One indication of this was a tightening of immigration rules. In 1921 Congress, reflecting a widespread prejudice against a huge influx of eastern and southern Europeans, passed an emergency act establishing a quota system. Each year 3 percent of the number of foreign-born residents of the United States in 1910 (about 350,000 persons) might enter the country. Each country’s quota was based on the number of its nationals in the United States in 1910. This meant that only a relative handful of the total would be from southern and eastern Europe. In 1924 the quota was reduced to 2 percent and the base year shifted to 1890, thereby lowering further the proportion of southern and eastern Europeans admitted.
In 1929 Congress established a system that allowed only 150,000 immigrants a year to enter the country. (In recent years, that annual number of legal immigrants has been increased to 700,000.) Each national quota was based on the supposed origins of the entire white population of the United States in 1920, not merely on the foreign-born. Here is an example of how the system worked:
Italian quota = Italian-origin population, 1920
150,000 White population, 1920
Italian quota = 3,800,000
95.500.000
6.000 (approximately)
The system was complicated and unscientific, for no one could determine with accuracy the “origins” of millions of citizens. More seriously, it ignored America’s long history of constantly changing ethnic diversity. The motto E Pluribus Unum— Out of Many, One—conceived to represent the unity of the original thirteen states, applied even more appropriately to the blending of different cultures into one nationality. The new law sought to freeze the mix, to turn the American melting pot into a kind of gigantic ice cube.
The law reduced actual immigration to far below
150,000 a year. Between 1931 and 1939, for example, only 23,000 British immigrants came to the United States, far below Britain’s annual quota of
65,000. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of southern and eastern Europeans waited for admission.
The United States had closed the gates. The National Origins Act caused the foreign-born percentage of the population to fall from about 13 percent in 1920 to 4.7 percent in 1970. (In 2010, the foreign-born population had again increased to about 13 percent.) Instead of an open, cosmopolitan society eager to accept, in Emma Lazarus’s stirring line, the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” America now became committed to preserving a homogeneous, “Anglo-Saxon” population.
Distaste for the “new” immigrants from eastern Europe, many of whom were Jewish, expanded into a more general anti-Semitism in the 1920s. American Jews, whether foreign-born or native, were subjected to increasing discrimination, not because they were slow in adopting American ways but because (being ambitious and hardworking, as immigrants were supposed to be) many of them were getting ahead in the world somewhat more rapidly than expected. Prestigious colleges like Harvard, Yale, and Columbia that had in the past admitted Jews based on their academic records now imposed unofficial but effective quotas. Medical schools also established quotas, and no matter how talented, most young Jewish lawyers and bankers could find places only in so-called “Jewish” firms.
World History
