100 Years Since the Immigration Laws were Enacted in the USA

5695 (1924)

By: Yaakov Rosenfeld

The immigration laws enacted in the United States a century ago indirectly caused the tragedy of millions of Jews from around Europe who, between the two wars, requested to immigrate to the United States, and were refused.

The United States, from its foundation, flourished and prospered thanks to being a country that accepted immigrants. Mass immigration made the United States a superpower. For hundreds of years, immigration to the United States was seen in the traditional American ideal as a way to give refuge to the persecuted, as well as a source of manpower needed to develop the empty territories of the west. That is until 5695 (1924), exactly one hundred years ago; that fateful year was the year in which the racist immigration laws of the USA were enacted, as a result of which millions of Jews from Eastern Europe were prevented from immigrating to the United States, and a large part of them perished in the Holocaust that broke out 15 years later.

The immigration laws of 5695 were partially repealed about twenty years after the end of World War II, but for the millions of victims who could have found refuge on the shores of the “Land of the Free,” it could no longer help. It was already too late.

The law stated that immigration to the USA would be allowed for a tiny number from each European country, a number equal to 2.5 percent of the population of that country in the United States. It seemed that the law was specially tailored to the dimensions of European Jewry, which according to the new law was almost hermetically blocked from the possibility of immigrating to the USA.

The website of the US Department of History says:

The quota was based on the number of people born outside the United States, or the number of immigrants within the United States. The new law traced the origins of the entire US population, including native-born citizens. The new quota calculations included a large number of people of British descent whose families had long lived in the United States for a long time. As a result, the percentage of visas available to people from the British Isles and Western Europe increased, but new immigration from other regions such as Southern and Eastern Europe was limited […]

The restrictive principles of the law could have caused strained relations with some European countries as well, but these potential problems did not appear for several reasons. The global depression of the 1930s, World War II, and stricter enforcement of US immigration policies helped reduce European immigration. When these crises passed, emergency resettlement orders in 1948 and 1950 helped the United States avoid conflict over its new immigration laws […]

In all its parts, the most fundamental purpose of the 1924 immigration laws was to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity. Congress amended the law in 1952.

“The ideal of American homogeneity,” which the American Ministry of History tells us about, entails, in brief, a very intense struggle waged by highly influential bodies in the United States, among which were not a only a few antisemitic bodies that did not hide the tone of hatred from their platform. Officially, the struggle was directed against the settlement of non-American populations in the extensive region, populations of different nationalities, many of whom did not even know the English language, but a very significant group of supporters of immigration quotas were supporters of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). In those years, it was an official organization, with political power and influence, consisting of branches that were established all over the United States (although membership in the organization was kept secret, and members hid their identities from the public by wearing white masks). Against the backdrop of this organization, the “Anti-Defamation League” was then established in the USA.

The law had serious consequences for the Jews: the immigration quotas reduced immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe to almost zero. The gates were closed to Jewish refugees who sought to escape from Europe in the late 1930s. Due to the quotas established by the laws, the Jews were not allowed to immigrate even in years when the quotas for immigrants from Northern and Western Europe were not fully utilized. From 1924 until the outbreak of World War II, immigration quotas prevented the entry of 6 million immigrants from Southern, Central and Eastern Europe. For example, in the year that ended at the end of June 1936, only 36,000 immigrants entered the United States. Millions of Jews from Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and Russia were banned altogether as a result of the new laws.