May 19: The End of Immigration

The Emergency Quota Act was passed by Congress on this date in 1921. It limited the number of immigrants entering the United States to 3 percent of the size of each nationality group that had been living in the country in 1910 — a formula that favored northern Europeans and Anglo-Saxons and greatly limited the entry of Eastern European Jews (as well as southern European Catholics). Three years later, the restrictions grew tighter with the National Origins Act, which reset the quota to 2 percent and the year to 1890, at which time the wave of Jewish emigration to the U.S. (1881-1914) was only a few years old. The 1924 law reduced overall immigration to 150,000 (less than half of the quota set by the 1921 law) and banned Asian people entirely. These laws had widespread electoral support, reflecting nativistic views of Jews and other foreign peoples as politically radical, culturally subversive, and corrupting to the “purity” of the country. Ultimately, the quota system, which was not abolished until the 1960s, would keep European Jews trapped under Nazi rule in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

“Remember, remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” — Franklin Delano Roosevelt