Text of the Immigration Act of 1924: Quotas and Asian Exclusion

The Immigration Act of 1924, also called the Johnson-Reed Act, was the first U.S. law to impose permanent numerical limits on immigration, assigning each nationality a small annual quota calculated from the 1890 census and barring almost all immigration from Asia. Signed by President Calvin Coolidge on May 26, 1924, it governed who could enter the United States for the next 41 years, until Congress replaced it in 1965.¹

How the Quota System Worked

The Act operated in two phases. Under Section 11(a), the annual quota for any nationality was set at 2 percent of the number of foreign-born people of that nationality living in the continental United States as recorded in the 1890 census, with a floor of 100 per nationality.² The choice of 1890 was the whole point. That year predated the large migrations from Italy, Poland, and Russia, so anchoring the count there suppressed quotas for Southern and Eastern Europe while preserving generous allocations for Northern and Western Europe.¹

A second, permanent formula under Section 11(b) was to take effect July 1, 1927. Each nationality’s quota would bear the same ratio to a total cap of 150,000 as the number of U.S. inhabitants of that national origin (per the 1920 census) bore to the total American population.³ This “national origins” method traced ancestry across the whole population, including U.S.-born descendants of earlier immigrants, and tilted the numbers even further toward Britain. The formula proved so complex that Congress delayed it twice; it finally took effect when President Herbert Hoover issued Proclamation 1872 on March 22, 1929.⁴

The Quota Board excluded several groups from the 1920 population count used for the calculation: immigrants from the Western Hemisphere, Asians and their descendants, descendants of enslaved people, and Native Americans. As a result, less than 1 percent of the 1929 quotas went to African countries.⁵

Who Was Favored and Who Was Shut Out

The initial 1924 quotas, set by Coolidge’s Proclamation 1703, gave Germany 51,227 slots, Great Britain and Northern Ireland 34,007, and the Irish Free State 28,567. Italy received 3,845, Poland 5,982, and Russia 2,248. Many countries got the statutory minimum of 100.⁶

Under the 1929 permanent quotas, Great Britain and Northern Ireland received 65,721 slots, Germany 25,957, and the Irish Free State 17,853. Italy stood at 5,802, Poland at 6,524, Russia at 2,784.⁴ Together, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ireland accounted for nearly 70 percent of all available visas.⁷

The numbers on the ground shifted just as sharply. Total annual immigration dropped from roughly 707,000 in 1924 to 294,000 in 1925. Italian immigration fell from over 220,000 the year before the quotas to fewer than 4,000 the year after.⁸ Southern and Eastern Europeans had received 41 percent of visa slots under the earlier 1921 quota law; under the initial 1924 scheme they received 11 percent, rising to 14 percent under the 1929 formula. By 1970 the foreign-born share of the U.S. population had fallen to 4.7 percent, down from 11.6 percent in 1930.⁵

The Visa Requirement

The 1924 Act introduced a procedure that still defines U.S. immigration: the requirement to apply for and receive a visa at an American consulate abroad before traveling to the United States. Under the earlier 1921 law, admissibility was decided upon arrival at ports like Ellis Island, producing chaotic dashes in which steamship companies raced to land migrants before quotas filled and turned away those who arrived too late. The 1924 system moved screening to the point of departure. Applicants completed paperwork, underwent medical examination, and received a visa stamp in their passport before boarding.⁵ The fee was $9 per immigration visa.²

The law also removed the statute of limitations on deportations, meaning unauthorized immigrants could be removed regardless of how long they had been in the country. Deportations and voluntary departures rose from fewer than 2,800 in 1920 to nearly 38,800 in 1929.⁵

Who Was Exempt from the Quotas

Not every immigrant counted against a country’s quota. Section 4 defined “non-quota immigrants,” a category that included:

Wives and unmarried children under 18 of U.S. citizens.
Immigrants previously lawfully admitted who were returning from a temporary trip abroad.
Natives of Canada, Newfoundland, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Canal Zone, and independent countries of Central and South America, along with their spouses and minor children.
Ministers and professors with at least two years of practice, along with their families.
Bona fide students aged 15 or older entering to study at approved institutions.

A separate “nonimmigrant” category was exempt from the quota system entirely: government officials, temporary visitors for business or pleasure, transit passengers, and bona fide seamen.⁹ Immigration from the Western Hemisphere remained uncapped, a concession meant to protect diplomatic and economic ties with neighboring countries.³

The Asian Exclusion Clause

Section 13(c) barred the admission of any alien ineligible for citizenship, with narrow exceptions. Naturalization law dating back to 1790 and 1870 restricted citizenship to “free white persons” and persons of African descent, so the provision functioned as a blanket ban on immigration from Asia.¹ Two recent Supreme Court decisions had drawn the racial lines the Act relied on: Ozawa v. United States (1922), which held that a Japanese immigrant was not Caucasian and therefore ineligible for naturalization,¹⁰ and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), which held that a high-caste Indian man was not a “white person” in common understanding even if scientifically classified as Caucasian. The Thind ruling led to the denaturalization of roughly fifty Asian Indian Americans.¹¹

The reach of Section 13(c) was tested almost immediately. In Chang Chan v. Nagle, 268 U.S. 346 (1925), a unanimous Supreme Court upheld the denial of entry to the Chinese wives of native-born American citizens, with Justice James Clark McReynolds writing that “hardships of a case, and suppositions of what is rational and consistent in immigration policy, cannot justify a court in departing from the plain terms of an immigration act.”¹²

The exclusion provision triggered a diplomatic crisis with Japan, which had regulated the emigration of laborers to the United States under the informal Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907.¹³ At Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes’s request, Japanese Ambassador Masanao Hanihara sent a letter on April 10, 1924, warning of “the grave consequences which the enactment of the measure retaining that particular provision would inevitably bring upon the otherwise happy and mutually advantageous relations between our two countries.”¹⁴ Senator Henry Cabot Lodge called the letter “a veiled threat.” Senator David Reed, who had offered an amendment to preserve the Gentlemen’s Agreement, reversed course. On April 14, the Senate voted 76 to 2 to reject the amendment.¹⁵ Both Hanihara and the American ambassador to Japan, Cyrus E. Woods, resigned.

Who Wrote the Law and Why

The Act’s sponsors were Representative Albert Johnson of Washington, chairman of the House Immigration Committee, and Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania. The House passed it on April 12, 1924, by a vote of 323 to 71.¹⁶

Both sponsors were open about their aims. Johnson, who served as president of the Eugenic Research Association in 1923 and 1924, told the House that “it has become necessary that the United States cease to become an asylum.”¹⁶ Reed wrote in the New York Times in April 1924 that the “chief aim” of the legislation was “to preserve racial type as it exists here today.”¹⁷

The intellectual scaffolding came from the eugenics movement, which held that certain races and ethnic groups were genetically superior. Madison Grant, a New York lawyer whose 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race argued that people of Northern and Western European descent sat atop a natural racial hierarchy, served as vice president of the Immigration Restriction League and lobbied for the bill.¹⁸ Harry H. Laughlin was appointed the House committee’s “Expert Eugenics Agent,” a position he held from 1921 to 1931, and his testimony that immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe had “diminished the genetic stature of the American people” was used to justify the quota structure.¹⁹ Journalist Daniel Okrent described eugenics as “a junk science” that made discriminatory restrictions “palatable” by clothing them in scientific authority.⁸

Consequences for Jewish Refugees

The quotas caused their gravest harm in the 1930s and 1940s, when they blocked Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. The United States had no separate refugee policy, and quotas functioned as ceilings; unused slots did not carry over. The German quota was 25,957 annually, rising to 27,370 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt merged the Austrian quota following the 1938 Anschluss. It went unfilled every year from 1933 through 1938.²⁰²¹ Applicants faced identity paperwork, transit permissions, financial affidavits from American sponsors, and a “public charge” test that Hoover had instructed consular officers to enforce strictly during the Depression.

The waiting list for the German quota grew from 139,163 in June 1938 to 309,782 in June 1939. Applicants from some countries faced potential waits of up to 40 years.²⁰ In May 1939, the passenger ship MS St. Louis carried 937 mostly Jewish passengers toward Cuba. After Cuba turned nearly all of them away, the ship sought entry to the United States and was refused because the German quota for 1939 was already filled. The ship returned to Europe, and roughly 250 of its passengers ultimately died in the Holocaust.²¹

Legislative relief failed. The Wagner-Rogers Bill, proposed in 1939 by Senator Robert Wagner and Representative Edith Nourse Rogers, would have admitted 10,000 German children under age 14 per year above existing quotas. Polls showed only 25 percent public support, and the bill died in committee.²¹ A November 1938 Gallup poll found 72 percent of Americans opposed increasing Jewish refugee admissions.²⁰ At least 110,000 Jewish refugees reached the United States between 1933 and 1941, but hundreds of thousands more were trapped in occupied Europe and murdered. Roosevelt did not establish the War Refugee Board until January 1944.

How the Law Was Repealed

The national origins system was dismantled in stages. The Magnuson Act of 1943 repealed Chinese exclusion during the wartime alliance with China, though it authorized a token annual quota of 105. The Luce-Celler Act of 1946 extended small quotas and naturalization eligibility to Indians and Filipinos. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 ended the racial bar on naturalization and gave Asian countries minimal quotas of 100 to 185, but kept the national origins framework in place.²²

The break came with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, known as the Hart-Celler Act, sponsored by Representative Emanuel Celler and Senator Philip A. Hart. Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on October 3, 1965, it abolished the national origins quotas, replaced them with a preference system based on family reunification and professional skills, and set an annual cap of 290,000 visas with a per-country limit of 20,000.²³ Lawmakers expected most immigrants would still come from Europe. Asian immigration instead rose from 153,000 during the 1950s to 1.6 million by the 1970s.²²

What Still Survives from the 1924 Act

The specific quotas are gone, but the architecture the Act built is still in place. Numerical limits on annual immigration, the requirement to obtain a visa at a U.S. consulate abroad before traveling, and the authority to deport unauthorized immigrants regardless of how long they have lived in the country all trace to this statute. The category of the “illegal” immigrant, as a person present without legal authorization, was cemented by the enforcement machinery the 1924 law introduced. As of 2022, immigrants accounted for 13.9 percent of the U.S. population, close to the 13.2 percent share recorded in 1920, the decade whose pressures produced the Johnson-Reed Act.⁵

1
Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. The Immigration Act of 1924
2
U.S. Congress. Congressional Record, Immigration Act of 1924
3
Immigration History. 1924 Immigration Act (Johnson-Reed Act)
4
The American Presidency Project. Proclamation 1872
5
Migration Policy Institute. The 1924 U.S. Immigration Act
6
The American Presidency Project. Proclamation 1703
7
Politico. Hoover Immigration Quotas 1929
8
NPR. Eugenics, Anti-Immigration Laws of the Past Still Resonate Today
9
Digital History, University of Houston. Immigration Act of 1924 Text
10
Densho Encyclopedia. Ozawa v. United States
11
Immigration History. Thind v. United States
12
Justia. Chang Chan v. Nagle, 268 U.S. 346
13
National Archives. Asian American and Pacific Islander Immigration History
14
Densho Encyclopedia. Immigration Act of 1924
15
The New York Times. Senate 76 to 2 Scraps Agreement With the Japanese
16
Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives. The Immigration Act of 1924
17
The New York Times. America of the Melting Pot Comes to End
18
National Park Service. Madison Grant
19
Arizona State University Embryo Project. Harry Hamilton Laughlin
20
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Immigration to the United States, 1933-41
21
Council on Foreign Relations. Limits on Jewish Refugees From Germany
22
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The Repeal of Asian Exclusion
23
Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965