigration that reaches our shores will be but a counterpart of the population that it finds on arrival. The racial composition of America at the present time thus is made permanent.
Its adoption means that America of our grandchildren will be a vastly better place to live in. It will mean a more homogeneous nation, more self-reliant, more independent and more closely knit by common purpose and common ideas.
Reed was careful to point out that “It implies no reflection upon the merit of the excluded peoples. It is merely a recognition of their fundamental dissimilarity from ourselves.” While he was referring to Asian exclusion, his sentiments are also clearly applicable to the national origin quotas.
Albert Johnson
Chairman Johnson was quite careful to frame the debate, and usually have his committee reports frame the debate, as one over unmanageable numbers, racial homogeneity, and assimilation rather than racial superiority and inferiority. For example, during House floor consideration, he stated:
As regards the charge … that this committee has started out deliberately to establish a blond race … let me say that such a charge is all in your eye. [The] committee is not the author of any of these books on the so-called Nordic race. This committee has not built up any ideas of that kind.
Exactly [when asked “Does not the gentleman recall that the Laughlin report does not declare that any race is inferior, but does show that they are not assimilable?”]
It makes no difference from whence they come — too many come.
I insist, my friends, there is neither malice nor hatred in this bill.
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.
I would very much to say on behalf of the committee that through the strenuous times of the hearings this committee undertook not to discuss the Nordic proposition or racial matters.
The Committee on Immigration and Naturalization’s report on H.R. 6540 (the first version of Johnson’s bill) stated:
To endure the United States must have homogeneity of its people. The future depends upon the children of all who are here. For their welfare restriction of immigration is necessary.
Our citizens do not speak of any type of peoples as actually undesirable. Nonassimilable, or slow of assimilation is meant. The undesirables are the criminals, the insane, the paupers, and the other classes excluded by … the act of 1917.5
An impelling reason for the change is that it is desired to slow down the streams of the types of immigrants which are not easily assimilated. Naturalization does not necessarily mean assimilation. The naturalization process can not work well with the continued arrival in large numbers of so-called new immigration. The new type crowds in larger cities. It is exploited. It gains but a slight knowledge of America and American institutions. It has grown to be a great undigested mass of alien thought, alien sympathy, and alien purpose. It is a menace to the social, political, and economic life of the country. It creates alarm and apprehension. It breeds racial hatreds which should not exist in the United States and which need not exist when the balance shall have been restored.6
The committee’s report on Johnson’s revised legislation (H.R. 7995) stated:
The use of the 1890 census is not discriminatory. It is used in an effort to preserve, as nearly as possible, the racial status quo in the United States. It is hoped to guarantee, as best we can at this late date, racial homogeneity in the United States. The use of a later census would discriminate against the descendants of those who founded the nation and established and perpetuated its institutions.7
The committee does not feel that the restriction aimed to be accomplished … is directed at the Jews, for they can come within the quotas from any country in which they were born. The committee in its deliberations has not dwelt upon the desirability of a “Nordic” or any other particular type of immigrant, but has held steadfastly to the purpose of securing a heavy restriction, with the quota so divided that the arrivals from the countries from which the most came in the two decades ahead of the World War might be slowed down in order that the United States might restore its population balance. The continued charge that the committee has built up a “Nordic” race and devoted its hearings to that end is part of a deliberately manufactured assault, for as a matter of fact the committee has done nothing of the kind.
Neither has the committee assaulted the religions of the various peoples. Mindful of the Constitution of the United States, the question of religion has not entered into the arguments that led to the construction of this bill.8
The Moral High Ground
Now, of course, the 1924 Act is infamous for its quotas. But we would all do well to keep in mind, as I have written, that “To the unfortunate extent that racist thought insinuated itself into immigration thinking at the time, mass immigrationists were just as susceptible as restrictionists … . Southern leaders … [during the Great Wave had] hoped to use … immigrants to replace Black workers.” Virulent racism was at the heart of this scheme. Just listen to West Virginia University historian Walter Fleming, who wrote in a 1905 article that “[a]gricultural development in the black belt is at a standstill because of the worthlessness of the black and the difficulty of getting more white labor” and that “After its experience with negro labor the South now turns to the northern and foreign whites to assist in the development of the country.”
And we should also keep in mind esteemed sociologist Nathan Glazer’s commentary that “Today, we decry the restriction policies of the 1920s, but we should recall that progressives and liberals as well as conservatives and racists generally supported them.”9 Tichenor has written that:
For some reformers, the national origins quota system was a necessary government response to the insecurities of modern industrial economic life. Many within the ranks of organized labor premised their support for sweeping restrictions in this period on the real or imagined costs of immigrant labor to working-class citizens. This perspective was shared by those social reformers who believed that “the effectual restriction of immigration is absolutely necessary if we are to raise the American standard of living and reduce the mass of poverty that still exists.”
[T]he New Republic concluded, unfettered European immigration was the luxury of an era when the demands on the state for social justice and control were few:
Freedom of migration from one country to another appears to be one of the elements of nineteenth century liberalism that is fated to disappear. The responsibility of the state for the welfare of its individual members is progressively increasing. The democracy of today cannot permit … social ills to be aggravated by excessive immigration.10
Vilja Lehtinen pointed out that:
[T]he restrictionist project received support even from groups that were either indifferent or hostile to race theories: the traditional economic interpretation of immigration had not lost its importance entirely, and groups (such as blacks and labor organizers) that didn’t necessarily see the immigrant as a racial threat nevertheless often worried about his economic impact.
The economic impact? Roy Beck, the founder of NumbersUSA, a premier restrictionist advocacy organization, contends that “[t]he booming Northern factories had basically closed their gates to Black southerners since 1880 when employers turned to accelerated mass immigration as their preferred method of filling new jobs” and that “[n]o federal action since Emancipation had done more to deprive Black citizens of economic advancement than the government’s mass immigration policies”. Keep in mind that Timothy Hatton, professor of economics at the University of Essex, and Jeffrey Williamson, professor of economics at Harvard University, have concluded that “In the absence of … immigration[] after 1870, the urban real wage would have been 14 percent higher in 1890 [or 3.7 percent higher given alternate assumptions regarding world capital flows] and 34 percent higher in 1910 [or 9.2 percent higher with alternate assumptions].”
Black Restrictionism
It was not only “progressives” and “liberals” and “conservatives” and “racists” who supported restrictionist policies. So did many Black leaders. Robert Malloy wrote in a Center for Immigration Studies report that “in the late 19th and early 20th centuries … [i]n speeches and letters, newspapers and books, black Americans of all political persuasions spoke out about the harm done to them by the federal government's policy of allowing the mass importation of cheap labor.” Frank L. Morris, retired dean of Graduate Studies at Morgan State University, has written that:
Anything, including immigration, which increases the supply of labor in America works against the interests of African Americans … [with c]onsequences [including] depressed wages or the substitution of other workers … . It is sad that this basic fact, recognized by such dissimilar figures as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, is today so widely ignored.
The First World War curtailed mass immigration, albeit temporarily, to a degree that the most fervent legislative drafter would never have thought possible. Immigration levels fell to 110,618 in 1918 (lower than any year since 1862) and 141,132 in 1919 (lower than any year since 1878). The beneficial effects on Black workers were startling. Susan Roth Breitzer has written that:
Wartime travel conditions largely shut off immigration, so during the war years African American migrants increasingly filled the employment breach. Employers also actively recruited them when the American entry into World War I also decreased the traditional white manpower pool, forcing employers to hire African Americans and other groups for what once would have been considered “white” jobs. The African American response to this unprecedented openness was a further jump in migration from the South to the North and the increased integration of African Americans workers into Northern industrial workforces, including into skilled labor.
These results opened the eyes of many in the Black community. Daryl Scott, chairman of the Department of History, Geography and Museum Studies at Morgan State University, wrote in a Center for Immigration Studies report that “[T]he civil rights leadership was well aware of the boon that wartime restriction had been to blacks.” On December 17, 1921, the Chicago Defender, a leading Black newspaper, concluded that:
The war, of course, showed us just how keen a competitor cheap European labor had been for the less skilled among us and the skilled alike … . [I]f it had not been for the harsh competition of the Southern European brought here by American capital to perform those tasks which the American white man had outgrown we would have been a much larger factor in industry than we are today.
And the National Urban League’s Opportunity concluded in December 1926 that:
The World War had accidentally revealed to [Black workers] the enormous pressure of yearly European immigration against their migration from the South to the industrial centers of the North. … What is most evident is that the gaps made by the reduction in immigrant labor have forced a demand for Negro labor despite theories regarding Negro labor not infrequently encountered among certain employers and some unions, which hold that they are neither needed nor desired.
The thought that these gains could be easily wiped away by a resurgent immigration caused great consternation. Vilja Lehtinen has written that:
When immigration had plummeted during the [First World W]ar, the position of blacks in industry had improved significantly. Still, blacks understood that little fundamental had changed, and feared that once immigration revived they would again be pushed to the bottom rung. Many black papers therefore supported the various suspension measures proposed immediately after the war, arguing that the war had shown how important a hindrance immigrant labor had been to the advancement of black Americans.
On February 8, 1919, the New York Age, a leading Black journal, concluded that:
The war gave [Black citizens] the opportunity to get a foothold in the economic world; there have been many grave doubts about their ability to keep this foothold when fierce competition set in again. The question arose in many minds, “Will the Negro be able to keep his new job when the aliens from Europe come back looking for work?”
Many Black leaders supported restrictive legislation, either vocally or silently. Scott concluded that “Rather than condemning restrictionism outright for its association with bigotry, black civil rights leaders limited their comments to discrimination against Asians and West Indians. There is little doubt that the silence of national civil rights leaders reflected their private support for restriction.” Scott pointed out that W.E.B. DuBois himself had written in The Crisis in August 1929 that “Colored America has been silent on the immigration quota controversy for two reasons: First, the stopping of the importing of cheap white labor on any terms has been the economic salvation of American black labor.”
But, as Scott noted, “If the perceived contradiction between their restrictionist desires and inclusionist principle led civil rights leaders to silence, not all national black leaders were silent.” He pointed to A. Philip Randolph, Black labor activist and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who wrote in the Messenger in August 1924 that:
[W]e favor reducing [immigration] to nothing ... . We favor shutting out the Germans from Germany, the Italians from Italy ... the Hindus from India, the Chinese from China, and even the Negroes from the West Indies. This country is suffering from immigrant indigestion … . It is time to call a halt on this grand rush for American gold, which over-floods the labor market, resulting in lowering the standard of living, race-riots, and general social degradation. The excessive immigration is against the interests of the masses of all races and nationalities in the country — both foreign and native.11
Susan Roth Breitzer noted that:
African American labor activists … knew that African Americans clearly would and did benefit from the “closing of the gates” against immigrants, and had little shame in pointing out the benefits of immigration restriction to African American workers. For example, a 1923 Chicago Defender editorial argued that “Our present method of restricting immigration doubtless does work a hardship on some of the poor foreigners, but self-preservation outweighs sympathy,” adding “we cannot be blamed for raising our voices against the admission of a flood of foreigners of any nationality in this country to take the very bread out of our mouths”.12
As the New York Age stated in 1919, “Speaking purely from a motive of self interest, the American Negro can say that the passing of a law restricting immigration for four years is a good thing.”
The Chicago Defender editorialized on January 5, 1924, that:
It is vitally important to keep the immigration gates partly closed until our working class gets a chance to prove our worth in occupations other than those found on plantations. The scarcity of labor creates the demand … . [T]he white foreign laborer is given preference over the black home product. When the former is not available, the latter gets an inning.
However, it is important to point out that while Black leaders supported restriction, they did not support nationality-based quotas. Vilja Lehtinen explained that:
The majority of blacks hoped for stringent limitations on immigration so that their own opportunities would increase, but they also wished that the limitations would be on an individual rather than a group basis. Black newspapers and leaders also spoke fervently against the Japanese exclusion clause of the 1924 Act (earlier anti-Asian measures had also prompted black opposition).
[Blacks] did not call for limits on Southern and Eastern Europeans specifically, as this would have implied acceptance of race theories. But blacks did resent the fact that whites preferred immigrants over native, English-speaking blacks; the tendency of immigrants to quickly adopt American race attitudes did not escape them, either.
And Breitzer wrote that:
While immigrant quotas themselves were heartily approved, the African American newspapers voiced their opposition to the total exclusion of Asians, arguing, instead, that Asians ought to be admitted “on the same quota basis as other nations,” and even sympathized with Japan’s vocal opposition to the exclusionary legislation … . [W]hile white proponents of immigration restriction were seeking to thoroughly racialize the process, African American supporters of immigration restriction instead favored protecting and prioritizing jobs for American workers, regardless of race.
As Roy Beck notes, “A. Philip Randolph was still fighting to remove the national-origins quotas in the 1950s.”
What did the Black press observe following the implementation of the 1924 Act? The Pittsburgh Courier, another leading Black newspaper, stated on March 24, 1928 that:
[T]here is good reason to believe that the economic progress of our group has been hindered by immigration … . As proof, one has only to point to the great strides made by Negroes, in all classes, since European immigration has been so markedly curtailed [in 1924]. This is especially noticeable in the North and East, where … the Negro has more industrial opportunities than at any time since the Civil War.
The Beck Hypothesis
In his recent monograph Emancipation Reclamation: The 1924-65 immigration reductions that propelled African Americans into the Great Migration and the middle class, Roy Beck sets forth an audacious hypothesis, that the 1924 Act “could be considered on balance as supremely anti-racist … help[ing] African American citizens more than any other group of Americans, and more than at any other time in history”, that the Act “was the greatest federal action in U.S. history — other than the Civil War Constitutional Amendments — in advancing the economic interests of the descendants of American slavery, and perhaps of all American workers.”
Beck detailed his hypothesis:
Yes, it was White supremacists who denied African Americans the economic, civil, and social rights of the Civil War Emancipation in the South.
But it was the federal immigration policies that kept most African Americans from moving to find those rights somewhere else.
When the gates to those rights finally began to open during the decades after 1924, it wasn’t by force of a military-led Reconstruction but by Congress simply and peacefully changing its immigration policies.
The Immigration Act of 1924 came to the rescue … by doing one simple thing: It made it more difficult the next four decades for employers to import foreign workers instead of recruiting Black U.S. citizens.
The new law kept the factory gates outside the South propped open for the descendants of slavery.
Black southerners responded spectacularly in what came to be known as the Great Migration, one of the most transformative epochs in United States history.
The 1924 law’s steep reduction in annual immigration started a steady and astounding series of employment changes over the next four decades that radically changed the United States.
[In] a powerful chain of events:
- The labor market tightened and forced open the gates of the nation’s factories to Black southerners.
- Black workers and their families hit the rails and roads in the historical phenomenon known as the Great Migration in which an estimated 6 million of them left the South.
- Labor unions, without the constant flow of new waves of immigrant members, began to open up and even seek Black members.
- In the tight labor markets, the … inflation-adjusted … incomes of White men expanded two-and-one-half-fold between 1940 and 1980. The … incomes of Black men expanded even faster (four-fold!).
- The number of middle-class African Americans more than tripled.
- Eventually, nearly half of African Americans were outside the South with markedly increased incomes. And their departures … tightened the southern labor market enough for those remaining to see steady improvement in their wages and civil rights.
[Beck quoted] Stanford’s Gavin Wright conclu[sion] that the Great Migration so radically changed the South economically and socially that: “This change in the fundamentals of southern society ultimately made possible the success of the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.”13
Is Beck’s hypothesis plausible? It is more than plausible, it is the most compelling reading of the historical evidence.
As to the 1921 and 1924 Acts’ catalyzing of the Great Migration, A. Philip Randolph wrote in the Messenger in August 1923 that: “A veritable flood of Negro workers is flowing North. Why? ... It is the high wages offered Negro labor which never before existed in the history of the country. This situation is largely due to the limitation of immigration.” And Sir Angus Deaton has stated that “It has … been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.” And, as to the impact of the Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson has concluded that “The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America … . It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system … . [T]hrough [its] sheer weight[, it] helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.”14
And then came the 1965 Act and the return of mass immigration. Roy Beck writes that “Employer behavior after 1965 imitated employer behavior before 1924. Provided with overflowing pools of foreign labor, employers tended to hire the immigrants ahead of African Americans.” And “As a result, nearly every aspect of life for the Black working class has been different — and not in a good direction.” Beck cites the findings of economists Kerwin Kofi Charles of the University of Chicago and Patrick Bayer at Duke University that from 1970 to 2014, white men’s (age 25-54) inflation-adjusted median annual earnings fell by 19 percent, and comparable Black men’s earnings fell by 32 percent. But, in addition, Charles and Bayer had found something even more incredible, that from 1940 to 1970, during the Great Pause, such white men’s earnings rose by 210 percent, and comparable Black men’s earnings rose by 406 percent!15
Charles and Bayer explained that “Previous work on racial earnings differences has mostly studied mean or median differences in wages among workers. By contrast, we measure differences among all men, including those not working for pay.” This is important, because as my colleagues Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler have found, the share of U.S.-born men (25 to 54) in the labor force has fallen from 96 percent in 1960 to 88.3 percent in 2023,16 and the share of those in the labor force with no more than a high school education has fallen from 95.7 percent to 81.6 percent and the share of U.S.-born Black men (16 to 64) has fallen from 83.7 percent to 69.8 percent. Camarota and Zeigler have concluded that:
It is likely that many factors have contributed to the fall-off in labor force participation, including declining wages, prior criminal convictions, ease of access to welfare and disability programs, competition with immigrants, and changing values and norms about the importance of work. However, while there is no agreement on what has caused the decline in participation, there is agreement that the deterioration is associated with a host of serious social problems. These include, but are not limited to, substance abuse, crime, overdose deaths, suicide, obesity, welfare dependence, and social isolation, to say nothing of the fiscal and economic costs of having a larger share of working-age people not in the labor force.
Sir Angus Deaton, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2015, has reflected:
I used to subscribe to the [view] that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so … . Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler [the 1965 Act] as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age.
Roy Beck put it less delicately: “No congressional action in the last hundred years has been more destructive to Black Americans’ employment, income growth and wealth accumulation than [the 1965 Act].”
Why Were Immigrants from the Western Hemisphere Exempted from the Quotas?
The 1924 Act exempted from the quotas natives of Western Hemisphere countries:
An immigrant who was born in the Dominion of Canada, Newfoundland, the Republic of Mexico, the Republic of Cuba, the Republic of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Canal Zone, or an independent country of Central or South America, and his wife, and his unmarried children under 18 years of age, if accompanying or following to join him [is a non-quota immimgrant].
This was hardly an act of brotherly solidarity with the nations of the Western Hemisphere.
In 1968, Harvey Levenstein, assistant professor of History at Columbia University, concluded that “throughout the 1920s the AFL [American Federation of Labor] tried to have [immigration from Mexico] severely restricted ... . [But] President Samuel Gompers failed in his attempts to include Mexico among the countries subject to the [1924 Act].”
Why did Gompers fail? Levenstein continued:
At the AFL Convention in late 1919, John L. Lewis proposed that the AFL officially oppose immigration from Mexico, as well as that from Europe and the Orient. … Lewis’ resolution was passed, and in the ensuing years the AFL’s lobbyists in Washington worked hard to have Mexico included in the immigration restriction bills which were being proposed in Congress.
The AFL was unable, however, to have Mexico included in the first postwar immigration restriction law, passed in 1921. … In September 1923, [Samuel] Gompers held a conference with Secretary of Labor James J. Davis and finally secured the Administration’s agreement to include Mexico under the quotas in the new immigration bill which it was framing.
…
In late 1923 Davis assembled a conference of labor leaders in Washington to read them the administration’s newly completed immigration bill. … [It] called for the inclusion of Mexico and Canada under its provisions. It appeared that Gompers’ lobbying efforts might be crowned with success.
The administration’s bill was introduced in the Senate. In the House, however, Representative Albert Johnson … was guiding a bill through his committee which would not subject Canada and Mexico to a quota. In March 1924, Gompers met with him and tried to persuade him to include the two countries in his bill. But Johnson refused, claiming that it would never pass the House in that form. Gompers continued to have the AFL lobbyists press for the inclusion of the two countries in the House bill, but to no avail.
But why would it never pass the House in that form? The likely answer is found in Tichenor’s conclusion that the exemption was “a concession secured by southern Democrats and Western lawmakers who relied on cheap Mexican labor”.17
In late 1927, the Chicago Defender approvingly reported the California State Federation of Labor’s resolution at the AFL convention that declared “the same reasons exist for an immigration quota for Mexico as for European Countries”.18
The fact that Chairman Johnson felt it necessary to make such a concession is hardly surprising. A few decades later, in 1950, President Harry Truman established “The President’s Commission on Migratory Labor”, which issued a report a year later noting that “[a]n authority on Mexican-American affairs explained ... to the Commission ... [that ‘t]he free and easy dipping into the cheap-labor reservoir that is Mexico, has made it virtually impossible for the citizens of Mexican descent in this area to make a satisfactory living[]’” and concluding it to be “unquestionable” that “the wetback traffic has severely depressed farm wages”. As to the living and working conditions of the illegal Mexican workers themselves, the report found that:
Where the wetback makes up the major proportion of the seasonal and migratory work force, virtually no housing, sanitary facilities, or other conditions of civilized living are supplied. ... A witness ... did not overstate the squalor of the housing and living conditions that are much too common ... when he said, “I have seen, with my own eyes, people ... living in shacks that I wouldn’t put a horse in.”
The commission recommended that “[l]egislation be enacted making it unlawful to employ aliens illegally in the United States”.
In 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, Congress passed and President Truman signed into law an extension and restructuring of the Bracero Mexican guestworker program in response to the Mexican government’s threat to terminate the program unless abuses against its nationals were dealt with. During congressional consideration, Sen. Paul Douglas (D-Ill.) offered an amendment establishing employer sanctions with criminal penalties for “[a]ny person who … employ[s] any Mexican alien not duly admitted by an immigration officer or not lawfully entitled to enter or to reside within the United States … when such person knows or has reasonable grounds to believe or suspect or by reasonable inquiry could have ascertained that such alien is not lawfully within the United States”.
The Senate actually adopted Douglas’ amendment after protracted and heated debate and then passed the bill. The Senate-passed employer sanctions provision was stripped out of the companion bill under consideration in the House following a ruling of nongermaneness, but while modified language was offered as an amendment and ruled germane, it was defeated by a vote of 55-125.
The next year, in 1952, the Senate used the House’s rejection of the Senate’s employer sanctions provision as an excuse not to include it in a Senate-passed bill further extending the Bracero program. In 1953, as Tichenor has written:
[President] Eisenhower dispatched Attorney General Herbert Brownell to southern California ... to investigate [growing public angst regarding illegal Mexican migration] ... . With White House backing, he urged Congress to enact employer-sanctions legislation similar to that previously proposed by Senator Douglas and labor activists.
Did President Eisenhower succeed? Tichenor explained that “congressional supporters of Southwestern growers remained adamantly and opposed to such legislation; the employer-sanctions proposal languished in committee”. Little had changed.
Jewish Immigration
Just as it is uncontestably true that the debate over the 1924 Act focused to a large extent on often ugly racial rationales for restriction, it is also uncontestably true that such ugly rationales often targeted Jews.
However, the committee’s report on Chairman Johnson’s revised legislation (H.R. 7995) stated that “[t]he committee does not feel that the restriction aimed to be accomplished … is directed at the Jews, for they can come within the quotas from any country in which they were born” and that “Neither has the committee assaulted the religions of the various peoples. Mindful of the Constitution of the United States, the question of religion has not entered into the arguments that led to the construction of this bill.”19 In any event, there may have been no love lost between Chairman Johnson and the Jewish community, as the report later hints at:
The cry of discrimination is, the committee believes, largely manufactured and built up by special representatives of racial groups, aided by aliens actually living abroad. Members of the committee have taken notice of a report in the Jewish Tribune (New York) February 8, 1924, of a farewell dinner to Mr. Israel Zangwill, which says:
Mr. Zangwill spoke chiefly on the immigration question, declaring that if the Jews persisted in a strenuous opposition to the restricted immigration there would be no restrictions. 20
While Jews were of course eligible to immigrate within the 1924 Act’s quotas, it is possible that the quotas were formulated in part to ensure low quotas for countries with large Jewish populations and histories of large-scale Jewish immigration to the U.S. In addition, it is certainly possible that one of the two preferences within the quotas was designed to lower utilization of the quotas by Jews — “preference shall be given … to a quota immigrant who is skilled in agriculture”, though the number of beneficiaries of the preference “shall not in the case of quota immigrants of any nationality exceed 50 per cent[] of the annual quota for such nationality”. Amy Davidson Sorkin has written in the New Yorker about a later such use of an agricultural worker preference: “Senators who didn’t want to let Jews in added language to what became the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 [including] a preference for agricultural workers.”
As to the fate of European Jews during the Holocaust, it is unfair to implicate the authors of the 1924 Act, as they could not have foreseen the horrors to come. However, this does not mean that it is unfair to implicate later congresses once they became aware of the Nazi war against the Jews. And this does not mean that it is unfair to implicate executive branch officials who deliberately placed roadblocks in the way of Jewish immigration even after becoming aware. Tichenor has written that:
Appallingly few Jewish refugees who sought sanctuary in the [U.S.] from the rise of the Nazi regime until the end of the Second World War secured authorized entry. … [But r]esponding to modern critics who charge that the Roosevelt administration could have done more to open America’s gates to desperate European Jews, Peter Novick argues effectively that the Great Depression, the restrictionist sentiment of both the general public and Congress, and Roosevelt’s foreign policy priorities meant that any alterations of existing quota limits was simply not feasible “as a practical political matter.”... [H]owever, Novick overstates his case by insisting that the American immigration regime was not particularly resistant to Jewish refugees and did not single them out for special discrimination. … [W]hether all quota slots were to be made available in any given year and who was to occupy those slots were decisions over which administrators exercised enormous control. … The State Department’s Visa Bureau and consular officers were especially resistant to Jewish refugees and often did use their discretion to target European Jews for harsh treatment.21 [Emphasis added.]
Treasury officials launched a careful investigation ... in 1943 that culminated in a lengthy, confidential memorandum, "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government to the Murder of the Jews.” The report found the State Department guilty of “willful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler.”… [Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. told President Roosevelt that] “There is a growing number of responsible people and organizations … [who] see plain Anti-Semitism motivating the actions of these State Department officials.”22
Conclusion
The 1924 Act was epochal legislation that ushered in a four-decade-long Great Pause in mass immigration that allowed the United States to assimilate the 20-plus million immigrants (including my forebears) who had arrived during the “Great Wave” beginning in the 1880s, no mean feat. The pause fostered a national economic climate conducive to the flowering of the “American Dream”, especially for long-suffering Black citizens. And it led, in no small degree, to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Unfortunately, as Roy Beck puts it, “Just as all trends had seemed to be in the right direction for the nation’s 20 million African Americans, Congress got rid of the law that had done so much to help make those trends possible.” Lamar Smith and Ed Grant have written that:
[T]he 1924 [Act], among the most far-reaching reforms of legal immigration in our nation's history, w[as] motivated in large part by purposes that eventually undermined the principles on which [it] rested … serv[ing] as [a] prime example[] of how employing erroneous reasons to enact even well-intentioned laws can be a self-defeating proposition.
In 1965 in the heady days of the civil rights revolution, Congress in its zeal to excise from federal law the demon of national origins quotas restarted mass immigration (most likely unintentionally). Congress could have easily accomplished the former without the latter, but it did not do so. Not only have the results been disastrous for our country, but the civil rights revolution itself was indebted to the very 1924 Act that had made quotas permanent. This all reads like a Greek tragedy. But the really tragic thing is that it actually happened. To us.
End Notes
1 E.P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798-1965, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981, at p. 468.
2 Nancy Ordover, “Johnson-Reed Act (The 1924 National Origins Act, or the Immigration Act of 1924)”, in Kathleen Arnold, ed., A Historical Encyclopedia: Anti-Immigration in the United States, Vol. 1, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2011, at p. 301.
3 Daniel Tichenor, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002, at p. 147.
4 Vernon Briggs, Jr., Mass Immigration and the National Interest, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK: Routlege, 1992, at pp. 5-6.
5 H.R. Rept. No. 68-176, 1924, at p. 17.
6 Id., at pp. 3-4.
7 H.R. Rept. No. 68-350, 1924, at p. 16.
8 Id., at pp. 16-17.
9 Nathan Glazer, “The Logic of Restriction”, in John J. Miller ed., Strangers at Our Gate: Immigration in the 1900s, Center for the New American Community, 1994, at p. 18.
10 Tichenor, at pp. 146-47.
11 A. Philip Randolph, “Immigration and Japan”, The Messenger, August 1924.
12 “Self-preservation”, The Chicago Defender, January 13, 1923.
13 Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War, Baton Rouge, La: LSU Press, 1986.
14 Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, London, UK: Penguin Random House, 2011.
15 Patrick J. Bayer and Kerwin Kofi Charles, “Divergent Paths: A New Perspective on Earnings Differences between Black and White Men Since 1940”, Becker-Friedman Institute for Economics, University of Chicago, July 2018; see Appendix Table 2.
16 Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, “Working-Age, but Not Working: A look at the decades-long decline in labor force participation among the U.S.-born and its implications for immigration policy”, Center for Immigration Studies report, August 2023; see Figures 3 and 4.
17 Tichenor, at p. 146.
18 “Racial labor problems big factors at AFL meeting”, The Chicago Defender, October 15, 1927.
19 H.R. Rept. No. 68-350, at pp. 16-17.
20 Id., at 16.
21 Tichenor, at p. 151 (citing Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 2000, p. 52).
22 Id., at 167.