Globusz^® Publishing 

The National Origins Quota Acts

There is little doubt that our forefathers had a distinct conception of the quintessential “American” citizen. Under this heading were peoples of “Nordic” blood from northern and western Europe; across the dividing line lay individuals of eastern European, Asian, and Mexican descent, seen as a collective blight on the social fabric of American life. While this perception traces its roots to America’s colonial past, contemporary U.S. immigration policy can be thought of as deriving its beginnings in the immediate aftermath of World War I. The disintegration of the Ottoman, German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires after the war entailed a massive uprooting of peoples, leaving global political and economic instability in its wake. At home in 1920, demand for labor was squeezed by the first severe economic recession in thirty years. With arrivals from Europe more than doubling between 1920 and 1921, from nearly a quarter of a million to some 650,000, Wilbur Carr, head of the U.S. Consular Service, warned Congress that the U.S. was about to experience an onslaught of immigration by Polish Jews, individuals who Carr and others regarded as “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits [...].”⁸ In the 1920s, in the face of domestic economic downturn and an unprecedented increase in global migration, immigration weighed heavily on the minds of American politicians, creating more than ever before a political push for restrictionist policy that pursued a more ethnically stable and homogenous citizenry.

Immigration legislation in the decade following World War I drew from the Immigration Act of 1917, which in turn drew from sundry laws, mostly passed in piecemeal fashion between 1882 and the early 1900s. A triumph for the restrictionist camp, the Act of 1917 drastically expanded the categories of immigrants who could be held excludable by immigration and customs enforcement officials. Of note in the Act were a passage pertaining to the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” which denied peoples from east of Iran to the Pacific, not including Japan, the right to enter the U.S. as immigrants, and a clause that required, as a condition of permanent residency, immigrants over sixteen years of age to be literate in some language.⁹ In effect, this policy, similar to many of its predecessors,¹⁰ further expanded and institutionalized the notion of an American caste system based explicitly on ethnic origin but implicitly on race. Although eastern and southern Europeans were considered “undesirable races,” their right to pursue citizenship as “white persons” was never challenged on legal grounds.¹¹ On the contrary, the citizenship eligibility and racial classification of Asian Indians, Mexicans, and many other ethnic populations remained unclearly defined in immigration laws enacted at the beginning of the twentieth century. American “national interest” seemed to be uniquely aligned with systematically excluding or deterring non-Nordic peoples from pursuing citizenship.

Much of the ideology behind the Immigration Acts of 1917, 1921, and 1924 can be attributed to various xenophobic and persecutory civil and political institutions, each of which grew out of a desire to preserve the power and character of the white majority and to pursue the “normalcy” of the pre-World War I era. At the forefront of the nativist campaign was the Ku Klux Klan which experienced a revival shortly after the war drew to a close and targeted Catholics, Jews, and foreigners as much as African Americans.¹² In the South Jim Crow laws were enacted; in California the property rights of the Japanese were tightened; and at elite universities, Catholics and Jews felt the heavy hand of social discrimination.¹³ At least in part, these prejudicial sentiments can be chalked up to the propagandizing trickle effects of culturally engrained prejudice which, moving from one generation to the next, encouraged the cyclical persecution of foreigners, Jews, and blacks. When considered in concert with the stereotypical view that foreigners crowd out domestic jobs, xenophobia and discrimination seem like reasonable responses for those uninformed citizens searching for a scapegoat to their social and economic woes.¹⁴ In other words, the institutionalization of prejudice supplied a façade of legitimacy for the nativist cause, and in turn, provided not only someone to blame but a means to return to a more familiar and comfortable version of society.

The most salient form of institutional prejudice and arguably the basis for a national origins quota system stemmed from the eugenics movement. Writing in 1962, Charles Alexander conjectured that this form of academic racism “probably began when a few intellectuals decided that there was an inherent difference between the type of immigrant coming to the United States after the Civil War and the European immigration of the first half of the nineteenth century, and that this difference constituted a peril to Anglo-Saxon culture in America.”¹⁵ Irrespective of their cause, the flawed arguments of eugenicists found a home in nativist rhetoric. Working in the early 1900s, various anthropologists, psychologists and physicians claimed that, due to their relatively low cranial capacity, northern and western Europeans were more intelligent than their southern and eastern counterparts, and “Asians and blacks were the least intelligent of all.”¹⁶

These pseudoscientific studies were further supported by results from newly created and administered intelligence tests, each purporting to provide a quantitative measure of intelligence, commonly referred to as the “intelligence quotient” (IQ). As “verified” by IQ tests given to soldiers during World War I and to students shortly thereafter, the intellectual inferiority of the “new” immigrants was striking; children of Polish and Italian descent tended to score five to fifteen points lower than the “average” American.¹⁷ But nothing depicted the need for the restriction of certain undesirable peoples more than Madison Grant’s seminal work, The Passing of the Great Race.¹⁸ As a main conclusion of his “research,” he found that in the United States, the intermixing of Nordic blood and inferior immigrant stock had put the former–the “great race”–on the path toward destruction. And as a New York aristocrat, naturalist and respected member of the Immigration Restriction League, Grant received profound recognition from many influential politicians and scholars for his work.

Compounded by economic recession, unemployment, and fears of a Bolshevik revolution at home, American politicians sought for a way to return the country to a state of relative prosperity. Businesses were afraid of foreign radicalism more than a labor shortage, and unskilled laborers were convinced that unabated immigration would further depress wages and heighten the rate of unemployment. In an effort to combat these concerns and to garner the perceived value of an ethnically homogenous population (in terms of a purportedly higher average IQ and the capacity for assimilation) Congress decided to predicate its Immigration Act of 1921 on a national origins quota system. The Act of 1921 permitted only 3 percent of the number of persons already present from a given country to immigrate to the United States each year, as determined by the 1910 Census.¹⁹ Three years later, the Immigration Act of 1924 moved the base census year back from 1910 to 1890, reduced the quotas from 3 percent to 2 percent, and added the Japanese to the list of excludable aliens, a list that still contained foreigners from all countries between (and including) Afghanistan and China.²⁰

Significantly, while Mexicans and Latin Americans were viewed as undesirable immigrants who contributed to the “brain drain” in the U.S., neither region experienced any quantitative restriction under either the 1921 or 1924 Quota Acts. The Mexican-American land border, much like the Canadian-American border, could not be adequately policed. And since agribusiness and the railroad industry of the 1920s had sizable demand for cheap Mexican labor, Congress decided to exempt the countries of the Western Hemisphere from the quota system. Migration across the Mexican border was only restricted by a head tax, the literacy requirement, the “LPC clause” and a prohibition against contract labor, “none of which was seriously enforced.”²¹ The ambiguous “LPC clause,” which allowed the government to deport an immigrant who was “likely to become a public charge,” similar to the prohibition against contract labor, was selectively applied in accordance with the general sentiments of the American people and politicians. These standards prevented Mexicans from acquiring legal permanent residency, and they allowed the American government to maintain a free flow of northern migration whenever sufficient business demand existed. Sadly, between the early 1900s and 1942, whenever Mexican labor was needed, enforcement practices were eased, and when the American labor market tightened, Mexicans were deported en masse.

On a macro level, the implications of the 1921 and 1924 laws were profound. As a result of the Act of 1921, the upper bound for quota immigration was approximately 357,000 per year, and after 1924, this figure dropped to 153,000.²² By basing the Act of 1921 on the pre-war census, immigration from southern and eastern Europe was limited to 20 percent of its 1914 total while “old” immigration was left practically unabated.²³ Moving the base census year back from 1910 to 1890 only further favored “old” immigration, providing immigrants from northern and western Europe a quota ceiling approximately six times that for immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.²⁴

Due to the considerable level of immigration permitted outside the quota system, the national origins quota laws failed in their purpose “to maintain the cultural and racial homogeneity of the United States.”²⁵ Still, the historical context from which they were formed show another example of the triumph of prejudice and racism in America. Afraid that the advent of large corporations and the formalization of America’s borders meant diminished opportunities at home, politicians and citizens looked abroad for a scapegoat. For many Americans, the “new” immigrants seemed to be not only polluting the Nordic blood of “common” American stock but also threatening the security and moral fabric of society. In this regard, the national origins quota laws were less of a response to the social and economic problems resulting from increased immigration and more of an attempt to combat post-war frustrations and changes by pursuing a return to pre-war “normalcy.”²⁶

The “Liberalization” of Policy: 1945-1965

Although the National Origins Quota Laws failed to significantly curb immigration from southern and eastern Europe, they did succeed in drastically reducing the total amount of immigration to the United States. Writing in 1950, W.S. Bernard estimated that, excluding emigration, immigration between 1924 and 1947 amounted to a little over 1.7 million, about the same figure for any two-year period during the decade immediately preceding World War I.²⁷ Similar to the monumental uprooting of peoples seen after the first world war, the aftermath of World War II left some eight million displaced persons between Germany, Austria and Italy, about one million which the American government deemed “unrepatriatable.” Faced with a strong push by Jewish organizations to relocate refugees, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act in 1948. The legislation allowed a mere 202,000 of the more than eight million displaced persons to settle in the United States, and tied visas to future quotas of the appropriate countries.²⁸ After meandering through the first Republican Congress since the start of the New Deal, the legislation reeked of anti-Semitism and xenophobia, two sentiments one might have expected to quickly dissipate with the fall of Nazi Germany. Yet, even with its prejudicial overtones, the Displaced Persons Act paved the way for the more liberal immigration policy that would come to highlight and expunge the discriminatory character of past laws.

The first baby step toward liberalization came in the form of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. As a piece of legislation, the act made few changes to existing policy, but the Congressional debate surrounding it had lasting implications on future reform. While the act reaffirmed the restrictive annual quota ceiling of slightly above 150,000, by abolishing the bar on Asian immigration and providing an explicit justification for the quota system, ²⁹ Congress marked the beginnings of what would become a massive ideological transformation. Notably, in 1950 the Senate attempted to explicitly and rationally explain the Nordic favoritism emanating from the Immigration Act of 1924. In the end, “[w]ithout giving credence to any theory of Nordic superiority,” Congress rationalized the inherent discrimination of the national origins quota laws on the basis of the similar cultural background of the Nordic peoples to the general U.S. population, as well as their supposed eagerness to assimilate into society.³⁰ Even though prejudice implicitly motivated the decision to keep the national origins quota system, overtly discriminatory policy had become a cultural faux pas. World War II had brought the issue of discrimination and intolerance to the forefront, and ushered in largely by Jewish lobbyists and the NAACP, the stage had been set for the Civil Rights Movement.

In the wake of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination based upon race, color, religion, sex or national origin, Congress set out to reevaluate the nation’s immigration laws. The debate surrounding the Immigration Act of 1965 came from two opposing camps, one led by Senator Edward Kennedy championed “humanitarian values,” and a second maintained support for the national origins quota laws, emphasizing a need to protect the American economy.³¹ Although only the former philosophical position favored a definitive end to the racist and discriminatory rules governing the Asia-Pacific Triangle and the entire quota system, mutual support quickly accrued for policies emphasizing family reunification. As a result, there was no numerical limit placed on the number of reunification visas that could be issued by the government to immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, and family relationships were used as a foundation for the selection of immigrants.³² The ultimate character of the Immigration Act of 1965 reflected a triumph for Congress’s humanitarian values proponents, but restrictionist legislators managed to barter a deal for protectionist labor laws. Along with a two and one-half year phase out of the quota system between the end of 1965 and mid-1968, the act allowed immigrants from any one, non-Western Hemisphere country to enter on a first-come, first-served basis up to 20,000 individuals per fiscal year. Visa ceilings were set at 170,000 for all non-Western Hemisphere countries and 120,000 for Western Hemisphere nations (exclusive, in both cases, of the parents, spouses and unmarried children of U.S. citizens). Moreover, refugees were given a preference category under immigration law.³³ For the first time in American history, Western Hemisphere immigrants, including Latin Americans and Mexicans, were given a numerical ceiling, and refugees gained a special status respected by law.

The labor certification requirement included in the 1965 Act, in concert with the termination of the Bracero Program one year earlier, paved the way for wave after wave of illegal immigration from Mexico. The Bracero Program, which began in 1942, was a binational contract labor agreement between Mexico and the U.S. that, in effect, represented a way for American companies, especially those specializing in agriculture and railroad construction, to obtain cheap, temporary workers from Mexico.³⁴ The labor certification condition included in the 1965 Act required that Western Hemisphere immigrants secure a job in the U.S. before they be allowed entry. While Congress’s motivation behind this was complex, in the most basic sense, the restriction was used as an implicit ceiling on Western Hemisphere immigration.³⁵ Yet, Congress failed to institute a penalty for businesses that hired illegal immigrants and afforded captured undocumented residents “voluntary departure.” As a result, Mexican migrants who desired employment in the U.S. were undeterred from seeking illegal entry and American firms had no incentive not to hire them. Since there was virtually no way to acquire employment in America from abroad, “the most rational approach was to enter illegally, secure a job, and spend the waiting period [for labor certification] working in the United States.”³⁶ In turn, illegal immigration from Mexico reached unprecedented levels shortly after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the act in 1965.

The liberal immigration policies codified under the 1965 Act were truly a story of unintended consequences. During oral arguments on the Senate floor in 1965, Senator Kennedy opined, “[O]ur cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually; [...] the ethnic mix of our country will not be upset.”³⁷ For better or for worse, neither statement proved to be true. Legal immigration expanded rapidly from 3.3 million in 1961-1970 to 4.5 million in the following decade.³⁸ European immigration was on an overall decline, and many more of the “new immigrants” from Asia, Africa and Latin America began taking residence in the United States. Both legal and illegal immigration were on the rise, and America was fast becoming a diverse, multiethnic nation. Significantly, the Immigration Act of 1965 ushered away the discriminatory national origins quota system. It was not perfect, especially with respect to its inability to properly manage immigration and work-related migration from Mexico. Still, in the words of President Johnson, “[I]t [did] repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It correct[ed] a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American nation.”³⁹

The Rise of Undocumented Migration from Mexico: 1965-1986

Although immigration from Europe was on an overall decline, eastern and southern European immigration slowly crept upward. Due to the inclusion of residents from the Asia-Pacific Triangle into the 170,000 visa quota for all non-Western Hemisphere migrants, Asians benefited the most from the 1965 Act. Prospective Western Hemisphere immigrants, however, faced an administrative backlog that averaged about two and one-half years. Unlike their counterparts from the east, migrants from the west did not have access to the tiered preference system available to eastern hemisphere applicants;⁴⁰ the western visa limit was applied solely on a first-come, first-served basis. Westerners also had to wade through a holistically applied labor certification requirement–a total bureaucratic disaster. Moreover, easterners were provided a 20,000 per country limit above and beyond their visa quota, a benefit not extended to western migrants. And since much of the 120,000 visa quota was devoted to refugees fleeing Fidel Castro’s intolerant Cuban dictatorship, illegal entry was the only practical alternative for westerners who did not want to trudge through an uncertain two and one-half year administrative nightmare.

The discrepancy between the policies of east and west and the concentration upon family reunification espoused by the 1965 Act had important effects on migrant flows as well as future reform. Since the children of resident foreigners born in the U.S. were American citizens, and since the parents of a U.S. citizen could become derivative beneficiaries, Mexicans and other western migrants had an incentive to immigrate illegally and afterward conceive a U.S. citizen child. In this manner, the labor certification process could be entirely circumvented. For immigrants from all countries, the preference provided for brothers and sisters within the annual quota fueled an unforeseen “chaining” effect: “after they became citizens, the siblings’ spouses were able to pass on immediate relative preferences to new families, and so on.”⁴¹ In response to the disparate impact of policies and in the spirit of equality, Congress amended the 1965 Act through a series of two public laws. The first bill, which passed in 1976, applied the preference categories to both hemispheres, and the second, which passed in 1978, joined both systems into a single, worldwide policy with a quota of 290,000 (including the 20,000 per country limit but still excluding the immediate family members of U.S. citizens).⁴² This egalitarian worldwide system, as codified under law and amended in 1976 and 1978, still applies to this day.

The wisdom of a unified world policy, however, is questionable to say the least; while it represents the logical backlash to the national origins quota laws, it fails to recognize America’s geopolitical ties with Mexico and other countries.⁴³ By 1978, not only had the unified system limited Mexican visas to 20,000 per year, but the labor certification loophole was closed. After the 1976 amendments to the 1965 Act, only children over 21 years of age could petition for their parents’ entry. Coinciding with this massive reduction in westerners’ accessibility to legal visas was a period of economic downturn in Mexico.⁴⁴ Due to these factors as well as the human and social capital Mexicans accumulated during the bracero era, “only one outcome was possible: an explosion of undocumented migration.”⁴⁵ While the rate of undocumented entries to the U.S. from Mexico hovered around 2 per thousand (Mexican residents) at the end of the Bracero Program (in 1965), illegal entries rose to more than 10 per thousand after 1973.⁴⁶

In response to the rapid increase of undocumented migration and the American economic unrest of the early 1980s, Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986. IRCA represented a political compromise between diverse interest groups–a policy that was both extremely amenable to many undocumented residents and hypercritical of prospective, future illegal migrants. Through the dual legalization policies of the Legally Authorized Workers Program (LAW) and the Special Agricultural Workers Program (PAW), 2.3 million formerly undocumented Mexicans gained LPR (legal permanent residency) status.⁴⁷ On the other hand, IRCA imposed civil and criminal sanctions (for repeat offenders) on businesses who knowingly hired illegal immigrants. Furthermore, border patrol personnel were expanded by 50 percent, and the agency’s funding increased 75 percent for the 1986 and ‘87 fiscal years.⁴⁸ With the advent of the amnesty policy in 1986, millions of undocumented migrants decided to remain in America and begin navigating the visa petition process. Consequently, undocumented apprehensions at the border plummeted, hitting a post-IRCA nadir in 1988; shortly afterward, however, the legalization program drew to a close and undocumented migration once again began to increase steadily.⁴⁹

Looking Forward: Immigration Policy in the Post-IRCA, Post-9/11 Context

In the recent past the events of September 11, 2001 have greatly influenced the debate over U.S. immigration policy. Pitted against each other are issues of security and globalization. For one thing, some politicians are worried that al Qaeda could use the Mexican border as a backdoor for entering the U.S.⁵⁰ As this indicates, the attacks on the World Trade Center have had policy implications that reverberate well beyond the Arab-American community. But outside of domestic security issues lay concerns over the effects of immigration on wages and the welfare state. Certainly the government receives a surplus of payroll taxes which undocumented migrants never receive back in the form of social security benefits, but what about the strain placed on tax-funded, social services such as emergency rooms and schools? To a certain extent this whole debate is moot, confounded by the fact that a policy that documented the undocumented (via an “amnesty program”), championed robust internal security, and binationally regulated frontiers⁵¹ would eliminate many economic and security difficulties. Of course, whether or not those policy suggestions would be consistent with the American people’s value system is a different question entirely.

Like any political argument, extremists have clearly marked their respective ideological platforms. On one side of the playing field are Republican Congressmen Tom Tancredo and Bill Frist, both who support the “deport ‘em all” mentality. In opposition are a number of democrats such as Senator Edward Kennedy, a veteran proponent of “immigration liberalization.” Unlike their rivals, this camp fervently touts the need to provide a path to citizenship for most of America’s undocumented population, an ever-growing group which currently amounts to more than 11 million.⁵² And somewhere in the middle of this political spectrum lurks President Bush’s proposal, a policy that generally falls on the side of Congress’s liberals but includes, among other things, increased funding for border security and plans for a temporary worker program.⁵³

None of this debate will be worthwhile unless the lessons of history act as a prelude to a productive dialogue concerning the social and economic consequences of immigration in today’s globalized world. Surely we do not want to return to anything reminiscent of the wholly despicable and discriminatory national origins quota laws. Still, the “one size fits all” policy instituted in 1965 as a reaction to the quota system completely ignores America’s geopolitical ties. In particular, it would seem counterintuitive for the U.S. to adopt the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), facilitate the relatively free flow of capital, goods, services, intellectual property, and technology between America and Mexico, and then prohibit a similarly free movement of labor. Nonetheless, this state of affairs currently characterizes the U.S.’s relationship with its geographically closest trading partner to the south.

Although modern-day restrictionists like Congressman Tancredo would like to begin a massive roundup and deportation of undocumented residents, such a proposal is neither politically viable nor socially desirable. Any suggestion for future reform must seek well-reasoned arguments that ignore discrimination and arbitrariness, champion sociopolitical practicability, and recognize the important notion that America holds different types of relationships with different countries. But before further discussion can ensue, a mental toolkit for analysis must be fleshed out, and thus, a lens through which to examine immigration policy will be proposed.