The 1924 Immigration Act and the Quotas That Lasted Four Decades

The trick was in the date. When Congress set out in 1924 to decide how many people from each country could immigrate to the United States, it did not use the most recent census, taken in 1920. It reached back to the census of 1890, and it did so on purpose. In 1890 the great wave of migrants from Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece and the rest of southern and eastern Europe had barely begun; the foreign-born population was still dominated by people from Britain, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia. Basing the quotas on that older count meant the Italians and Jews and Slavs who had arrived since would be allotted almost nothing. President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act on May 26, 1924. Among the members of the House who had argued against it was a young Brooklyn congressman in his first term, a lawyer named Emanuel Celler. He lost that fight. He would spend the next four decades waiting to win it.

In short: The Johnson-Reed Act capped immigration from outside the Western Hemisphere and divided the slots by national origin to favour northern and western Europeans, while barring almost all Asians. It was built on eugenic ideas that were mainstream science at the time. Its quotas held until 1965, and they shaped who could escape Europe in the 1930s.

From open doors to a numbers game

For most of the nineteenth century, the United States set few limits on European immigration. The exceptions were explicit: the Chinese were barred from 1882, and certain categories such as people judged likely to become a public charge or people with certain diseases could be refused at the port. Ellis Island processed millions of arrivals, the vast majority of whom were admitted within hours.

Between 1880 and the First World War, more than twenty million immigrants arrived, many from regions that had not sent large numbers before. They filled the factories, mines and tenements of industrial America. Native-born Americans reacted with a mix of economic anxiety, religious prejudice against Catholics and Jews, and fear of radical politics, a fear that grew after the Russian Revolution and the bombings and strikes of 1919 and 1920.

Congress's first try at numerical limits came in 1921, with the Emergency Quota Act, which capped immigration from each European country at three percent of the number of people born in that country who were living in the United States in 1910. It was meant to be temporary. The 1924 act made the system permanent and much stricter: two percent, based on 1890.

The two men and their committee

The law is usually called the Johnson-Reed Act, after Representative Albert Johnson of Washington state, the chairman of the House immigration committee, and Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, both Republicans. Johnson was a newspaper editor from Hoquiam who had built his politics on opposition to radical labour organisers and to Japanese immigration on the West Coast.

His committee relied heavily on testimony from Harry Laughlin, a eugenicist from the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, whom the committee had appointed as an expert adviser. Laughlin presented the committee with reports arguing that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were overrepresented in prisons, asylums and hospitals, and that their admission threatened the country's biological stock. His statistical methods were criticised even at the time. They were treated as science anyway.

Behind Laughlin stood a body of writing that was respectable in its day. Madison Grant, a wealthy New York lawyer and conservationist, published a book in 1916 dividing Europeans into a ranked hierarchy of races, with "Nordics" at the top. It sold well and influenced politicians on both sides of the aisle. That is one of the uncomfortable facts of this history: eugenic ideas were not confined to fringe cranks. They were taught at leading universities, endorsed by progressive reformers as well as conservatives, and written into law in many states, including laws permitting forced sterilisation.

How the quotas worked

The 1924 law did several things at once.

It set annual quotas for each country outside the Western Hemisphere at two percent of the number of people born in that country living in the United States as of 1890, with a small minimum for every country. It provided that, starting a few years later, a new national origins formula would replace the 1890 base. Under that system, which took effect in 1929, a total of roughly 150,000 quota slots a year were divided according to estimates of the national origins of the entire American population as of 1920, a calculation that was nearly as tilted, because it counted the descendants of colonial-era British settlers heavily and largely left out the descendants of enslaved Africans.

The results were stark. Great Britain and Germany received large quotas that often went unfilled. Italy, which had sent hundreds of thousands of people in some years before the war, was limited to a few thousand a year. Quotas for Poland, Greece, Russia and other countries of the east and south were similarly small.

It barred the admission of any "alien ineligible to citizenship." Because naturalisation law at the time limited citizenship to white people and people of African descent, and the Supreme Court had recently ruled in cases involving a Japanese immigrant and an Indian immigrant that neither counted as white, this provision shut out almost everyone from Asia. It ended the informal arrangement under which Japan had restricted emigration itself, and the Japanese government and public treated the act as a national insult.

It exempted the Western Hemisphere. Immigrants from Canada, Mexico and Latin America faced no numerical quotas, largely because southwestern growers and other employers wanted Mexican labour and because of diplomatic concern about the rest of the Americas.

And it moved the decision abroad. Prospective immigrants now needed a visa from an American consul in their home country before they could sail, which meant that the critical judgment about who could come happened in consulates, often with little oversight, rather than at Ellis Island.

The border that followed

Two days after Coolidge signed the act, Congress created the Border Patrol in an appropriations law. Its early focus included enforcing Prohibition and stopping Chinese and European migrants who tried to enter through Canada or Mexico to evade the quotas.

Because Mexico was exempt from quotas, Mexican immigration was policed differently: through head taxes, literacy tests, visa fees and the public charge rule, enforced unevenly depending on the season and the needs of employers. In 1929, Congress made unlawful entry into the United States a federal crime, a law that federal prosecutors still use. During the Depression that followed, local and federal authorities pushed large numbers of Mexicans and Mexican Americans to leave the country, including many children who were American citizens.

That combination, quotas that kept Europeans and Asians out and a southern border open to labour when employers wanted it and closed when they did not, set a pattern for the rest of the century.

Empire, citizens and the gaps in the wall

The 1924 law had odd edges, and they show how much American immigration policy depended on where the country's borders and colonies happened to lie.

Filipinos were the clearest case. After the United States took the Philippines from Spain in 1898, Filipinos became US nationals, neither citizens nor aliens. That meant the 1924 bar on people ineligible for citizenship did not stop them from coming to Hawaii and the West Coast, where many worked in fields and canneries and faced the same hostility earlier Chinese and Japanese workers had. The exception lasted only a decade. In 1934 the Tydings-McDuffie Act set the Philippines on a path to independence and, in the same stroke, treated Filipinos as aliens for immigration purposes and gave the islands a quota of 50 people a year.

Puerto Ricans moved in the other direction. Congress had made them US citizens in 1917, so they could move to the mainland freely, and in the decades after the Second World War a large migration, especially to New York, built communities that are central to the city's life today. A person born in San Juan could move to the Bronx without a visa; a person born in Naples could not, unless he was lucky in the quota line.

And Mexico, exempt from quotas, became the main source of the labour the restricted system no longer supplied. Employers in the Southwest recruited across the border when they needed workers and called for deportations when they did not. During the Second World War, the federal government formalised that arrangement in the Bracero program, which brought Mexican farm workers on temporary contracts.

The result was a system that looked tidy on paper, with each country's number fixed in law, and was in practice a patchwork shaped by empire, labour demand and diplomacy. The quotas were rigid exactly where the people they targeted had the least power to bend them.

The refugees who could not come

The quotas had their deadliest consequences in the 1930s, when Jews and others in Nazi Germany and the territories it seized were desperate to leave.

The German quota was among the larger ones, yet for much of the 1930s it went unfilled. The reason was administrative: consular officers applied the public charge rule strictly, demanding proof that applicants would not need public support, at a time when the Nazi regime was stripping Jews of their property and jobs. Applicants faced long waiting lists and requirements for documents that the regime made impossible to get.

In 1939 the ocean liner St. Louis, carrying more than 900 passengers, most of them German Jewish refugees, was turned away from Cuba and then failed to find permission to land in the United States. It returned to Europe, where the passengers were taken in by several countries, and some of them were later killed in the Holocaust after Germany invaded those countries. The same year, a bill to admit 20,000 refugee children from Germany outside the quotas, the Wagner-Rogers bill, died in Congress without a vote on the floor.

Here is the argument, and I think it is hard to escape. The quota system was not designed to kill anyone. It was designed to keep the country's ethnic makeup as its authors preferred. But a system built on the premise that certain peoples were less welcome was very poorly suited to a world in which those same peoples were being hunted. Laws written in calm years determine what is possible in emergencies.

The case its defenders made

It would be dishonest to pretend no one had a non-racial argument for restriction in the 1920s. Labour unions, including the American Federation of Labor, supported limits because they believed mass immigration depressed wages and weakened organising, and some economists argue that the restriction era did raise wages for less-skilled workers. Others argued that a country recovering from war and a wave of strikes needed time to absorb the people who had already come.

Those arguments deserve a hearing, and they echo in today's debates. But they could have been addressed with an overall cap that treated every country equally. The national origins system was not a numbers policy; it was a ranking of human beings by ancestry, and its authors said so in their own committee reports. That is what makes it different in kind, not degree, from the ordinary argument over how many people to admit.

Why it lasted so long

The quotas survived the Second World War. In 1952 Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act, which ended the racial bar on naturalisation, a real step, but kept the national origins quotas. President Harry Truman vetoed it, calling the quota system discriminatory, and Congress overrode his veto.

Even the generous exceptions bent around the old system. After the war, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 admitted hundreds of thousands of European refugees, but it did so by charging many of them against future years' quotas for their countries of origin, mortgaging the small quotas of eastern European nations for years to come. Truman criticised the bill when he signed it, saying it discriminated against Jewish and Catholic refugees, and Congress loosened it two years later. The machinery of 1924 was still running even when the country was trying to be generous.

Emanuel Celler was still in the House. He had opposed the 1924 law as a freshman, he opposed the 1952 law, and he kept introducing reform bills. In 1965 he finally had the votes, a president who wanted to sign, and a country changed by the civil rights movement. The law that replaced the quotas carries his name.

What you can do

• Learn whose story your family's is. Many Americans descend from people who came just before the doors closed in 1924, or who could not come at all. Family history, ship manifests and naturalisation records are a powerful way to connect present debates to the past.
• Follow immigration rules as they are written. Much of immigration policy is made by agencies, and the public comment page lists federal rules open for comment now, grouped by issue, with advice on writing a comment that counts.
• Call the people who will write the next immigration law. With a new Congress sworn in on January 3, 2027, the representatives lookup gives you your members' phone numbers and their recent votes.
• Support refugee resettlement. Local resettlement agencies and immigrant legal aid groups, listed in the organizations directory, need volunteers for everything from airport pickups to English classes.
• Read more on how race and immigration law have shaped each other on our racial justice topic page.