Immigration Act of 1924

In 1917, amid wartime anxiety about national security, Congress passed the first broadly restrictive immigration law. It required a literacy test for immigrants over 16 and barred people from an “Asiatic Barred Zone.” Chinese immigrants were already excluded under the Chinese Exclusion Act.

When the literacy test failed to reduce immigration much, Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont proposed quotas: 3 percent of the foreign-born population of each nationality as recorded in the 1910 census, capping visas at about 350,000 a year. President Wilson pocket-vetoed the bill, but President Harding called Congress into special session and signed it in 1921. By 1924 the quota principle was accepted, and the debate turned on how strict to make it. Restrictionists won.

The 1924 law lowered the quota from 3 to 2 percent and moved the base year back from 1910 to 1890 — before the largest waves of immigration from Italy, Poland, Russia, and other parts of southern and eastern Europe. It also changed the basis of calculation from the foreign-born population to the national origins of the entire U.S. population, which greatly increased the share of visas for people from the British Isles and western Europe.

The act also excluded any immigrant who, by race or nationality, was ineligible for citizenship. Because naturalization laws dating from 1790 and 1870 barred people of Asian ancestry from becoming citizens, the law shut out the Japanese and other Asians not previously excluded. Japan, which had voluntarily limited emigration under the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement, protested bitterly, but the law stood. The State Department’s historians conclude that Congress valued preserving the country’s racial composition above good relations with Japan.