The 100th Anniversary of One of America's Worst Laws—the 1924 Immigration Act

This is the law that made most immigration presumptively illegal, with terrible effects that continue even today.

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This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the worst laws in American history: the 1924 Immigration Act. This was the law that ended the era when most immigration was presumptively legal, and shifted to the opposite presumption: that most would-be immigrants are presumptively barred from the United States. My Cato Institute colleague David Bier, a leading immigration policy expert, summarizes some of its awful consequences:

America is often said to have two "foundings": the first after the Revolution and the second after the Civil War with the abolition of slavery….. but there is a third "founding" that occurred in 1924—one that changed the future of America almost as much as these other foundings. Unlike the first two, America's third founding was fundamentally illiberal, inspirational to Hitler, and a rejection of America's first two foundings.

The third founding occurred on May 24, 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge signed the National Origins Quota Act, which imposed the first permanent cap on legal immigration. Prior to the 1924 Act, all would‐​be immigrants were presumed eligible to immigrate unless the government had evidence showing that they were ineligible. The 1924 law replaced this system with the guilty‐​until‐​proven‐​innocent, Soviet‐​style quota system that we have today.

No law has so radically altered the demographics, economy, politics, and liberty of the United States and the world. It has massively reduced American population growth from immigrants and their descendants by hundreds of millions, diminishing economic growth and limiting the power and influence of this country. Post‐​1924 Americans are not free to associate, contract, and trade with people born around the world as they were before.

The legal restrictions have erected a massive and nearly impenetrable bureaucracy between Americans and their relatives, spouses, children, employees, friends, business associates, customers, employers, faith leaders, artists, and other peaceful people who could contribute to our lives. It has made the world a much poorer and less free place for Americans and people globally, necessitating the construction of a massive law enforcement apparatus to enforce these restrictions….

The number of new legal immigrants as a share of the US population plummeted after 1924, and it has only slowly recovered. If the United States had granted legal permanent residence at the same per‐​capita rate that it did from 1900–1914—before World War I disrupted travel—another 164 million immigrants would have been permitted to settle in the United States legally. Many of these immigrants would have ultimately returned to their home countries, as they did in great numbers even before airlines shrank the globe….

A century of freer immigration would have made the United States a vastly wealthier, freer, stronger, and more powerful country, while also raising hundreds of millions globally out of poverty and freeing hundreds of millions more from tyranny. The implications are too massive to summarize quickly, but Cato's Alex Nowrasteh has written an excellent alternative history, exploring some less obvious implications for US and world history had immigration not been cut off.

The most obvious harm caused by the 1924 Immigration Act was consigning many millions of would-be immigrants to a lifetime of poverty and oppression in their countries of origin. The most notorious example is that of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, such as Anne Frank and her family. But there are many, many other examples, too.

As David Bier notes, the Act also did great harm to native-born Americans by depriving them of the economic growth, productivity, and innovation that immigration produces, and reducing America's power and influence in the world. Immigrants contribute disproportionately to scientific innovation and entrepreneurship. More generally, immigration restrictions severely constrain the economic freedom and civil liberties of natives, as well as that of would-be migrants themselves.

Ironically, the main groups targeted for exclusion under the 1924 Act were migrants from eastern, southern, and central Europe: Italians, Jews, Poles, Greeks, and others. Today, most Americans, including even most conservative immigration restrictionists,  think of these groups as indisputable parts of the American mainstream. But, back then, nativists raised  complaints against them similar to those now raised against Hispanic migrants. Jews, Italians, and others were said to be unassimilable, prone to crime, competitors for jobs, threats to national security, agents of nefarious foreign governments, and a menace to American values and culture.

Such claims were largely wrong then, they were wrong when made about the Irish in the 19th century, and are wrong about Hispanics and other migrants now. But they had an enormous impact on American history and public policy, and remain all-too-influential today.

Some of the worst elements of the 1924 Immigration Act were eventually repealed, especially in the 1965 Immigration Act. But, as Bier points out, the 1965 Act and subsequent legislation still retain key features of its predecessor, such as "a presumption against legal immigration, a low overall cap, country‐​by‐​country caps, and a preference for family unity." And we still have a system where the vast majority of would-be migrants have little or no chance of ever being allowed to enter legally.

The 1924 Act was not the first major federal immigration restriction. That dubious distinction belongs to the deeply racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred most Chinese immigration, and led to an awful Supreme Court decision giving the federal government a general power to restrain migration, despite the fact no such authority is enumerated in the Constitution. But the 1924 Act generalized the presumption of exclusion to a vast range of additional countries, making it applicable to migrants from most of the world.

Conservative Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has additional thoughts on the awfulness of the 1924 Act and its legacy here.