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entry of both skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers and imposed burdensome paperwork
requirements on many Chinese who had already arrived.11 A series of subsequent acts
expanded Chinese exclusion and made it permanent in 1902. In 1892, every Chinese
person already living in the United States became an illegal resident “unless he or she
could demonstrate otherwise.”12
While Chinese immigrants were perceived as the greater cultural threat in the years
between 1850 and 1910, the number of immigrants from Asia was dwarfed by the wave
of immigrants who arrived from more and more parts of Europe, and by the vast numbers
arriving overall. From 1881 to 1890, for example, a total of 4,735,484 immigrants arrived
from Europe while just 69,942 came from Asia. Between 1900 and 1910, a massive
8,795,386 immigrants from all nations arrived in the United States—roughly four times
the number that had entered in each of the decades between 1850 and 1880, and more
than 11.5 percent of the country’s population at the start of that decade.13
The turn of the century saw a spike in immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. The
newcomers’ languages, religions, and cultures differed from those of earlier Northern
European and British immigrants, galvanizing anti-immigrant forces. The result would be
two decades of intensifying restrictions on immigration.

Overriding a veto by President Woodrow Wilson, Congress in 1917 established a literacy
test for all immigrants and an “Asiatic Barred Zone” that further restricted immigration
from Asia.14 The Red Scare that followed Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution inspired the
Immigration Act of 1918, which for the first time allowed aliens to be deported because of
their ideological beliefs or membership in certain organizations. A bombing traced to
anarchists in 1919 provoked the Justice Department to compile lists of thousands of
suspected radicals and their affiliations, and to conduct massive raids that resulted in the
arrests of more than 10,000 people. Setting a precedent for some of the actions taken
after the September 11, 2001, (or 9/11) terrorist attacks, the government’s effort to root
out alleged foreign and leftist subversives compromised the due process rights of many
and led to the deportation of hundreds of people.
World War I temporarily slowed immigration. In its aftermath, though, Congress passed the
1921 Quota Act, sometimes referred to as the “Emergency Quota Act” or the “Johnson
Act.” This law established an overall quota of 358,000 immigrants per year and set quotas
for particular nations of origin as well. The 1924 Immigration Act, or Johnson-Reid Act,
tightened these restrictions further and made the system permanent and preferential.

The new limits imposed in 1924 significantly favored immigrants from Northern and
Western Europe. Quotas for these countries were cut by only 29 percent, whereas quotas
for Southern and Eastern Europe were cut by 87 percent. Italy’s quota alone was slashed
from 42,057 to 3,845 persons.15 The 1924 act also prohibited all immigration from Asia,
including Japan for the first time. On the other hand, all Western Hemisphere countries
were excluded from the quota system because the U.S. government did not want to
estrange its neighbors, and because the U.S. economy depended on Mexican agricultural
labor.16
The 1924 act marked the peak of nativist influence on federal immigration policy. It
reflected postwar concerns about job competition, the fear that immigrants’ willingness to
work for lower wages would reduce living standards, and—especially for American
Protestants—the fear that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, most of them

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