PERSPECTIVE: Sadly, American nativism is nothing new

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However, this lax national policy changed dramatically during the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. Federal laws in 1875 and 1882 banned the immigration of “undesirables” — prostitutes, convicted criminals and people with contagious diseases. Various private organizations clamored for tighter controls, resulting in the Immigration Law of 1903 that precluded people considered to be “anarchists,” those opposed to the governmental structure of the United States.

Then, in 1907-1908, President Theodore Roosevelt, under political pressure from forces in California, forced Japan to accept the putative “Gentleman’s Agreement” that limited Japanese emigration into this country, and Congress followed with the Immigration Act of 1917 that imposed strict literacy requirements designed to curtail all Asian (read Japanese and Chinese) immigration. Thus, within about 40 years, the United States had changed from a country with virtually no restrictions on immigration to one that focused upon limiting those immigrants with different political and cultural beliefs.

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The greatest boom in immigration restriction occurred both during and after World War I. Hatred of Germany, combined with the fear of Bolshevism, gave rise to our most restrictive policies to date. Plus, this was the era of eugenics, the supposed scientific studies that indicated there were “superior” peoples in the world, mainly from northern and western Europe, and there were “inferior” people from everywhere else.

This combination of fear and racism led to the Quota Law of 1921, which limited the number of immigrants from any nationality to 3 percent of foreign-born persons of that nationality who had lived in the United States in 1910. This law limited the number of immigrants to 350,000 per year, mainly from northern and western Europe.

However, there was great political pressure to increase these restrictions, resulting in Congress adopting the Immigration Law of 1924, a statute that retained the quota system but changed the base year to 1890 instead of 1910. This change increased the number of Nordic immigrants, while dramatically reducing immigration from the “inferior” peoples of central and southern Europe. When the law took effect on July 1, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge declared, “America must be kept American,” thus legitimizing the various social, racial and economic arguments that underpinned immigration restrictions.

Did these limitations work? Oh, yes. In 1924, before the law took effect, just over 706,000 immigrants entered our country; one year later the number dropped to 294,000. And in 1934, 10 years after the law’s adoption, immigration was but 29,000, a drop of 95 percent in but a decade.

So, looking back, it is clear that current efforts to stem the flow of certain immigrants is not new; that there are plenty of examples from our history that demonstrate how fear and racism can drive national policies; that the notion of our country being the great “melting pot” is restricted to only “desirable” peoples from certain parts of our world.