The most active forces in its favor were, primarily, organized labor, which wished no more competition from floating aliens with a wholly un-American standard of living and, most of all, the native American groups, eugenists and others who were far-sighted and unwilling to see the racial character and national unity of America destroyed and republican ideals endangered and undermined.
The first attempt at a general restriction to improve the quality of immigration was the adoption by Congress of the literacy test, which provided that those who could not read and write some language should be excluded. This was vetoed by President Wilson.
Meanwhile the outbreak of the World War had, for the time, put a virtual stop to international movements of population, and the nation had a breathing space to consider its future policies. In 1917 the Burnett Act consolidated the existing provisions for excluding undesirables, and included the literacy test. President Wilson vetoed it also, but it was passed over his veto.
At the close of the war, there was widespread apprehension that the unsettled and impoverished peoples of Europe would begin a new mass migration westward. Before the war we had been receiving a million immigrants a year; travellers and consular agents predicted that we might look forward to receiving two million or more annually. It was felt that the literacy test, and the provisions against mental and physical defectives, would not be enough to stop this flood. Congress met the emergency by the Quota Act of 1921, which provided that the number of aliens of any nationality admitted in any one year should be no more than 3 per cent of the number of foreign-born persons of such nationality residing in the United States in 1910. This law was intended to preserve the status quo. What the nation was in 1910, that it should be forever.
Such a solution could not satisfy the native Americans, whose people had made the country great. Fortunately, the demand for a more scientific approach to regulation found an adequate representative in the Hon. Albert Johnson, a member of Congress from the State of Washington, under whose leadership the whole system was revised in the famous act of 1924.
Administratively, the proceedings were made more workable and more intelligent by placing on the United States consuls abroad the duty of approving passports, without which no immigrant could enter. When the quota was exhausted, the consul was required to refuse his visa on passports until the next year. There was no longer any possibility of hardship and apparent injustice.
Restrictively, the quota was reduced from 3 per cent to 2 per cent, and based not on the 1910 census, but on the 1890 census. The purpose of this was, frankly, to encourage new arrivals from the countries of the "old immigration,"—the countries of northern and western Europe who had contributed most to the American population and whose people were, therefore, most easily assimilable in the United States; and, conversely, to discourage immigration from the countries of southern and eastern Europe, most of whose nationals had come here since 1890.
This law reduced the total possible immigration under quota to 167,750 as against 357,800 permitted by the act it supplanted, and favored the European Nordic whose people made the United States what it is, as against the European Alpine and the Mediterranean who were late comers and intrusive elements. Unfortunately it did not apply to the western hemisphere, hence offered no obstacle to the Indian peon from Mexico nor to the Negro from the West Indies, nor were the Filipinos barred.
The most interesting provision of the law of 1924 and, in one sense, the reason for the existence of this present book, was a provision that the quotas should be based only temporarily on the 1890 census. That basis had been justly criticized on the ground that it made the immigrants of recent times, rather than the old native stock, the determinants of the future composition of the United States. The quotas, it was argued, should be based not on the number of aliens here in 1890, or in any other year; but on the ratio of these aliens to the whole population. The law therefore embodied the National Origins provision—one of the decisive events in the racial history of America.
An investigation was ordered to find the proportions of the various national (not racial) groups in the United States at the time of the 1920 census. The general quota to apply from July 1, 1927 (later delayed one year), was fixed at a total of 150,000. Each nationality was to be assigned such proportion of this 150,000 as the number of its people here in 1920 bore to the total population. Thus, if it should transpire that 10 per cent of the total population in 1920 was of Swedish ancestry, Sweden would receive a quota of 10 per cent of 150,000 or 15,000. Or if it were found, for example, that 2 per cent of the total population in 1920 derived from France, the French quota would become 3000.