So imagine, if you will, a single piece of paperwork.
Just one document. Yeah, one document that simultaneously
invents the US Border Patrol, severely alters
the demographic makeup of the entire United States.
Oh, and effectively traps millions of European
refugees a decade later. Right. And incredibly,
it inadvertently helps trigger the rise of Japanese
militarism that led directly to the attack on
Pearl Harbor. I mean, it sounds like the plot
of an alternate history novel. It really does.
But it is entirely strictly historically accurate.
Exactly. So today we are opening the files on
a law passed in 1924. Welcome to today's Deep
Dive. Glad to be here for this one. We are going
to unpack the Immigration Act of 1924, which
is also known as the Johnson -Reed Act or the
National Origins Act. Right. If you are listening
to this to try and understand how modern borders
are drawn, I mean, you have to look at this specific
moment. You really do. We're going to trace the
intense social and political fears of the 1920s,
examine the genuinely shocking role that literal
eugenics played in drafting U .S. policy, and
we're going to reveal the mathematical sleight
of hand legislators used with census data to
engineer the ethnic makeup of the country. Yeah,
the math part is wild. But before we step back
into the 1920s, I do need to address you, the
listener, directly for a second. Go ahead. Because
this deep dive involves highly charged historical
content, including white supremacy, the Ku Klux
Klan, eugenics, and some really severe political
rhetoric spanning the ideological spectrum. We
want to make it absolutely clear to you that
we are not taking any political sides. Right.
Definitely not. Nor are we endorsing the viewpoints,
racial theories, or historical prejudices found
in this original source material. Our job today
is to impartially report on the contents of these
documents to help you understand the ideas and
motivations that drove this era of history. Thank
you. Having that framework is crucial, so let's
set the stage. Okay, paint the picture. It's
May 1924. President Calvin Coolidge is sitting
at his desk. He's about to sign a bill that caps
global immigration, specifically from outside
the Western Hemisphere, at just 165 ,000 people
a year. Which is a tiny number. It is. To put
that in perspective, that is an astonishing 80
% reduction from the pre -World War I average.
80%. Wow. Yeah. But here's what I don't get.
If you look at the 1920s, we always think of
the roaring 20s, right? Right. Flappers, jazz,
Gatsby. Exactly. The economy is booming, skyscrapers
are going up, assembly lines are churning out
Model T Fords. So why would an industrializing
capitalist powerhouse suddenly want to choke
off its supply of labor? It seems counter -intuitive.
It defies basic economic logic. I mean, why the
drastic reduction right at that moment? Well,
that is the paradox of the 1920s. We remember
the flappers and the jazz. But to understand
the 1924 Act, you really have to look at the
immediate aftermath of World War I. OK, before
the roaring really started. Exactly. The climate
of fear in America was suffocating. And it was
driven by two distinct highly volatile engines.
You had economic anxiety and you had ideological
paranoia. Let's look at the economics first.
OK. So when the war ended in 1918, millions of
American soldiers returned home from the trenches
and the wartime industrial boom, you know, the
factories churning out munitions and uniforms.
It just suddenly halted. Right. The war machine
turns off overnight. Exactly. The government
canceled massive manufacturing contracts. And
this triggered a severe, albeit brief, post -war
recession between roughly 1920 and 1921. So people
are out of work. Unemployment spiked. So you
have a terrified domestic workforce. The immediate
fear was that a massive unrestricted influx of
desperate immigrants from a war -torn Europe
would flood the labor market. Which would skyrocket
unemployment even further. Right. And completely
crater American wages. OK. So the American worker
is looking at the factory gates and thinking,
If a million people show up from overseas willing
to work for pennies, I can't feed my family.
That's the mindset. Yeah. That explains the economic
protectionism. But you mentioned ideological
paranoia. We are talking about the era immediately
following the 1917 October Revolution in Russia.
Yes. How did the Bolsheviks overthrowing the
czar translate into immigration policy in Washington?
It translated into what we now call the first
Red Scare. which peaked between 1919 and 1921.
Okay. And this wasn't just like a vague unease
about communism. It was a visceral hysterical
panic. People were actually freaking out. Completely.
The American public was watching the Russian
empire collapse into a violent communist revolution.
And there was a widespread belief that foreign
radicals, specifically anarchists, socialists,
and communists, were migrating to the United
States with the express purpose of undermining
American values. And staging a violent uprising.
Exactly. And it wasn't just imaginary paranoia,
right? I mean, the fear was definitely blown
out of proportion, but there were actual events
fueling it. Oh, absolutely. You had the mail
bombings in 1919, where anarchists sent dynamite
to prominent politics. politicians and business
leaders? Precisely. You had bombs going off in
major cities. You had massive violent labor strikes,
like the Seattle General strike and the Boston
police strike. So it felt like chaos. To the
average American reading the newspaper in 1920,
it genuinely felt like the fabric of society
was unraveling. And the government's response
was the Palmer raids. Right. Led by Attorney
General A. Mitchell Palmer. Yeah. Where thousands
of suspected radical immigrants were rounded
up and deported without due process, the narrative
became deeply ingrained. Foreign equals radical,
and radical equals a threat to the nation. OK.
So on the East Coast, you have people looking
across the Atlantic Ocean at a shattered Europe.
They see poverty, unemployment, and communist
revolution, and they are terrified it is all
going to spill onto American shores. That's the
East Coast view, yeah. But if we pivot and look
at the West Coast, the anxiety has a completely
different flavor. They aren't looking at Europe.
They're looking at Asia. A totally different
demographic reality. And from the source documents
we have, the rhetoric coming out of California
isn't just about jobs or anarchism. It's incredibly
militarized. Yes. The West Coast anxiety was
heavily racialized under the banner of what was
historically termed the Yellow Peril. All right.
You have to remember the historical context here.
The Chinese Exclusion Act. of 1882 had already
severely choked off Chinese immigration decades
earlier. So the Chinese population wasn't the
primary focus anymore. Exactly. But by the 1920s,
you had a new demographic reality. Japanese,
Korean and Filipino laborers who were initially
brought in to replace the excluded Chinese workers
in agriculture and railroad construction were
now putting down deep roots in the western United
States. They weren't just passing through. No,
they were buying land. starting businesses and
having children. And this permanence sparked
a massive, highly organized exclusionary movement
among white citizens in places like California.
I was looking through our sources at a quote
from a man named Valentine S. McClatchy. Oh,
he's a key figure here. Yeah, he was the publisher
of the Sacramento Bee, the founder of the McClatchy
Company and a major, highly influential leader
in this anti -Japanese movement. Very influential.
He went to Congress to argue against these Asian
immigrants, and his specific words were, and
this is a quote, They come here specifically
and professedly for the purpose of colonizing
and establishing here permanently the proud Yamato
race. That specific vocabulary is not accidental
at all. Exactly. That's what jumped out at me.
If you're a farmer in California and another
farmer moves in next door, you might view them
as a competitor. Sure. But McClatchy isn't calling
them competitors. He's using words like colonizing.
Right. He is framing these immigrants who are
just individuals trying to grow strawberries
or run a shop as a literal vanguard, an invading
military force setting up a colony for a foreign
empire. It's pure threat escalation. So how does
that hyper -militarized rhetoric moved from a
newspaper publisher's mouth into the actual drafting
of a federal bill. It moves very smoothly when
the politicians drafting the bill rely on that
rhetoric to secure votes. Ah, of course, politics.
That narrative of a silent demographic invasion
successfully catalyzed politicians to write an
outright ban into the 1924 Act. The legislation
included a deeply insidious clause. What did
it say? It mandated that no alien ineligible
to become a citizen could be admitted to the
U .S. as an immigrant. Wait, explain that mechanism.
How does ineligible for citizenship translate
to an immigration ban? It ties back to existing
naturalization laws. Under the laws of the time,
dating back to the late 18th and 19th centuries,
naturalized citizenship was generally restricted
to free white persons and persons of African
nativity or descent. Okay, so Asians were excluded
from that. Therefore, Asian immigrants were already
legally categorized as aliens ineligible to citizenship.
I see. By writing that exact phrase into the
1924 immigration bill, Congress created a perfectly
closed loop. So they didn't even have to name
them. While the act didn't explicitly name Japanese
or Korean individuals, that was exactly who it
was aimed at. In effect, the act completely banned
all immigrants from Asia. All of them. The only
exception was the Philippines. And that was strictly
because the Philippines was a U .S. territory
at the time, meaning its citizens were technically
U .S. nationals who could travel to the mainland.
OK, so we have a foundation of raw fear, economic
anxiety about jobs, ideological panic about communism
and blatant militarized xenophobia on the West
Coast. A very toxic mix. But if you look at human
history. Fear of the other is tragically common.
I mean, politicians have been standing on soap
boxes shouting about foreign threats since the
Roman Empire. Sure. What makes the 1924 act so
unique and honestly so deeply unsettling to read
about today is how these fears were legitimized.
Yes. They didn't just use angry rhetoric. They
wrapped their prejudice in a lab coat. That's
a great way to put it. If you want to understand
how this bill passed, you have to look at the
pseudoscience of exclusion. This is perhaps the
most crucial and sobering element of the entire
deep dive. The two main architects of the act
were U .S. Representative Albert Johnson of Washington
state and Senator David Reid of Pennsylvania.
Johnson and Reid. When they spoke on the floor
of Congress, they didn't just speak in terms
of union wages or national security. They spoke
in biological genetic terms. They explicitly
stated that they conceived the act as a necessary
bulwark against a stream of alien blood. A stream
of alien blood. Again, look at the language.
That is not the vocabulary of trade tariffs or
border security. Got it all. That is the vocabulary
of a biology textbook being weaponized. Precisely.
Senator Reid argued to the Senate that earlier
legislation had focused too much on the newcomers
and disregarded the people who were already born
in America. OK. He stated he wanted to keep American
stock and he explicitly meant genetic stock.
up to the highest standard. Meaning white northern
Europeans. He argued that immigrants from southern
and eastern Europe who were predominantly Catholic
and Jewish were arriving sick, starving, and
were biologically incapable of contributing to
the economy or assimilating into American culture.
And to justify this biologically, they turned
to eugenics. Now, if you are listening to this,
you might have heard the term eugenics in relation
to some of the darkest chapters of the 20th century.
But let's define what it actually meant in the
context of 1920s America. Eugenics was a completely
discredited pseudoscience that claimed you could
and should improve the human race by selectively
breeding out undesirable traits and promoting
desirable ones. That's the core of it. But the
key here is that in 1924, this wasn't considered
some fringe dark web conspiracy theory. Not at
all. That is a vital distinction to make. In
the 1920s, eugenics was treated as a cutting
edge, legitimate scientific discipline. It was
mainstream. Very mainstream. It was taught in
major Ivy League. universities. It was funded
by prominent philanthropic organizations. It
was discussed in polite society. That is just
so hard to wrap your head around today. The proponents
of eugenics argued that traits like poverty,
criminality, and what they called feeble -mindedness
were strictly hereditary. And they tied these
supposedly hereditary traits directly to specific
races and ethnicities. So they basically created
a biological hierarchy of human value. Exactly.
So in 1924, lawmakers were explicitly using this
mainstream pseudoscience to restrict certain
ethnicities, claiming they were scientifically
obligated to prevent the spread of genetic inferiority
in American society. But the integration of eugenics
into the government goes far beyond a few senators
quoting a textbook. The institutionalization
of this is staggering. It really is. The United
States Congress literally had a eugenics subcommittee.
Yes. The House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization
created a specialized eugenics subcommittee.
Unbelievable. And the man they appointed as the
expert advisor to this committee during the entire
legislative process was Harry Laughlin. Okay,
explain who Harry Laughlin was because his role
here is the lynchpin. Harry Laughlin was one
of the most prominent eugenicists in the United
States. He was the superintendent of the Eugenics
Record Office in New York. So this is his whole
life's work. His entire career was dedicated
to compiling data. which we now know was deeply
flawed and heavily biased, to prove that immigrants
from Southern and Eastern Europe had overwhelmingly
higher rates of insanity, criminality, and intellectual
disability compared to older Northern European
immigrant populations. And he brings this to
Congress. He presented this data to Congress
as undeniable, objective scientific fact. He
testified repeatedly, presenting charts and graphs,
essentially arguing that the American gene pool
was being polluted. And Congress just swallowed
this whole thing. They didn't just swallow it.
They enthusiastically built a legal apparatus
around it. Jeez. After the bill passed, Laughlin
didn't just celebrate a political victory. He
praised the law specifically as a political breakthrough
in the adoption of scientific racism as a theoretical
foundation for immigration policy. Wait, he actually
called it scientific racism. He literally used
the phrase scientific racism as a point of pride.
That phrase stops you in your tracks. Scientific
racism. If you're listening to this and wondering
how a democratic government justifies something
like that out loud, it really comes down to how
the law essentially redefined what it meant to
be an American. Yes. I was reading the analysis
in our sources by historian Maingai, and she
makes a brilliant point about what the pseudoscience
actually accomplished legally. Maingai's analysis
is essential here. She points out that the 1924
law operated on two distinct levels. OK. On the
surface, the practical level. It differentiated
Europeans according to nationality ranking them
in a hierarchy of desirability. British and German
immigrants were at the top. Italians and Eastern
European Jews were at the bottom. But on a deeper,
more profound level, the law effectively constructed
a white American race. Let's unpack that. What
does it mean to legally construct a race? Before
this period, people didn't necessarily view all
Europeans as one cohesive white race. Oh, right.
Because of religious and ethnic tensions. Exactly.
A wealthy Anglo -Saxon Protestant in Boston did
not view a poor Catholic Sicilian immigrant as
being of the same race. They were seen as distinct
groups. But Nega argues that the 1924 Act, by
grouping all these European nationalities into
a quota system that excluded Asians and heavily
restricted others, legally synthesized a new
identity. A shared category. It created a legal
framework where persons of European descent,
despite their different nationalities, shared
a common whiteness that was legally, socially,
and politically distinct from those deemed not
white. Wow. So the law didn't just reflect the
racial categories of the time. It actively manufactured
them and codified them into the administrative
state. Yes. So they essentially used the law
to define what whiteness was and then used eugenics
to justify protecting that definition. That's
the core machinery of the act. We have now established
the why. We know the fear, the economic panic,
and the pseudoscience that drove the motivation.
Right. But motivation isn't legislation. You
can't just write a federal law that says, uh,
no Italians or Eastern European Jews allowed.
No, that would cause an international crisis.
Exactly. That violates a dozen international
treaties. It's a diplomatic nightmare and it's
too legally blunt. So they didn't use names.
They used math. They weaponized the United States
census. This brings us to the actual mechanics
of the law. How do you legally engineer a demographic
shift without explicitly stating it? This is
where the bureaucratic engineering comes in.
And to understand the trick they pulled in 1924,
we actually have to look three years earlier
to 1921. Okay, the 1921 Emergency Quota Act,
how did that work? In 1921, Congress passed a
stopgap measure. It established the first numerical
limits on European immigration. The formula was...
relatively straightforward. It limited annual
immigration from any given country to three percent
of the number of foreign born persons of that
specific nationality who were residing in the
U .S. at the time of the 1910 census. Let's do
the math out loud so we can see how this works.
Sure. Let's say we look at the 1910 census and
it shows there are exactly one hundred thousand
people born in country X currently living in
the United States. Under the 1921 law, country
X gets an annual immigration quota of three percent
of that number. So 3 ,000 people from CountryX
can immigrate this year. Simple enough. Exactly.
It tied future immigration directly to the existing
demographic footprint. Makes sense on paper.
But for architects like Albert Johnson and the
eugenics advocates like Harry Laughlin, the 1921
law was fundamentally flawed. Why? It wasn't
restrictive enough overall. And more importantly,
it didn't target the right people in their eyes.
I don't get it. The 1910 census was just 10 years
prior. Because by 1910, the massive wave of immigration
from Southern and Eastern Europe had already
been happening for two decades. Oh, I see. There
were already millions of Italians, Poles, and
Eastern European Jews living in the U .S. by
1910. Therefore, 3 % of a very large number still
resulted in tens of thousands of those specific
immigrants arriving every year. So the quotas
were too high for the groups they hated. The
eugenicists looked at those numbers and said,
this isn't working. We were still letting in
too much alien blood. So they go back to the
drawing board for the 1924 Act. The first thing
they do is turn the dial down on the percentage.
They drop the quota from 3 % to 2%. Yes. That
tightens the valve a bit. But that is not the
smoking gun of this legislation. The real mathematical
sleight of hand was changing the baseline year.
Yes. The 1924 Act completely abandoned the 1910
census. Keep in mind. They are drafting this
law in 1924. They have a perfectly fresh, highly
accurate census from 1920 sitting right in front
of them. The most recent data available. But
Congress legally mandated that the new 2 % quotas
must be calculated using the data from the 1890
census. I want you to really think about how
absurd this is. It is 1924. You have 1920 data,
but you pass a federal law insisting that your
government must ignore reality and base its formulas
on data that is done four years old. It's completely
ahistorical. That is like a modern tech company
trying to understand smartphone usage today,
but insisting their algorithms can only use data
from the year 2004 before the iPhone even existed.
That's a great analogy. Why deliberately look
backwards? What was so magical about the year
1890? It was a mathematically sinister brilliance.
Madison Grant, the chair of the eugenics subcommittee,
and Harry Laughlin heavily pushed for the 1890
census for one very specific demographic reason.
Which was? 1890 was the exact moment before the
massive demographic shift in American immigration
occurred. If you look at American immigration
prior to 1890, the vast majority of immigrants
came from Northern and Western Europe, places
like Great Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia.
The people the eugenicists liked. Exactly. The
massive wave of Italian Catholics and Eastern
European Jews didn't truly explode until the
late 1890s and the early 1900s. So the trap clicks
into place. If you use the 1910 or 1920 census,
you have to acknowledge the millions of Italians
and Eastern Europeans already living in America.
Yes. Which means their 2 % quota would be relatively
high. But if you rewind the clock and point your
legal time machine at 1890, you artificially
shrink their baseline population to almost zero.
That is so deeply manipulative. By legally pretending
it is 1890, the act magically allocated 85 percent
of the total global immigration quota to northern
and western Europe. Eighty five percent. It systematically
punished southern and eastern Europe without
ever having to write the words Italian or Jewish
into the restrictive clauses. It was demographic
engineering disguised as arithmetic. The numbers
in our sources just lay bare how devastating
this math was. Let's look at Italy. The Italian
numbers are shocking. From 1901 to 1914, an average
of 210 ,000 Italians immigrated to the United
States every single year. They were building
the infrastructure of American cities. Under
the new 1924 quota using the 1890 census time
machine, that number plummeted from 210 ,000
a year down to just 4 ,000 per year. 4 ,000.
A total collapse. Meanwhile, Germany, which was
a favored northern European nation with a massive
population already in the U .S. in 1890, was
granted an annual quota of over 55 ,000. Great
Britain got over 34 ,000. The math functioned
exactly as the eugenicists designed it to. But
it is important to note that this 1890 census
trick was originally written as a temporary measure.
Yet the law stated that the 1890 baseline would
only be used until 1929. In 1929, a new permanent
quota system would be implemented, and this one
would be based on the more recent 1920 census.
Wait, if they switched to the 1920 census in
1929, doesn't that undo the whole trick? The
Italians and Eastern Europeans are in the 1920
census? You would think so, but the architects
of the law anticipated that. They found a way
to manipulate the 1929 update as well. The 1929
system wasn't a flat 2 % of foreign -born residents.
It was based on the national origins of the total
U .S. population in 1920. Okay, total population.
They would calculate the ethnic makeup of the
entire country and distribute the 150 ,000 total
quota slots proportionally. But, to ensure the
quotas remained overwhelmingly weighted toward
white Northern European nations, the law purposefully
mandated that the baseline population calculation
would not include certain groups. Who did they
exclude from the math? The law explicitly stated
that the demographic baseline would not include
Black Americans, mulattoes, or Asians. You have
got to be kidding me. They legally erased millions
of minority citizens from the demographic reality
of the United States. So they just pretended
they didn't exist. If they had included Black
Americans in the baseline, the proportion of
white Americans would have been lower, thereby
lowering the quotas for European nations. By
erasing non -white citizens from the equation,
they artificially inflated the percentage of
the population that was of European descent,
ensuring the quotas favored the demographics
they desired. It is truly staggering when you
see the mechanics of it laid out on the table
like that. It's not an accident. It is precision
engineering. Absolutely. So the trap is set.
They have the pseudoscience of eugenics providing
the biological justification, and they have the
weaponized time machine census math providing
the legal mechanism. Right. But to get a bill
passed into law, you need votes. You need massive
political coalitions. Who exactly pushed this
over the finish line? Because when you look at
the political alignments of 1924, or you find
some very, very strange bedfellows. You certainly
do. When you look at the coalition that supported
the Johnson -Reed Act, some of it is entirely
expected, and some of it is deeply paradoxical.
Let's start with the expected. On one hand, you
had rabidly nativist and xenophotic groups. The
Ku Klux Klan, which had experienced a massive
resurgence in the 1920s and wielded significant
political power in both the South and the Midwest,
fiercely supported the bill. Well, obvious. They
marched in Washington to support it. That aligns
perfectly with the racial and religious rhetoric
we've discussed. The Klan was anti -black, anti
-Catholic. and anti -Semitic. Right. The Klan
supporting a eugenics -based immigration ban
tracks with everything we know about history.
But here is the part that genuinely shocked me
when I was reviewing the sources. The labor unions.
Yes. Alongside the Ku Klux Klan, you had massive
organized support from the American Federation
of Labor, the AFL. Yes. The most powerful labor
union in the country. And the founder and president
of the AFL was Samuel Gompers. Now, if you know
anything about labor history, you know Gompers.
But look at his biography. It's quite the contradiction.
Samuel Gompers was himself a Jewish immigrant
who came to the U .S. from Britain. He experienced
the immigrant struggle firsthand. He did. Yet.
He throws the full immense political weight of
the AFL behind this act, an act that he knows
is explicitly designed by eugenicists to severely
restrict Jewish immigration. Why? If you are
sitting there wondering why a Jewish immigrant
would lobby for a bill supported by the KKK that
targets Jewish refugees, it feels inexplicable.
It feels inexplicable until you look at it strictly
through the lens of labor economics. Right. For
Gompers, economic protectionism ultimately overrode
any sense of ethnic solidarity. Wow. We have
to understand the union's position. The AFL's
entire purpose was to improve wages, shorten
working hours, and secure better working conditions
for its members. Right. Gompers fundamentally
believed that a constant unrestricted influx
of desperate immigrants, people who were fleeing
poverty and were willing to work for practically
nothing, would perpetually flood the labor market.
It's the law of supply and demand. If the factory
owner has a thousand men outside the gate willing
to work for a dollar a day, the union inside
the factory loses all its leverage to demand
two dollars a day. Exactly. Gompers viewed mass
immigration as a weapon used by industrial capitalists
to break strikes and depress wages. So to him,
closing the border was pro -worker. He believed
that the only way to build a strong middle -class
labor force in America was to artificially restrict
the supply of labor. If labor is scarce, labor
is valuable. Interesting. For Gompers, closing
the border was the ultimate union protection
mechanism. He was willing to close the door on
people fleeing the exact same poverty he fled
because he believed it was the only way to protect
the American worker who was already here. It
is a phenomenal insight into how resources or
the perceived scarcity of resources can force
alliances between groups that otherwise despise
each other. Absolutely. The Klan wants them out
for biological reasons. The unions want them
out for economic reasons. They meet in the middle
and pass the bill. But there was opposition,
right? It wasn't unanimous. No, it wasn't. Who
is standing up against this tidal wave? There
was opposition, but they were severely outnumbered
and swimming against the political current. In
the House of Representatives, one of the most
vocal and vigorous opponents was a freshman congressman
from Brooklyn named Emanuel Seller. Emanuel Seller.
He was a Jewish -American, and he didn't mince
words. He loudly called out the act's blatant
mathematical discrimination against Central,
Eastern, and Southern Europe. He pointed out
the absurdity of the eugenics arguments. And
he actually spent the next 40 years of his life
fighting this exact law, right? He eventually
helps tear it down in 1965. Yes. The Hart -Celler
Act of 1965, which finally abolished the national
origins quota system, bears his name. That's
a legacy right there. But in 1924, he was a lonely
voice. He also had Secretary of State Charles
Evans Hughes opposing the act, primarily because
he saw the diplomatic disaster it was going to
cause, calling the exclusion clauses quite...
unnecessary. And in the Senate. In the Senate,
progressive voices like Wisconsin Senator Robert
M. LaFollette argued passionately that the bill
was fundamentally inhumane and would inflict
untold misery on millions of would -be immigrants.
But the most dramatic climax of this entire legislative
battle, the moment where it all almost fell apart,
didn't come from a congressman in Washington.
No, it came from across the Pacific. Right. We
talked earlier about the West Coast paranoia
regarding the Yellow Peril and the specific clause
banning Asians. Well, the Japanese government
was absolutely furious about this. They were.
And to understand why, you have to look at the
geopolitical dynamic. OK. By 1924... Japan had
defeated Russia in the Russo -Japanese War. They
had been an allied power in World War I, and
they viewed themselves rightfully as a rapidly
modernizing top -tier global power. They were
a major player. They had maintained a relatively
cordial economic and political relationship with
the U .S., governed by a gentleman's agreement,
where Japan voluntarily restricted its own emigration
to ease tensions. So Japan is saying, we are
already playing ball. We are already restricting
our citizens to help you out. Exactly. And then
Congress writes a law legally defining Japanese
people as racially ineligible to immigrate. Which
is just a slap in the face. To the Japanese government,
this felt like a massive public betrayal, a profound
national insult. The Japanese foreign minister
Matsui Kishiro instructed his ambassador in Washington,
Masanohanihara, to write a formal, highly diplomatic,
but incredibly stern letter of protest to Secretary
of State Hughes. And the wording of this letter
is critical to how the vote actually goes down.
Let's look at what Hanihara actually wrote. Hanihara
wrote that the manifest object of the law was
to single out Japanese people as a nation, stigmatizing
them as unworthy and undesirable in the eyes
of the American people. Which is exactly what
the law was doing. He pointed out the sheer mathematical
absurdity of the insult. Based on the 2 % quota
formula, if Japan had just been given a normal
quota like a European country, it would have
amounted to a mere 146 Japanese immigrants a
year. Wait, 146 people? Yes, the formula would
have yielded exactly 146 people. That is nothing.
Anahar is basically saying you are causing a
massive international incident and insulting
a global empire just to stop 146 people from
moving to California. Unbelievable. And then
he ended the letter with a standard diplomatic
warning. He wrote that he felt compelled to warn
of the grave consequences that this enactment
would inevitably bring upon the otherwise happy
and mutually advantageous relations between the
two countries. OK, so if you read that in the
context of international diplomacy, grave consequences
means we are going to raise tariffs. We are going
to cancel trade deals. Our relationship is going
to sour. Right. It's economic fallout. It's a
warning about diplomatic fallout. But how does
the U .S. Senate react when they read those two
words? They seize upon it instantly. Hardliners
in the Senate, led by Henry Cavett Lodge, get
their hands on this letter. Oh, boy. And instead
of reading it as a diplomatic protest, they deliberately
spin the phrase grave consequences as a literal
physical military threat against the United States.
They treat it like a declaration of war. Exactly.
Lodge goes to the Senate floor and essentially
says, the Japanese empire is threatening us with
grave consequences if we pass our own domestic
law. We cannot let a foreign nation dictate American
policy through threats of violence. Wow, what
a spin. It was a completely manufactured spin,
but it was incredibly effective. It whipped up
nationalist anger. Any senator who might have
been on the fence or who might have voted against
the bill to preserve trade relations was suddenly
painted into a corner. Right. If you voted against
the bill now, you looked like you were bowing
to a foreign threat. It's a brilliant if utterly
cynical parliamentary maneuver. It forces the
vote through. But what about the president? Calvin
Coolidge is a pro -business Republican. He knows
this is going to hurt trade. Why doesn't he veto
it? Election year politics. Oh, always. 1924
was a presidential election year. Coolidge knew
that the bill had massive populist support from
the unions to the nativists to the general public
whipped up by the Red Scare. vetoing the bill
would have been political suicide. He couldn't
risk it. And even if he had stood on principle
and vetoed it, the margins in Congress were overwhelmingly
against him. The Senate passed the final version
of the bill with a vote of 69 to 9. The House
passed it three on eight to 58. So it was veto
proof anyway? It was veto proof. Two thirds majority
in both houses. The die was cast. So on May 24,
1924, Coolidge signs the bill. We've spent a
lot of time in the quiet rooms of Washington
looking at the paperwork, the census math, the
eugenics hearings, the parliamentary spin. The
bureaucratic side. Right. But as we know, legislation
doesn't stay on paper. A law is just ink until
a government enforces it. If you have just banned
millions of people from entering the country,
how do you actually stop them at a physical border
that up until now was essentially open. That's
the million dollar question. Let's transition
to the immediate physical realities on the ground
because the mechanics of the border changed almost
overnight. They absolutely did. The 1924 Act
invented two massive logistical systems that
fundamentally created the modern border apparatus
we still live with today. What's the first one?
First, it literally authorized the creation of
the United States Border Patrol. It's wild to
think the border patrol didn't exist before 1924.
If someone wanted to walk across the border from
Mexico or Canada in 1915, who stopped them? Nobody,
really. There were mounted watchmen who looked
for Chinese immigrants trying to smuggle themselves
in after the 1882 Exclusion Act and customs agents
looking for untaxed goods. But there was no systemic
patrol of the physical border. It was just a
line on a map. But the 1924 act changed the paradigm.
If you suddenly severely restrict the front door.
the ports of New York and Boston people are inevitably
going to seek a side door. Sure, human nature.
Lawmakers realized that European and Asian immigrants
would simply sail to Mexico or Canada, which
had no quotas, and walk across the land border.
So the creation of the Border Patrol wasn't even
initially about Mexican or Canadian citizens.
It was to stop Europeans and Asians from bypassing
the quotas via the land borders. Exactly. The
Border Patrol was established just two days after
the act was passed. Congress initially appropriated
$1 million to hire 450 patrol inspectors. 450
guys for the whole border? Yeah, they were issued
badges and revolvers and tasked with patrolling
thousands of miles of incredibly porous, difficult
terrain, primarily along the Mexico -U .S. border.
This is the moment the southern border transitions
from a line on a map into a militarized zone
of enforcement. OK, so that is the physical enforcement
on the land. But what about the ports? What about
the millions of people trying to cross the ocean?
You mentioned a second massive creation. Yes.
And this second creation was perhaps even more
globally impactful. Consular control system.
How did an immigrant get to America before 1924?
Before this act, the journey was relatively unregulated
on the departure side. If you were a farmer in
Italy, You saved up your money, you went to a
port like Naples, you bought a steamship ticket,
and you got on the boat. Okay. You sailed across
the Atlantic and you arrived at Ellis Island.
The inspection, the medical checks, the legal
checks happened after you arrived on American
soil. And if you failed? If you failed the inspection,
the steamship company had to sail you back at
their own expense. Which was incredibly tragic.
People would sell everything they own, make the
brutal journey, and be turned away at the gates
of New York. It was heartbreaking. But the 1924
Act completely dismantled that system. It mandated
that immigrants could no longer just show up
at a U .S. port. So what did they have to do?
They now had to obtain a valid immigration visa
from an American consulate abroad before they
were even legally allowed to purchase a ticket
or board a ship. So they essentially pushed the
U .S. border out into foreign countries. They
outsourced the gatekeeping. Precisely. It created
what historians call a double layer of protection.
First, you had to travel to a city in your home
country that had a U .S. embassy or consulate.
Okay. You had to apply for a visa, prove you
didn't violate the quotas, undergo medical and
background checks by American officials operating
on foreign soil, and wait for approval. All before
leaving home. If you passed that, you got the
visa. Then you made the journey. And then you
were checked again upon arrival in the U .S.
That gives the State Department immense, unprecedented
control over who even starts the journey. You
don't have to deport people if you never let
them on the boat. And it fundamentally transformed
the logistics of global travel. The visa system
we all use today to travel internationally, that
bureaucratic hurdle of going to an embassy and
getting a stamp and a passport, was largely popularized
and institutionalized by the requirements of
the 1924 Act. So the U .S. throws up these massive
bureaucratic and physical walls. Let's look at
the global shockwaves of this action, because
when you slam a door that hard, the sound echoes.
It reverberates everywhere. Let's go back to
Japan. They warned about grave consequences and
the U .S. Senate essentially laughed in their
faces and passed the ban anyway. What actually
happened in Tokyo when the news broke? The reaction
in Japan was a mixture of intense, profound sorrow
and furious national anger. It was viewed across
Japanese society as an unforgivable national
humiliation. They felt completely betrayed. The
U .S. essentially told them, we do not view you
as equals on the world stage, and we do not view
your people as biologically fit to live among
us. Wow. The diplomatic fallout was immediate.
Japanese ambassadors, including Hanehara, resigned
in protest. The Japanese government retaliated
economically by heavily hiking tariffs on American
goods by 100%, which severely hurt American businesses
operating in the Pacific. And there was a visceral
public reaction too, wasn't there? Yes, there
were massive anti -American boycotts, and there
was a highly publicized, deeply tragic incident
where an unknown Japanese citizen committed seppuku
ritual suicide right near the compound of the
U .S. Embassy in Tokyo. That is just chilling.
He left behind a note that simply read, appealing
to the American people. The sense of betrayal
was absolute. That is heartbreaking. And it goes
far beyond just a temporary diplomatic freeze.
In our sources, historian David C. Atkinson traces
the long -term political domino effect this had
inside Japan, and it is honestly terrifying.
Atkinson's analysis is vital. During the 1920s,
Japan actually had a growing, albeit fragile,
democratic movement. Oh, really? Yeah. There
were liberal, pro -Western politicians who were
arguing for international cooperation, disarmament,
and peaceful trade with the United States and
Britain. That sounds like a completely different
path. But the passage of the American Immigration
Act of 1924 dealt a near -fatal blow to that
democratic movement. Because it made the pro
-Western politicians look weak. Exactly. The
hardline right -wing militarists in Japan looked
at the liberal politicians and said, you advocate
for friendship with the Americans. Look at how
they treat us. They despise us. They pass racist
laws against us. That's powerful political ammunition.
They argued we cannot rely on international cooperation.
We must rely on military strength and imperial
expansion to secure our future. So the racist
quota passed in a quiet room in Washington in
1924 directly undermines Japanese democracy.
Yes. Atkinson notes that this humiliation opened
the door for those anti -Western militarists
to gradually take control of the Japanese government
in the late 1920s and 1930s. Leading to World
War II. It is widely seen by historians as a
major turning point, a catalyst in the growing
estrangement between the U .S. and Japan, setting
the two empires on a slow, grinding collision
course that ultimately culminated in the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. It is terrifying
to trace that line of causality. You change a
census baseline year in Washington and 17 years
later, battleships are burning in Hawaii. Actions
have massive unintended consequences. And Japan
wasn't the only place where the 1924 act had
devastating historical consequences. Let's look
across the Atlantic at Europe, specifically the
impact on Jewish migration, because the math
they invented was about to collide with the darkest
chapter of the 20th century. The impact here
is profoundly dark. As we discussed earlier,
the 1890 census math was explicitly designed
to target and restrict Eastern and Southern Europeans.
Right, the time machine algorithm. Well, demographically,
nearly 75 % of all Jewish immigrants in the U
.S. prior to 1924 had come from Russia and Eastern
Europe. Oh, wow. Because mass migration from
those areas didn't really start until the late
1890s. Using the 1890 baseline... effectively
made mass migration from Eastern Europe, where
the vast majority of the global Jewish diaspora
lived at the time, mathematically impossible.
The door was slammed shut. The quota for countries
like Poland and Russia dropped to practically
nothing. Yes. And this had an immediate demographic
shift, right? Because millions of Jewish people
who were facing rising anti -Semitism in programs
in Eastern Europe could no longer come to America.
They had to go somewhere else. This spurred what
is known as the Fourth Lea. Correct. Blocked
from entering the United States, a massive wave
of Jewish immigration turned toward mandatory
Palestine. The British Peel Commission in 1937
specifically noted that the drastic American
quotas were a primary factor in spurring immigration
levels to Palestine that hadn't been previously
anticipated. Which obviously drastically altered
the demographic and political landscape of the
Middle East. But the absolute grimmest historical
footnote regarding the 1924 Act is what happened
in the decades immediately following its passage.
We move into the 1930s. The rise of the Third
Reich. Exactly. The Nazi Party rises to power
in Germany. They begin their systemic brutal
persecution of the Jews. The Nuremberg laws are
passed. A massive desperate refugee crisis emerges
as Jewish families try to flee Europe. And they
look to the United States for asylum. Right.
They're desperately trying to get visas. But
what happens with the quotas? Does Congress look
at the humanitarian crisis and say, OK, the circumstances
have changed. We need to lift the 2 % cap. No,
they do not. The United States government did
not modify the quotas at all. Despite the obvious,
well -documented and escalating horrors of the
Holocaust, the strict numerical limits established
by the eugenics driven math of the 1920s were
rigidly kept in place. The law was simply not
altered to aid Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.
That is just sickening. There are countless tragic
stories of families who were denied visas because
the quota for their birth country was already
full for the year. They were trapped. and so
they couldn't escape. The quota system worked
exactly as its original architects designed it
to, keeping undesirables out, regardless of the
humanitarian cost. It is incredibly sobering.
You realize that a mathematical formula designed
to protect a manufactured idea of racial purity
ended up being a death sentence for thousands
of people. It really was. And look, even if we
step away from the profound moral and humanitarian
tragedies, even if we look purely at the domestic
cold, hard economic outcomes that people like
union leader Samuel Gompers were so worried about,
the act still managed to backfire spectacularly
on the United States. Oh, the economics of it
totally failed. We now have modern economic studies
looking back at a century of data. What did this
restriction actually do to the American economy?
It did the exact opposite of what Gompers and
the protection as hoped it would do. How so?
Economists Petra Moser and Shmuel San published
a highly detailed paper in 2020 analyzing the
long term economic impact of the 1924 quotas.
They focused on science and innovation. OK. They
found that the drastic sudden reduction in immigration
from Eastern and Southern Europe caused a significant
measurable drop in American scientific innovation.
Because fewer immigrant scientists were arriving.
That is part of it, but it goes deeper. There
were vastly fewer new patents filed. Yes, because
the immigrant scientists were kept out. But the
study found a sharp decline in patents filed
by Native -born American scientists as well.
Wait, Native -born Americans stopped inventing
as much. Why? By cutting off the flow of international
talent, the U .S. isolated its own scientific
community. Native -born scientists were no longer
collaborating with, competing against, or being
pushed by brilliant international peers. The
entire ecosystem of innovation stagnated. Wow.
So trying to protect American exceptionalism
actually weakened it. But what about the blue
-collar workers? The folks Gompers was trying
to protect, the miners, the farmers, the factory
workers who were terrified of cheap labor driving
down their wages. The everyday worker. Right.
Did the 1924 act usher in a golden age of high
wages for the American working class? Not according
to the data. A major 2023 study published in
the American Economic Journal looks specifically
at the industries most affected by the sudden
loss of cheap immigrant labor. And what did they
find? And the findings are fascinating. The end
of that labor pool didn't lead to factory owners
suddenly doubling wages for native -born workers.
Instead, capitalist industries adapted to the
scarcity. How did they adapt? Well, the agricultural
sector, which was highly reliant on migrant labor,
shifted rapidly towards capital -intensive methods.
Instead of paying higher wages to American farmhands,
farm owners invested heavily in mechanization.
So tractors, reapers, automated systems. Yeah,
they replaced the missing immigrants with machines.
The mining industry, which was also heavily reliant
on immigrant labor in places like Appalachia,
couldn't automate as easily. So it simply contracted.
Mines closed down. So jobs just disappeared.
Ultimately, the economic contraction in some
sectors and the rapid shift toward mechanization
in others ended up economically harming the very
U .S.-born workers the act was ostensibly supposed
to protect. The American worker didn't get a
raise, they got replaced by a machine, or they
lost their job when the industry shrank. So if
we step back and look at the entire massive picture
we've painted today, let's summarize the journey
of this single piece of legislation. It's a heavy
journey. We started in an America gripped by
post -World War I economic anxiety and the ideological
hysteria of the Red Scare. Those very real, very
potent fears were weaponized by lawmakers pushing
the mainstream pseudoscience of eugenics. Right,
the biological threat narrative. Because they
couldn't explicitly ban people by nationality
without causing chaos, they reached back into
the past. They pulled out outdated 1890 census
data to mathematically engineer a quota system
that artificially inflated Northern European
numbers and erased everyone else. The time machine
algorithm. They used that algorithm to preserve
a manufactured ideal of racial homogeneity. And
the consequences of that bureaucratic engineering
were seismic. They inadvertently sparked global
chain reactions that defined the 20th century.
Seriously. They created the modern border apparatus
and the consular visa system. They accidentally
fueled the rise of Japanese militarism by humiliating
a rising Pacific power. They stifled their own
domestic economic and scientific innovation.
It's just failure after failure. And most tragically,
they shut the door on millions of refugees right
before one of the darkest periods in human history.
trapping them in Europe. It is a phenomenal terrifying
example of how bureaucracy is never neutral every
number every baseline year every percentage point
in a law has a philosophy behind it and real
world consequences ahead of it. We look at the
paperwork and think it is just administration,
but it is destiny. It truly is. And before we
close, I want to leave you, the listener, with
one final, deeply chilling piece of historical
context to mull over. OK, what is it? We spent
this whole deep dive looking at how America's
fears shaped this law and how the law impacted
the rest of the world. But the ultimate legacy
of the Immigration Act of 1924 wasn't just domestic.
The eugenic framework and the concept of legally
manufacturing racial demographics didn't go unnoticed
abroad. Oh, no. Four years after the act passed
in 1928, a rising radical political figure in
Europe published a book where he explicitly and
publicly praised the American immigration law.
Seriously. He praised it for its success in banishing
what he called strangers of the blood. He expressed
deep admiration for how the United States had
managed to legally methodically exclude foreign
racial masses from its gene pool. Let me guess.
That European leader was Adolf Hitler. Wow. He
wrote about the American quota system in his
unpublished second book and the framers of his
later regime would go on to cite U .S. immigration
and segregation law favorably when drafting their
own racist exclusionary legislation in the 1930s.
That is just devastating. It invites us to consider
a very dark reality. How laws designed in a quiet
room to protect a nation's identity can end up
writing the blueprints for history's darkest
chapters across the globe. So the next time you
hear about a shift in a quota, a change in a
baseline year, or a debate over the math of a
border, well, remember that the muddy waters
of bureaucratic policy are never just math. They
are the blueprints of the future. Thank you for
joining us on this deep dive. Something to think
about.