But… we were already here, lucky for me.
I learned about the Johnson-Reed law for the first time in a sociology class at the U. of Michigan, and it helped to explain why my Mom had always tended to downplay being Yugoslavian. She was six when the law was instituted to keep people like her out of the country.
We kids thought our Yugoslavian ancestry was the coolest thing! Dad’s family was from England, but everybody’s was from England, weren’t they? We had one way to be unique! Which goes to show how much had changed in our environment since 1924, when Slavs (as Eastern Europeans) along with Southern Europeans, were “quota’d-out” from immigrating to the US because they interfered with our “ethnic homogeneity.” “Those people” looked different, they didn’t speak the language, they came with no skills, no money...
“America,” wrote James J. Davis, the secretary of labor, in the New York Times in February of 1924, should not be “a conglomeration of racial groups, each advocating a different set of ideas and ideals according to their bringing up, but a homogeneous race.” [Post]
Previous laws had tried literacy tests to keep the undesirables out, but these were not as reliable as hoped. Instead, a quota system was set up based on the percentages of immigrants already in the US. In other words, if X% of the country’s current crop of foreign-born people were from Country X, then Country X would get X% of the annual visas (which by then totaled in the 160,000/year range).
But in 1924 a clever new tweak was instituted to the establishment of national immigration quotas:
The quota had been based on the number of people born outside of the United States, or the number of immigrants in the United States. The new law traced the origins of the whole of the U.S. population, including natural-born citizens. The new quota calculations included large numbers of people of British descent whose families had long resided in the United States. As a result, the percentage of visas available to individuals from the British Isles and Western Europe increased, but newer immigration from other areas like Southern and Eastern Europe was limited. [DoS] [emphasis added]
In another devilish alteration, the new quotas were not based on the current population percentages; instead the population structure back in 1890 was used to establish how many of each country’s nationals would be allowed into the US each year. Gee — I wonder why... The actual metric was that 2% of the foreign country’s then-US-population could be admitted each year. So instead of 3% of the recent population percentage, now 2% of the much-more-homogeneous 1890 population from each country would be admitted. [Another critical focus of the 1924 law based permission to immigrate on “eligibility for citizenship”; this suddenly excluded Japanese nationals from immigrating, though they had been accepted previously. This is a simplification of another long and important story.]
My Slavic mother told me late in her life that the only reason my English Dad was “allowed to” marry her was that her father had become such a pillar of the community. He was the postmaster, and, after years of hard work, had bought and run (with his wife, and [eventually] nine children) the community’s general store (now in the National Register of Historic Places - but those shingles are totally new). Now, Dad’s family was from Cornwall, and we found in the census records that his US immigrant grandfather had been a “mine boy” at the age of nine. Not exactly royalty. But they were English, and, in keeping with the understanding of the time, were therefore above those lesser immigrants from south or east Europe.
When I told my students about what would have been considered my parents’ “mixed marriage” back in the day, they were mystified. That fact gives me some hope that what are perceived as divisions today may, in a few more decades, be met by a resounding “Huh?” by the future population. Alas, not holding my breath.
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Citations from Department of State website: history.state.gov/…
Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/…
Washington Post (extended article on immigration — this is a share link) : wapo.st/...