Immigration Act of 1924

Audience

The Immigration Act of 1924 was meant to serve as a bridge between the more progressive (liberal) members of Congress, who wanted to have open immigration into the United States, as had been the norm since America's founding, while also appeasing men like Senator Ellison DuRant Smith, a Democrat from South Carolina who argued that America's borders should be closed to immigrants and the workforce “Americanized” by employing only those who had been granted total U.S. citizenship. Stopping immigration altogether would not be feasible, given the economic demands for a cheap labor force in light of America's growing industrial might, but many political leaders had recognized that there was a political need to curtail it as well. By establishing the census date for the first three years at 1890, many of the nations that America viewed as a threat to American capitalist sovereignty in eastern and southern Europe saw their annual immigration numbers reduced by 90–98 percent. To a degree, this act served as an extension of foreign policy for the United States by sending a clear message to those nations in the midst of revolution or socialist reform that their citizens would not be allowed into the country, as America did not wish to associate with socialism—all without any formal declaration to risk America's entanglement in foreign affairs, as had brought them into World War I.

Perhaps more significant, the act was intended to appease a growing conservative movement throughout America as a whole. Throughout the 1920s, the United States saw a resurgence in membership of the Ku Klux Klan as its focus of hatred became less about race and more about social and xenophobic anger as American progressivism flourished. In Ohio for example, membership in the Klan surged to around three hundred thousand members, representing a substantial voting block for senators seeking to keep their seats in Congress. The act was meant to appease this growing grassroots movement while also ensuring that America's progressives remained supportive of Republican objectives even as Democrats gained a stronger foothold in the Congress.