How the Immigration Act of 1924 Tried to Reshape America

The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson–Reed Act, upended the way migration into the United States functioned for a century and a half. The legislation drastically reduced immigration by setting quotas for which nationalities could—and couldn’t—settle in America.

A New York Times headline on April 27, 1924, declared, “America of the Melting Pot Comes to End.” The article by Senator David Reed, a Republican from Pennsylvania, outlined the bill he cosponsored to reshape the nation’s demographic future by attempting to recreate a version of its past. A month later, the bill was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge.

The Act’s main goal, as laid out in Reed’s article, was to undo the effects of decades of heavy immigration from southern and eastern European countries like Italy and Russia. It was designed to reduce overall immigration while favoring migration from northern and western European countries like Great Britain and Germany.

“Each year's immigration should so far as possible be a miniature America,” Reed wrote.

Prior to the 1924 Act, the United States had almost no immigration restrictions based directly on national origin—with the notable exceptions of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1907 "Gentleman's Agreement” to limit Japanese immigration.

“Until 1920, policymakers focused primarily on qualitative restrictions when it came to European immigrants, says Maddalena Marinari, a professor at Gustavus Adolphus College who has written about the 1924 Act. According to Marinari, screeners had targeted immigrants with disabilities or diseases. They also screened out immigrants with a criminal past or who exhibited what they deemed was "immoral behavior." These judgements were generally made once a prospective immigrant arrived in the United States—typically at processing facilities like Ellis Island in New York Harbor.

In the early 1900s, proponents of eugenics theories claimed scientific authority as they divided humanity into allegedly "superior" and "inferior" racial types. They claimed northern and western Europeans were more desirable than those from southern and eastern regions of the continent. The eugenicists and their allies pushed for drastic reductions in immigration by nationalities they deemed inferior, arguing that literacy tests and other qualitative restrictions weren’t having enough of an effect.

As World War I ended and international migration picked up, Congress passed the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, a stopgap measure that limited immigration from any country to just 3 percent of the immigrant population from that country recorded in the 1910 U.S. Census. It also capped arrivals at around 350,000 annual immigrants, less than one-third of the 1906 total.

Immigration dropped right away, but the 1910 Census still reflected an increase in southern and eastern Europeans. So when Congress set out to create a permanent policy, it turned to the 1890 Census—the last count before those demographics had shifted. The 1924 Act set quotas at 2 percent of the European immigrant population in 1890 and pledged to cut total immigration to 150,000 a year once officials created a formula to favor northern and western Europeans.

By the end of the decade, lawmakers had finalized a system that based quotas on the assumed national origins of the 1920 U.S. population. The quotas still excluded Black and Native American immigrants and those from the Western Hemisphere and Asians.

The 1924 Act also required immigrants to secure visas from U.S. consular officers before boarding ships to America, ensuring that the quotas would be enforced abroad. Marinari says this shifted authority to individual consulates, with sometimes tragic results. “Despite having one of the largest yearly quotas, Germany never filled its quota in the 1930s because most of the individuals applying for visas were German Jews,” she says.

With the visa requirement, the 1924 Act drew a sharp line between legal and illegal immigration and specified that immigrants without legal status could be deported no matter how long they had been in the United States. As a result, between 1920 and 1929 the number of U.S. deportations and voluntary departures grew more than 13-fold.

The 1924 Immigration Act’s provisions remained largely intact until 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, lifting many of the system’s most racist restrictions and allowing significant immigration from Asia, Africa and other nations excluded or ignored under the 1924 law. But the nation-by-nation quota system remained in modified form, as did the requirement that most immigrants secure visas at U.S. consulates abroad.

The 1924 Act sidestepped questions about migration at the nation's northern and southern borders by excluding immigrants from the Americas from its calculations and quotas, partly due to lobbying from Southwest businesses that relied on migrant labor. Two days after the Act was signed, Congress created the U.S. Border Patrol to regulate migration at the country’s land borders by other means.

Although immigrants from the Americas remained free from the restrictive national quotas, Marinari says their exemption paradoxically “contributed to the creation of an image of immigrants from these areas as always temporary and thus incapable of being citizens.”

Although its eugenicist excesses are largely in the past, portions of Senator Reed’s vision of a U.S. immigration system admitting his idea of “a miniature America” remain a century later. Marinari says the 1924 Act established a pattern of quotas and of prioritizing immigrants with skills, education and existing U.S. family ties that persists today. “Its most important legacy,” she says, “is that it created a hierarchy of desirability when it came to which immigrants the United States should admit.”