Immigration Act of 1924

Impact

The Immigration Act of 1924 became a major turning point in America's long-term immigration policies as well as a short-term catalyst for growing conflict with Asia. For the latter, the introduction of the Asiatic Barred Zone would only further enflame tensions with Japan, which saw it as a direct affront to the Gentlemen's Agreement made in 1907 between Theodore Roosevelt and the Japanese government (saying that Japan would disallow further emigration of certain groups, such as laborers, to the United States for the reciprocal agreement that Japanese children could continue to attend integrated schools on the U.S. West Coast and families would still be allowed entry). Moreover, it served as additional proof of America's imperial aims in Asia. Coupled with America's economic aggressiveness during Japan's conflict in the 1930s with China, the Japanese government found itself moving to a more hard-line, anti-Western mindset that would lead to hostilities between the United States, Great Britain, and imperial Japan in 1941.

The Immigration Act of 1924 also established a system of proxy control for the naturalization service, which now required potential immigrants to visit a U.S. embassy in their homelands to conduct an initial evaluation of fitness for naturalization. This created two significant benefits for the immigration services: First, it allowed the investigating officer to better check with local authorities and references to determine risks to American national security or safety. Second, it kept immigrants from being denied entry at the border and rendered unable to return to their home country. This process remains relatively unchanged even today as the State Department partners with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to process applications for immigrant visas. Although the ease of travel in neighboring countries such as Mexico and Canada has increased the number of illegal border crossings since the 1970s, the system originally developed by the Sixty-eighth Congress processes over six hundred thousand visa requests annually for legal immigration to the United States.

A major criticism of the Immigration Act of 1924 came following the discovery of Germany's concentration camps in World War II and public knowledge of the refusal to grant Jewish immigrants passage into the United States from Nazi-controlled territories. In 1939, the ocean liner St. Louis was denied entry to the United States in Miami. The liner was carrying nearly nine hundred Jewish passengers seeking refuge from Adolf Hitler's anti-Jewish policies in Germany and conquered territories. Nearly a third of these refugees died in the Holocaust as a result of being returned to Europe, raising concerns that America's quota system made America negligent in these deaths. While the refugees had not applied for visas to America until they were off the shores of the United States (having originally been granted passage to Cuba), this incident would lead to the addition of a refugee amendment to the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 to allow the United States to admit individuals seeking to escape particularly dangerous conditions.