Immigration

The most important developments in immigration from 1929 to 1945 were the sharp reduction in the number of immigrants because of the Great Depression and World War II and the issue of what to do about reeu-GEEs, especially Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Immigration to the United States dropped off precipitously in the 1930s. The number of immigrants had averaged about 1 million per year in the decade before World War I, surged again once the war was over, and then fell off with the immigration restriction legislation of 1921 and 1924. Even so, immigration averaged nearly 300,000 annually from 1925 to 1930. The Great Depression then sent immigration plummeting to barely more than 50,000 per year from 1931 to 1940—the lowest rate since the 1820s. In the early years of the 1930s, in fact, more people left than entered the United States. Immigration picked up in the second half of the decade, before declining again, to only about 30,000 annually, during the war.

The social composition of immigration changed in the era too. Because the 1924 legislation imposed immigration quotas for nations outside the Western Hemisphere (and prevented most immigration from Asia), a higher proportion of immigrants than before came from Canada and Mexico. In terms of gender, immigration changed from about three-fifths male from 1900 to 1930 to three-fifths female in the next two decades.

While the decline in immigration in the 1920s had resulted from laws motivated in substantial part by nativist desires to keep out immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and from Asia, the low totals of the 1930s came largely because mass unemployment made the United States a much less attractive destination. American policy also played a role, however. Concerned about the economic crisis, President Herbert Hoover insisted upon tight enforcement of national policy going back to the late 19th century preventing admission of immigrants who were likely to become public charges (the “LPC clause”). The Mexican Repatriation Program of the 1930s begun in the Hoover presidency returned up to a half million Mexican Americans to Mexico, many of them U. S. citizens, on the grounds that they might take scarce jobs or swell reliee rolls.

The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt brought little liberalization to immigration policy. The Tyd-ings-McDuffie Act of 1934, in addition to setting independence for the Philippines for 1945, established a quota of just 50 per year on Filipino immigration. But the Mexican Repatriation Program slowed in the mid-1930s, the number of immigrants deported declined significantly, and during World War II the United States inaugurated the bracero program to bring Mexicans into the country to help alleviate the shortage of agricultural labor. In 1943, Congress repealed the Chinese exclusion laws that went back to 1882 but established a yearly quota of just 105 for Chinese immigration. (It also made immigrant Chinese Americans eligible for citizenship, which paved the way for ultimately ending the ban on Asian-American immigrants becoming citizens.)

By the mid-1930s, the issue of refugees, especially Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, began to emerge. In the contexts of the 1924 national quota law, the unemployment problem of the 1930s, and widespread ANTI-Semitism, the United States accepted only a small proportion of those who wanted to flee Nazi rule. Roosevelt did convene an unsuccessful conference in France in 1938 to discuss the refugee problem and also directed that refugees on temporary visas be allowed to remain in the United States and that the LPC clause not be rigidly enforced against refugees. He did not, however, make the refugee issue a major priority or take action to liberalize policy when German quotas were filled in the late 1930s. From 1933 through the end of World War II, the United States accepted an estimated quarter million refugees from Europe, most of them Jewish—but that total fell far below the quota limit even though it significantly exceeded what any other nation did.

During the war, immigration from outside the Western Hemisphere slowed to a trickle. Caused partly by the impact of wartime conditions on international travel, the decline also reflected State Department concerns about admitting immigrants who might be a threat to national security and by the anti-Semitic prejudices of some influential officials in the department. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Mor-GENTHAu, Jr., dismayed by the accumulating evidence of the Holocaust and the obstructionism of the State Department, helped persuade Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board in January 1944, which may ultimately have helped rescue as many as 200,000 Jews. New U. S. policy on refugees and other displaced persons, and the resumption of significant immigration, did not occur until the early postwar era.

Further reading: Elliott Robert Barkan, And Still They Come: Immigrants and American Society, 1920 to the 1990s (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1996); Stephan Thernstrom, ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980).