Immigration Act of 1924

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
President Calvin Coolidge signs the bill in front of the White House. John J. Pershing stands to the left of the President.

The Immigration Act of 1924 , also known as the National Origins Act , Asian Exclusion Act, or Johnson-Reed Act , was a federal act of the United States that reduced the number of immigrants allowed to immigrate to the United States from each country annually to 2% of the already population originating from this country is limited.

Content and meaning

The census of 1890 was used as the basis for the data . It banned Asian workers from immigrating, particularly Chinese immigrants who were banned from entering the United States since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as well as Chinese prostitutes, and heightened the effect of the Alien Land Acts of some western states that prevented Japanese Americans from legally owning land. It replaced the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. The law aimed to further restrict the immigration of Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans, who had immigrated in large numbers since the 1890s , and completely banned East Asians and Indians from immigrating. No borders were set for immigration from Latin America .

The law was passed after intensive lobbying with strong support from Congress . There were only 6 votes against in the Senate and a handful of opponents in the House of Representatives . Most decisively, the newly elected Brooklyn representative , Emanuel Celler , opposed the law. Over the next four decades, Celler, who belonged to the house for nearly half a century, made the repeal of the law the subject of a personal crusade.

Some of the law's most staunch supporters were influenced by Madison Grant and his 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race . Grant was a eugenicist and a racist. He tried to prove the superiority of the northern European races. But most of the advocates of the law wanted above all to maintain the ethnic status quo and avoid competition from foreign workers.

Relative proportions of immigrants from northern and western Europe (red) and from southern and eastern Europe (blue) in the decades before and after the immigration-limiting legislation

The law stopped 'unwanted' immigration with quotas. It included certain countries of origin from the Asia-Pacific triangle such as Japan , China , the Philippines, Laos, Siam (Thailand), Cambodia, Singapore (then a British colony), Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma (Myanmar), India, Ceylon ( Sri Lanka) and Malaysia. It excluded immigrants who were believed to be of an undesirable "race".

Consequences of the quotation

In the ten years after 1900, around 200,000 Italians immigrated annually . With the enforcement of the quotas of 1921, however, only 4,000 were allowed to come per year, and with the new regulation of 1924 “total immigration was limited to 164,667 people annually”. This quota included 51,227 places for German immigrants. In the wake of the global economic crisis of 1929, the total number of allowed immigration to 153,879 people has been reduced each year, but the German share halved (was increased while the number of Immigration willing from the UK from 34,007 to 65,721 people) to 25,957 people.

These quotas now set formed the framework for American immigration policy in the 1930s and 1940s, "because at no time did the US change its immigration policy between 1933 and 1945". With minor modifications, the quotas remained in effect until the Immigration Act of 1965 .

American immigration policy before and during World War II

In the early years of Nazi rule in Germany , the USA was not yet one of the primary escape destinations for German emigrants. They initially fled to neighboring European countries and hoped to see the end of Nazi rule there. It is therefore not surprising that until 1938 even the quota for German immigrants to the USA was never exhausted and even never exceeded the 50 percent mark. The fact that it did not become one after that - according to Krohn in no year between 1933 and 1945 - is less due to a lack of will to immigrate to the USA than to the increasing restrictions on the part of the American authorities.

The tightening of the quota rules

In 1938, with the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, the demand for American visas rose sharply, in 1938 to around 20,000 applications, and in 1939 to 32,000 people. Since this number also included 5,000 applications from the previous year, Krohn assumes that in 1939 the quota for German immigrants was in fact only used up to 85%. Nevertheless, the State Department immediately began not only to reject all proposals for a quota increase, "but [it] actually tightened the procedural provisions. The dramatic images of endless queues in front of the American consulates in Europe date from those years ”. The only refugee-friendly measure in 1939 was that people who had stayed in the USA on a visitor visa were allowed to extend their stay by six months at a time.

Krohn describes the "tightened procedural provisions" as follows:

“Further harassment of the administration included the introduction of a relatives clause, according to which applicants with relatives in Germany and the Soviet Union were subject to particularly strict controls, or the even, non-transferable distribution of quotas between the various consulates, whereby it was clear that the Visa demand in Zurich or Rome was disproportionate to that in Marseille. The demand for a second affidavit also made the situation more difficult. The affidavit givers themselves were subjected to a petty control of their financial situation to deter them. "

Krohn quotes American scientists who ruled in retrospect that the American visa policy of the time had become an instrument to prevent visas being issued.

Fritz Karsen is a good example of the absurd effects of this administrative harassment . He wanted to travel to the USA from Paris in early 1935. However, despite an affidavit from Max Horkheimer, he did not receive a visa for himself and his family . In 1938, when the Karsen family was now living in Bogotá , he applied for a visitor visa for the USA. However, as Karsen's daughter Sonja Petra reported , the American consul in Bogotá offered him a quota visa instead of a visitor's visa, which enabled the Karsen family to enter the USA permanently. Ecuador was not a heavily frequented transit country for German emigrants who wanted to immigrate to the USA.

Converting a visitor's visa into a permanent one was also problematic. The application had to be made outside of the USA, so it required departure from the USA, which in turn resulted in the expiry of the visitor visa. For many people, emigrating to Cuba in the hope of obtaining a visa entitling them to permanent re-entry was the risky route. Ernst Moritz Manasse and Ernst Abrahamsohn, for example, were successful .

The fact that the American immigration policy based on the “Immigration Act of 1924” was not only harassing but also directly life-threatening is shown by the fate of the St. Louis , whose more than 900 Jewish passengers refused to enter the USA after a failed attempt to enter Cuba and Forcing ship and passengers to return to Europe.

Quota visas and non-quota visas

The terms quota visa and quota visa have become commonplace for the mechanisms of American immigration policy described so far. The exception to these strict rules were the non-quota visas or non-quota visas. Its beneficiaries were mainly people from the field of science.

In 1940, after the defeat of France, the "Emergency Visitor's Program" was created on the initiative of President Franklin D. Roosevelt , which was supposed to take care of the entry of particularly vulnerable people outside the quotas. Aid organizations named over 3000 people for this, but interventions by the State Department prevented the program from being implemented in full. The State Department decreed that these visa applications should not be checked by the local consulates, but by the State Department in Washington. This not only led to long delays in processing the applications, but often also to harassing queries. Of around 1200 applications in the summer of 1940, only 238 had been decided by the end of the year, and the program only helped just under 1000 people to obtain entry permits.

Aid to refugees despite the Immigration Act and xenophobia

As much as the “Immigration Act of 1924” determined American immigration policy at a time when people in Europe needed help en masse, this should not hide the fact that “the USA, despite all administrative obstacles, compared to other countries does most Taking in refugees. In no other country had there been as many private initiatives to rescue the refugees as there after 1933, and in no other country have there been so many enthusiastic testimonies from immigrant refugees, especially from those who had previously made experiences with other countries of exile ”. The work of the Joint stands for this, as does that of the American Friends Service Committee or that of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee .

It should not be overlooked, however, that isolationism, xenophobia, latent anti-Semitism and fear of communists determined a widespread mood in the USA that was directed against all immigration. At the political level, she won by the "House Un-American Activities Committee" (HUAC), the House Un-American Activities Committee very early major influence and witnessed after 1945 and in the early 1950s by the activities of Joseph McCarthy its climax. Krohn quotes a HUAC chairman in this context:

"We must ignore the tears of sobbing sentimentalists and internationalists, and we must permanently close, lock and bar the gates of our country to new immigration waves and then throw the keys away."

This shut-the-door ideology did not stop at children either.

“When Senator Robert Wagner proposed a bill in 1939 to allow 20,000 Jewish children from Germany to live in the United States, the initiative was led by a coalition of anti-Jewish forces - including the Catholic charity and conservative women's organizations - who argued that no special There was an emergency to justify this measure - easily thrown out. "

- Walter Laqueur : Born in Germany. The Exodus of the Jewish Youth after 1933 , p. 46

The American presidential election campaign of 2016 shows how virulent such political views have remained to this day . Donald Trump , then a Republican presidential candidate, made immigration policy a key campaign issue. He not only announced that he would temporarily refuse entry to the USA for Muslims from certain countries, but also called for the construction of a wall on the US-American-Mexico border , which would also have to be paid for by Mexico . As President, he issued corresponding controversial decrees on January 27 and March 6, 2017 (-> Executive Order 13769 , Executive Order 13780 ).

literature

  • Roger Daniels: The Politics of Prejudice. The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion . University of California Press, Berkley CA et al. a. 1977, ISBN 0-520-03411-2 , ( University of California Publications in history 71), (covers the development of the anti-Japanese movement in California from the late 19th century to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924).
  • Michael Robert Lemay (Ed.): US Immigration and Naturalization Laws and Issues. A Documentary History . Greenwood Press, Westport CT et al. a. 1999, ISBN 0-313-30156-5 , ( Primary Documents in American History and contemporary Issues ).
  • Aristide R. Zolberg: A Nation by Design. Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America . Russell Sage Foundation et al. a., New York 2006, ISBN 0-674-02218-1 .
  • Claus-Dieter Krohn: United States of America . In: Claus-Dieter Krohn, Patrik von zur Mühlen, Gerhard Paul, Lutz Winkler (eds.): Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 . Special edition, 2nd, unchanged edition, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2008, ISBN 978-3-534-21999-5

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Leung, George. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. 1989. January 28, 2007. cis.umassd.edu ( Memento of the original from February 18, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.cis.umassd.edu
  2. ^ The Library of Congress. American memory. “An act supplementary to the acts in relation to immigration,” ch. 141, section 3, 18 Stat. 477 (1875).
  3. ↑ When Hate Hits . ( Memento of the original from August 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) Japanese American Citizens League Anti-Hate Program, January 29, 2003, 2007.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jacl.org
  4. ^ John B. Trevor Sr .: An Analysis of the American Immigration Act of 1924 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / ocp.hul.harvard.edu  
  5. ↑ Helen F. Eckerson: Immigration and National Origins . In: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , 367 (The New Immigration), 1966, pp. 4–14, here p. 6
  6. ↑ a b Robert A. Guisepi: Asian Americans . ( Memento of the original from May 27, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. World History International, January 29, 2007 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / history-world.org
  7. ↑ Claus-Dieter Krohn: United States of America , p. 449
  8. ^ Claus-Dieter Krohn: United States of America , p. 448
  9. ^ Claus-Dieter Krohn: United States of America , p. 448
  10. ↑ Claus-Dieter Krohn: United States of America , p. 450
  11. ^ Claus-Dieter Krohn: United States of America , p. 452
  12. ↑ Claus-Dieter Krohn: United States of America , p. 455
  13. ↑ Claus-Dieter Krohn: United States of America , p. 454
  14. ↑ Claus-Dieter Krohn: United States of America , p. 456
  15. ↑ From the context it is not clear whether the quote is from Paul Martin, the first HUAC chairman, or from McCarthy. Walter Laqueur names Martin Dies, HUAC chairman, as the author. (Walter Laqueur: Born in Germany. The Exodus of Jewish Youth after 1933 , Propylaea, Berlin and Munich 2000, ISBN 3-549-07122-1 , p. 45)
  16. ↑ Claus-Dieter Krohn: United States of America , p. 453. Basically, the quote ties in seamlessly with the “shut-the-door speech” by Senator Smith from 1924 (see web link).
  17. ^ Walter Laqueur: Born in Germany. The Exodus of Jewish Youth after 1933 , Propylaea, Berlin and Munich 2000, ISBN 3-549-07122-1 . For more information on the controversy surrounding the so-called Wagner – Rogers Bill, see: Jewish Virtual Library: Wagner – Rogers Bill , or the short article in the English WIKIPEDIA: Wagner – Rogers Bill .
  18. ↑ Trump wants Mexico to pay for the border wall . Mirror online