Immigration and Restriction in
Twentieth-Century America
Clips from The New York Tribune, 1920
Danielle Vigneaux, Ph.D. Candidate
University of California, Irvine
Immigration Restriction
1924-1965
• Created a new ethnic and racial map based on
new categories and hierarchies of difference
• Articulated a new sense of territoriality, marked
by unprecedented awareness and state
surveillance of the nation’s contiguous land
borders
• Created illegal immigration and the illegal alien,
whose inclusion within the nation was
simultaneously a social reality and legal
impossibility – a subject barred from citizenship
Immigration before the 1920s
• U.S. Immigration was numerically unrestricted
• Free global movement of labor (encourages
movement from capitalism’s rural peripheries
to industrializing centers)
• Until the late Nineteenth Century, immigrants
came largely from northern and eastern
Europe, but immigrants also came from
southern and western Europe, as well as from
China
Early Tensions over Immigration
• The 1870 census counted 63,000 Chinese, ¾
of Chinese in CA, and most of them men
• the 1880 census counted 105,000 Chinese,
more than 70% of whom lived in CA, at a 20:1
male-to-female gender ratio
• Completion of the Union-Central Pacific
Railroad at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869
makes Chinese immigration a growing concern
for westerners
Harper’s Weekly, 1879
New York
"Pale face 'fraid you crowd him out, as he did me."
The Wasp, 1882
San Franciso, CA
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act
• Prohibited entry of Chinese laborers – defined as
“both skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese
employed in mining”
• Initially intended as a 10-year ban, the law
became more stringent over time
• The Chinese Exclusion Act made Asians racially
ineligible for naturalization (broadened by
Supreme Court cases Takao Ozawa v. U.S. in 1922
& U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923)
• Racial requirements for citizenship were not
abolished until 1952 (McCarran-Walter Act)
Enduring Contention
The Wasp, 1889
San Francisco, CA
European Immigration & Restriction
• The U.S. Immigration Service excluded only 1% of
the 25 million immigrants from Europe from 1880
through WWI
• Excluded individuals: criminals, prostitutes,
paupers, the diseased and anarchists
• The Immigration Act of 1917
– Made literacy a requirement for admission
– Intended to reduce immigration from southern and
eastern Europe
– Gendered implications of the literacy requirement
– Targeting of anarchists and communists (Palmer Raids)
Causes of Increased Restriction
WWI Refugee Crisis
Specter of millions of
destitute European war
refugees seeking entry
into the United States
The Day Book, March 7, 1917
Chicago, Illinois
Causes of Increased Restriction
• Domestic Politics during the WWI Era
– Nativism: the intense opposition to an internal
minority on the grounds of its foreign (i.e., “unAmerican”) connections
– Eugenics: the idea that social undesirability derived
from innate character deficiencies, perceived to be
biologically rooted in race, gender, or “bad blood”
– Organized Labor and concerns about domestic job
scarcity
• Rising Role of Nationalism in Immigration Policy &
Exclusion
– Anti-Bolshevism
Emergency Quota Act of 1921
• First numerical restrictions on immigration
• 3% quotas based on the 1910 census
– Quotas based on the number of foreign-born in
the population in 1910
• Nativists disfavored the legislation
– They felt the numbers allowed for too many new
southern and eastern Europeans to immigrate
(northern/western Europeans received 55% of the
quotas and southern/eastern Europeans received
45% of the quotas)
Responses to the Emergency Quota Act
The Lehi Sun, April 28, 1921
Lehi, Utah
Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924
• First comprehensive restriction law
• First established numerical limits on
immigration
• Established a global racial and national
hierarchy that favored some immigrants over
others
• National Origins Quota System abolished in
1965 (Hart-Cellar Act)
What does the Johnson-Reed Immigration
Act do?
• Restricted immigration to 155,000 per year
• Established temporary quotas based on 2% of the
foreign-born population in 1890
• Mandated the secretaries of labor, state and
commerce to determine quotas on the basis of
national origins by 1927
• Excluded from immigration all persons ineligible to
citizenship (Asian exclusion)
• No numerical restrictions on immigration from
countries of the Western Hemisphere
Congressional Reactions to Restriction
Senator Ellison DuRant Smith
South Carolina
Congressman Robert H. Clancy
Detroit, Michigan
“I think we now have sufficient
population in our country for us to
shut the door and to breed up a
pure, unadulterated American
citizenship…If you were to go abroad
and some one were to meet you and
say, ‘I met a typical American,’ what
would flash into your mind as a
typical American, the typical
representative of that new Nation?
Would it be the son of an Italian
immigrant, the son of a German
immigrant, the son of any of the
breeds from the Orient, the son of
the denizens of Africa?”
“The foreign born of my district
writhe under the charge of being
called ‘hyphenates.’ The people of
my own family were all
hyphenates—English-Americans,
German-Americans, IrishAmericans…My family put 11 men
and boys into the Revolutionary War,
and I am sure they and their women
and children did not suffer so bitterly
and sacrifice until it hurt to establish
the autocracy of bigotry and
intolerance which exists in many
quarters to-day in this country.”
Consequences of Regulation
• Minimizing the immigrant population loosened
American ethnic groups’ ties to their homelands
• Numerical restriction created a new class of persons
within the national body – illegal aliens – whose
inclusion in the nation was at once a social reality and a
legal impossibility
• The number of aliens expelled from the country rose
from 2,762 in 1920 to 9,495 in 1925 and 38,796 in
1929
• New emphasis on control of the nation’s contiguous
land borders – especially the border with Mexico
A Tale of Two Borders
U.S. – Canada Border
• Europeans often
immigrated to Canada first,
and after residing in Canada
for five years, they could be
legally admitted to the
United States.
– The proportion of lawful
admissions from Canada of
persons not born in Canada
increased from 20% in 1925
to over 50% in the early
1930s.
U.S. – Mexico Border
• U.S.-Mexico border became
a cultural and racial
boundary. The immigration
service instituted new
policies – new inspection
procedures and the
formation of the Border
Patrol – that accentuated
the difference between the
United States and Mexico.
Inspection at the U.S.-Mexico Border
• Bathing, delousing, medical-line inspection,
and interrogation (occasional psych profile)
– Humiliating & Gratuitous
• Prospective immigrants had to present a
medical certificate to the U.S. consul when
applying for a visa (before travel).
– Ellis Island: Line inspection eliminated in 1924
– El Paso, Texas: Immigration service exempted all
Europeans and Mexicans arriving first class rail
from line inspections, baths and literacy tests
The Border Patrol (est. 1924)
• Comprised of cowboys, skilled workers, and small
ranchers
– Majority were young, many had military experience,
and some were associated with the Ku Klux Klan
• Clifford Perkins, the first Border Patrol inspector
at El Paso charged that patrolmen “were a little
too quick a gun, or given to drinking too much,
too often.”
• Most training took place on the job.
– During the 1920s, the turnover rate was 25%
– Lack of professionalism plagued the force (drinking,
reading, socializing on duty, reckless driving, etc)
El Paso Border Patrol, 1927
Of 34 patrol inspectors in the El Paso district in
1927, only one was Mexican American
West Coast Demand for Farm Labor
• 1920-1929: ≈14,000 Filipinos migrated from
Hawai’i to the U.S. mainland, and another
37,000 came directly from the Philippines
• Nearly 85% of the Filipinos arriving in CA
during the 1920s were under 30 years of age
– 93% were male
– 77% were single
• In SF & LA, Filipinos worked as domestics, and
in hotels or restaurants as bellmen, cooks,
dishwashers, and janitors
Filipino farm workers in Pajaro Valley, CA (1939)
*Most Filipinos were migrant laborers who worked in agriculture
(they cut asparagus, picked fruit and hops, topped beets , etc)
Racial Tension on the West Coast
• 1929-1930: at least thirty incidents of racial
violence against Filipinos took place on the
Pacific Coast, including two large-scale race
riots and several fire bombings
• The perception of widespread job competition
between white laborers and Filipino migrants
fueled racial animus
• The perception of Filipino men as a sexual
menace to white society fueled violence
Calls for Filipino Exclusion
• Supported by: California Joint Immigration
Committee (1927), American Federation of Labor
(1928) and the American Legion (1929)
• The movement for exclusion began to identify its
interests with Philippine independence
• 1934, The Philippine Independence Act
– Declared that “citizens of the Philippine Islands who
are not citizens of the United States shall be
considered as if they are aliens” and that “for such
purposes the Philippine Islands shall be considered a
separate country” with an annual immigration quota
of fifty.
The Welch Bill
• Made Filipino nationals eligible for federallyfunded repatriation between 1936-1941
– “No Filipino who receives the benefits of this Act shall
be entitled to return to the continental United States
except as a quota immigrant…”
• INS advertised the act in Filipino newspapers &
posted translations in pool halls, restaurants, and
other sites frequented by Filipinos
– A total of 2,064 Filipino nationals used the program to
return to the Philippines
Selected Bibliography
• Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door:
American Immigration Policy and Immigrants
Since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).
• Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens
and the Making of Modern America (Princeton &
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005).
• Stern, Alexandra Minna. Eugenic Nation: Faults &
Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America
(Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2005).