Racial quotas for immigration are back | Heba Gowayed

On 14 January, the Trump administration announced a stop on issuing immigrant visas for applicants from 75 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as 10 countries from eastern Europe. The Department of Homeland Security justified the decision by claiming that immigrants from these countries are at “high risk” of reliance on welfare and becoming a “public charge”.

As an immigration scholar, I was immediately struck by the falsehood of this economic justification. The vast majority of immigrants have been legally disqualified from cash welfare since 1996. Those who do qualify for benefits like Snap and Medicaid use them at much lower rates than non-immigrants. Through their taxes, immigrants are net contributors – especially undocumented immigrants who are excluded from federal benefits.

I also noted a pattern uniting the countries on the list: nearly all were also restricted through the 1924 Immigration Act’s racial quotas.

Abolished in 1965, due to the civil-rights movement’s demands for equality of all races under the law, racial quotas were at the heart of the 1924 Immigration Act, also called the Johnson-Reed Act, which for four decades restricted immigration to the United States on the basis of nation of origin.

Albert Johnson, its lead author, was a representative from Washington, and a eugenicist, who believed that “our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood”. Johnson, who boasted about participating in Ku Klux Klan violence against south Asians, wrote the Immigration Act to exclude anyone who was not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

The 1924 law set a cap on total immigration to just a fifth of the pre-first world war number. It used the 1890 census to determine annual quotas for who could come from where, allocating nearly nine out of 10 slots to people from northern and western Europe, with the remaining largely set aside for people from southern and eastern Europe. Asians were totally barred, save for a few slots for people from the Levant, and total African admissions were capped at 1,200 people each year.

The Immigration Act also established the category of “illegal alien” for the first time, as well as visa requirements. An accompanying act later that year allocated funds for the first border patrol.

Trump’s rhetoric almost a century later bears a jarring resemblance to Johnson’s. The president has also claimed that immigrants are “poisoning the nation’s blood.” He too has said that he prefers the “nice people” of Sweden, Norway and Denmark to people from “filthy, dirty, disgusting” countries like Somalia.

The Johnson and Trump policies also developed in similar ways. Just as this administration is evoking the specter of immigrants becoming a “public charge”, and instructing consular officers to test immigrant’s English through an interview, Johnson ushered through a bill in 1917, as a precursor to the 1924 Immigration Act, that excluded anyone who was a “public charge” and required a literacy test for immigrants. Both sets of policies demanded more stringent testing on immigrant health – Johnson was a proponent of sterilizing the mentally disabled.

At the time, the Johnson-Reed Act was very popular. It passed with over 80% support in both houses of Congress. And it was signed into law by Calvin Coolidge, who believed that “America must be kept American”, echoing the mantra of the Ku Klux Klan, which was a proponent of the law.

The Immigration Act achieved its goals of keeping America white and stopping migration. In the coming four decades, immigration to the United States would come to a screeching halt, dropping from 13% foreign-born in the 1920s to less than 5% in 1970. That year, the US was 87.5% white.

By contrast, today 15% of people in the US are foreign-born, and the country is 57.8% white. The concern that the United States could become majority non-white as of 2045 is likely a driving force for Project 2025’s mass deportation vision that Trump is enacting today.

Then, like now, refugees were also denied. In one harrowing example, in 1939, more than 900 Jewish passengers aboard the SS St Louis were forced to return to Europe, almost a quarter of whom later died in Nazi concentration camps. Even after the horrors of the Holocaust were fully revealed, it was not until 1948 that the United States took in Jewish refugees, and even then, just 200,000 people. Signing that bill into law, Harry Truman described himself as reluctant, denouncing the bill’s restrictions as antisemitic and xenophobic.

It is no surprise then that Adolf Hitler, who wrote about the Johnson-Reed Act in Mein Kampf, praised it, writing that the US was the “one state” that “simply excludes the immigration of certain races”.

A century later, the 1924 Immigration Act still has fans. Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass deportation policy as the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, has praised Coolidge and the four decades of low immigration to the United States.

With the return of immigration to the United States after the abolition of racial quotas in 1965 came economic growth. New arrivals breathed life into US industry at all levels, injecting trillions of dollars into the economy, and filling key labor shortages. Yet, as the number of non-white people increased, pathways to admissions narrowed. The United States spent three times as much on the detention of immigrant detention as adjudicating immigrants’ claims. The idea that Trump is closing an open border belies the fact that $410bn has been spent on border securitization alone in the last two decades.

None of these facts matter. The purpose of this immigration ban, like the other travel bans this administration has passed, has nothing to do with economics. Just as the mass deportation agenda has nothing to do with immigrant criminality – which has long been a myth. The purpose of this latest immigration ban is to whiten the nation, period, just as was the purpose of the ban a century prior. This administration has said and has shown time and time again that there is “no price tag” on accomplishing this goal.

But just as this latest immigration ban has precedent in US history, so too does the resistance to it. We can learn from the civil rights movement, from the Black led multiracial coalition that insisted that the rights of all people of color were deeply connected, that they needed to be treated equally under the law. We can recognize too that the work of that movement continues, that the white supremacy it fought is enduring, and that we need to organize and protest, and fight for a system that once and for all refuses enduring racist reasoning, and recognizes the humanity of all.