Anti-Immigration Act: 1924 Quotas, Asian Exclusion, and Repeal

The Immigration Act of 1924, also called the Johnson-Reed Act, was a federal law signed by President Calvin Coolidge on May 26, 1924, that sharply restricted immigration to the United States through a national-origins quota system designed to favor immigrants from northern and western Europe, virtually shut out immigrants from Asia, and cap total annual admissions. It replaced a temporary 1921 quota law with a permanent framework that governed who could enter the country for the next four decades, until Congress abolished the quota system in 1965.¹

What the Law Did

The act was authored primarily by Representative Albert Johnson of Washington, chairman of the House Immigration Committee, and Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania. It tightened the earlier Emergency Quota Act of 1921 in two ways that mattered enormously. It reduced each nationality’s annual quota from three percent to two percent of that group’s foreign-born population living in the United States, and it moved the reference census from 1910 back to 1890, a date deliberately chosen because it preceded the large waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe.¹

Beginning in 1929, the formula shifted again. Quotas were then calculated from the “national origins” of the entire U.S. population as reflected in the 1920 census, under a total annual cap of 150,000.²

The country-by-country effect was severe. Italy’s annual allotment dropped from 42,057 to 5,802. Poland went from 31,146 to 6,524. Russia fell from 24,405 to 2,784. Britain and Ireland, meanwhile, saw a combined quota rise from 77,342 to 83,574. The minimum quota for any nationality was 100. The Western Hemisphere was exempt from the caps, partly for diplomatic reasons and partly to preserve access to Mexican labor.³

The act also created a consular visa system. Prospective immigrants had to apply at U.S. embassies abroad before traveling, which meant the burden of proving admissibility fell on the applicant and rejection could happen before anyone boarded a ship.²

The Ban on Asian Immigration

The law’s most absolute provision barred entry to any “alien ineligible for citizenship.” That phrase did specific work. Under the Naturalization Act of 1790, citizenship was limited to “free white persons,” and while Congress extended naturalization to people of African descent after the Civil War, Asian immigrants remained permanently ineligible.⁴ The 1924 act converted that naturalization bar into an immigration bar.

Earlier laws had already excluded most Asian populations. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers. The Immigration Act of 1917 created an “Asiatic Barred Zone” covering much of the continent from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. The 1924 act closed the remaining gap by ending Japanese immigration, which had previously been managed through the informal 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement between the U.S. and Japanese governments.⁵

The Supreme Court had recently reinforced the classification the law relied on. In Ozawa v. United States (1922), the Court ruled that Japanese immigrants could not be classified as “white” and were therefore barred from naturalization. In United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), it unanimously extended the same reasoning to Asian Indians.⁶

Japan’s diplomatic protest was pointed. Ambassador Masanao Hanihara wrote to the U.S. government on April 10, 1924, criticizing the proposed exclusion as discriminatory. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge called the letter a “veiled threat,” and the episode hardened congressional resolve to include the ban. The law was widely perceived in Japan as a national insult and worsened relations between the two countries for years.⁷

Who Pushed the Law and Why

Johnson-Reed was not just a response to labor pressures or wartime anxiety. It was shaped heavily by the pseudoscience of eugenics and by a nativist movement that had been building for decades. The Immigration Restriction League, founded in 1894 by Harvard-educated Bostonians including Prescott Hall, promoted what was called “Nordic theory,” the claim that Anglo-Saxon Protestants were racially superior and that newer immigrants from southern and eastern Europe came from what Hall described as “historically downtrodden, atavistic, and stagnant” races.⁸

Madison Grant’s 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race gave these ideas wide circulation and influenced Representative Johnson directly. Johnson served as head of the Eugenics Research Association and treated Grant as an advisor on immigration policy.⁸ Johnson also invited Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Research Association to testify before the House Immigration Committee as its unofficial “Expert Eugenics Agent.” Laughlin urged lawmakers to adopt an explicitly “eugenical standard” for admissions and argued that “the character of the nation is determined primarily by its racial qualities.”⁹

Other constituencies supported the bill for their own reasons. The Ku Klux Klan, then at the peak of its political influence, opposed Jewish and Catholic immigration. The American Federation of Labor advocated restrictions to shield domestic workers from foreign competition. Senator Reed described the goal plainly: to make the United States a “more homogeneous nation” and preserve its “racial type.”³

How Immigration Collapsed After 1924

Admissions fell immediately. Annual lawful permanent admissions dropped from nearly 707,000 in 1924 to 294,000 in 1925 and 280,000 by 1929. The foreign-born share of the U.S. population fell from 11.6 percent in 1930 to a record low of 4.7 percent by 1970, and the absolute number of foreign-born residents dropped from 14.2 million to 9.6 million over that same period.³ During the 1930s, net migration turned negative at times, meaning more people were leaving the country than entering it.¹⁰

Japanese immigration effectively ceased. While 30,842 Japanese entered the U.S. in 1907, only 3,503 total Japanese immigrants arrived across the entire two decades from 1931 to 1950.⁷

The Western Hemisphere was exempt from the quotas, but that did not mean migration from Mexico was unaffected. The U.S. Border Patrol was created in 1924, and during the 1930s hundreds of thousands of people, primarily of Mexican descent, were deported.¹⁰

The Refugee Crisis of the 1930s and 1940s

The quota system’s most devastating consequence came when it was used to limit Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. The United States had no separate refugee policy during this period, only its standard immigration law, and Congress did not revise it to account for the crisis.¹¹

Germany’s annual quota was 25,957, later merged with Austria’s to reach 27,370. Quotas functioned as ceilings, not targets, and unused slots did not carry over. Even so, the German quota went unfilled in every year between 1933 and 1938.¹²

Administrative barriers made the ceilings even lower in practice. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover directed that immigrants “likely to become a public charge” be denied entry, requiring applicants to find a financial sponsor. That was a near-impossible task for people fleeing with nothing. The State Department enforced strict documentation requirements that refugees often could not meet because Nazi Germany refused to issue the necessary papers. The waiting list for the German quota grew from 139,163 in June 1938 to 309,782 in June 1939. A Hungarian applicant registering in 1939 faced an estimated forty-year wait.¹¹

The most notorious single episode was the voyage of the MS St. Louis. In May 1939, the ship left Germany carrying 937 passengers, the vast majority Jewish refugees. Cuba permitted only 28 to disembark. The U.S. government refused asylum, stating the German quota was already filled. The ship returned to Europe, where 288 passengers went to Great Britain, 224 to France, 214 to Belgium, and 181 to the Netherlands. After Germany conquered western Europe in 1940, more than 600 of those passengers found themselves under Nazi authority, and 254 of the passengers who had returned to the continent were murdered in the Holocaust.¹³

Between 1933 and 1945, roughly 180,000 to 220,000 refugees fleeing Nazism permanently immigrated to the United States. Hundreds of thousands of other applicants were unable to gain entry. It was not until January 1944, by which time more than five million European Jews had already been killed, that President Franklin Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board to assist victims of Nazi oppression.¹⁴

How the 1924 Framework Was Dismantled

Congress’s first major revision came with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, known as the McCarran-Walter Act. The law kept the national-origins quota system and held the annual quota-immigrant ceiling at roughly 155,000, but it made two significant changes. It repealed the outright ban on Asian immigration, granting every country a quota for the first time, though the concession was largely symbolic: individual Asian nations received quotas as small as 100, and total immigration from an “Asia-Pacific Triangle” was capped at 2,000 per year. The law also eliminated the remaining racial barriers to naturalization, so Japanese, Korean, and other Asian immigrants could become citizens for the first time.¹⁵ President Harry Truman vetoed the bill, arguing it did too little for refugees, but Congress overrode his veto.¹⁶

The national-origins system finally ended with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as the Hart-Celler Act after its sponsors Senator Philip Hart and Representative Emanuel Celler. It abolished national-origin quotas effective June 30, 1968. President Lyndon Johnson signed it at the foot of the Statue of Liberty on October 3, 1965, calling it a measure to “repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice.”¹⁷

The new system used a preference framework centered on family reunification and employment skills. It set an annual ceiling of 170,000 immigrants (excluding immediate relatives of citizens, who were admitted without limit) and imposed a per-country cap of 20,000, extended for the first time to the Western Hemisphere. Many supporters predicted the changes would have minimal demographic impact. They were wrong. Annual immigration eventually grew to nearly 500,000, with only about 20 percent coming from Europe, as arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Latin America surged.¹⁸

1
U.S. House of Representatives History, Art & Archives. The Immigration Act of 1924
2
Immigration History. 1924 Immigration Act (Johnson-Reed Act)
3
Migration Policy Institute. The 1924 U.S. Immigration Act
4
Pew Research Center. How U.S. Immigration Laws and Rules Have Changed Through History
5
U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian. The Immigration Act of 1924
6
U.S. House of Representatives History, Art & Archives. First Arrivals
7
Densho Encyclopedia. Immigration Act of 1924
8
Cato Institute. Reflections on the Immigration Act of 1924
9
DNA Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Biological Aspects of Immigration, Harry H. Laughlin Testimony
10
Population Reference Bureau. Repeats and Rhymes: Lessons From 100 Years of U.S. Immigration Policy
11
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Immigration to the United States, 1933–41
12
Council on Foreign Relations. Limits on Jewish Refugees From Germany
13
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Voyage of the St. Louis
14
The National WWII Museum. War Refugee Board
15
Immigration History. Immigration and Nationality Act (the McCarran-Walter Act)
16
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The Fraught Passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act
17
Immigration History. Hart-Celler Act
18
U.S. House of Representatives History, Art & Archives. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965