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Roman Catholic, Orthodox Christian, or Jewish, threatened American
values.17 Congressional support for the bill was nearly unanimous; only six senators cast
dissenting votes. The number of immigrants from Europe fell sharply, while immigration
from the New World grew from 8.6 percent of the total in 1910 to 45.1 percent in 1924,
with the clear majority of those coming from Canada and Mexico.18
During the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover stepped up immigration controls
administratively, and the number of migrants fell significantly. The first net outflow of
migrants occurred in 1934, when roughly 10,000 more people left the country than
entered, leaving large portions of most quotas unfilled.19 Even the number of Mexican
immigrants dropped markedly, as there were fewer low-level jobs available.
World War II brought strict policies governing “enemy aliens,” including the notorious
internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in “relocation centers.”
Nonetheless, immigration policy was liberalized during the 1940s in important ways, with
the repeal of Chinese exclusion laws in 1943 and the extension of naturalization and full-
quota immigration rights to other Asian groups.

The United States had long been a haven to political refugees and failed revolutionaries.
The Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950, however, introduced the first formally
articulated U.S. policies for admitting those fleeing persecution. Refugee policy has come
to represent one of the most generous aspects of immigration in America and, at the same
time, provides a clear example of the ties between immigration and foreign policy
considerations. By the 1940s, racist and economic motivations for restrictionism were
outweighed by concerns about the political loyalties of the American population and, for
some, a need for immigration policy to support foreign policy. Mindful of the country’s past
failure to give refuge to Jews fleeing Nazi oppression and a new obligation to welcome
those whom the U.S. government was encouraging to leave oppressive Communist
societies, U.S. leaders began a dramatic shift away from restrictionism in the 1950s that
would culminate in the abolition of the old national quotas in 1965. The 1953 Refugee
Relief Act (RRA) authorized the admission of 214,000 refugees from European and
especially Communist-dominated countries, outside of the national-origins quota system.
Other refugee legislation (for example, the Refugee Escapee Act of 1957, the Fair Share
Law of 1960, and subsequent legislation prompted by the Vietnam War in the 1970s and
1980s) admitted 29,000 Hungarians after the unsuccessful 1956 Hungarian revolution,
700,000 Cubans after leftist guerrillas toppled President Fulgencio Batista’s government
in 1959, and more than 400,000 Southeast Asians after the fall of South Vietnam and
Cambodia to Communist forces in 1975.20
The shift toward a more open immigration policy arguably began with President Harry
Truman’s 1952 veto of the McCarran-Walter Act, which prescribed a rigid and ethnically
biased national quota system that clearly contradicted the country’s international campaign
for freedom and against Communist oppression. Congress overrode Truman’s veto,
however, partly to ensure the enactment of the bill’s domestic security provisions.
McCarran-Walter authorized the deportation of any alien who engaged or had purpose to
engage in activities prejudicial to the public interest or subversive to national security.21
The most fundamental change occurred when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-
Celler Immigration Act in 1965, making family reunification—and not national origin—the
cornerstone of U.S. immigration policy. The 1965 law was the product of both foreign
policy concerns—competition with the Soviet Union and the decolonization of Asia and

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