Emergency Quota Act

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The Emergency Quota Act was a law that came into force in the United States in 1921 at the federal level to limit immigration , which had increased sharply after the First World War . The law, which was passed on May 19, 1921, and which was also known as the Johnson Quota Act, regulated how many people were allowed to enter each year from which countries of origin.

Nationality regulation

Aside from the Chinese Exclusion Act , which restricted the influx of Chinese in 1882, the Emergency Quota Act was the first US federal law to make entry into the United States dependent on the applicant's nationality. The law was superseded three years later by the Immigration Act of 1924 , the provisions of which were even stricter.

The act primarily disadvantaged immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who were pouring into the United States in large numbers at the time. By contrast, immigrants from the “old” immigration countries, the British Isles and Germany, were relatively favored. The background to the law was a widespread aversion in the American public to often poorly educated and poor migrants from southern and eastern Europe, who were considered to be barely able to integrate into the Protestant-northern European culture of the United States.

Details of the law

The law made the number of eligible immigrants of a given country of origin dependent on how many compatriots were living in the United States at the time of the 1910 census. This number was not allowed to exceed 3% of the population counted in the reference year per year.

Excepted from the regulation were, inter alia. Government officials, minor children of US citizens and residents of other countries in the Americas .

literature

  • John Philip Colletta: They came in ships: a guide to find your immigrant ancestor's arrival record , 2002, p. 118 ( Google Books )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ History: The main political and social challenges facing America: Why did immigration become such a major issue in American society? BBC, accessed May 19, 2016 .
  2. ↑ Kimberly K. Porter: Immigration Act of 1921. mmigrationtounitedstates.org, accessed May 19, 2016 .