Immigration Act of 1924 Timeline

The 1917 October Revolution in Russia became a reference point for American fears that foreign radicals might undermine American values or provoke an uprising in the United States.

Image source: October Revolution

The First Red Scare fueled fears of foreign radicals migrating to the United States and helped create the political climate in which restrictive immigration legislation gained support.

Image source: First Red Scare

Immigration declined for approximately a year from July 1919 to June 1920, then doubled during the following year, intensifying public concern about rapid demographic change.

Image source: Immigration to the United States

The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 established the basic national-origins quota system that the Immigration Act of 1924 made permanent and modified.

President Calvin Coolidge signed the immigration act into law on May 24, 1924. Although he declined to veto it because 1924 was an election year and compromise was unavailable, both houses had passed it by veto-overriding majorities.

The Immigration Act of 1924, also called the Johnson–Reed Act or National Origins Act, was enacted as Public Law 153. It barred immigration from Asia and imposed national quotas on immigrants from other regions.

The act has been cited as a major cause of the fourth wave of Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine from 1924 to 1928, as restrictive United States policy limited an important alternative destination.

Image source: Fourth Aliyah

Total recorded immigration fell from 357,803 between 1923 and 1924 to 164,667 between 1924 and 1925 after the act's revised quota formula took effect.

The act's restrictive provisions helped produce a situation in which more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Portuguese, Romanians, Spaniards, Chinese, and Japanese left the United States than arrived as immigrants.

In 1928, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler praised the act for banishing what he called “strangers of the blood,” illustrating how American racial immigration restrictions were viewed by foreign extremists.

Image source: Adolf Hitler

In 1937, Britain's Peel Commission noted that the act had spurred immigration levels to Mandatory Palestine that had not been anticipated when the 1922 Mandate for Palestine was drafted.

Image source: Peel Commission

Looking back in 1939, eugenicist Harry Laughlin, an expert adviser to the House Committee on Immigration during the legislative process, praised the act as a breakthrough in using scientific racism as a foundation for immigration policy.

Image source: Harry H. Laughlin

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 substantially revised the immigration regime defined by the 1924 act, eased some quotas, and more fully addressed discriminatory provisions affecting women.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 ultimately replaced the national-origins quota system that had governed United States immigration policy for nearly three decades.

A 2020 paper by economists Petra Moser and Shmuel San reported that the drastic reduction in immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe led to fewer new patents from both immigrants and native-born scientists working in affected fields.

A 2023 study in the American Economic Journal found that the act's restriction of migrant labor encouraged more capital-intensive farming and contributed to contraction in the immigrant-dependent mining industry, economically harming U.S.-born workers.