AP US History †Factors of the Immigration Act of 1924 Essay

Although the in-migration work on of 1924 was mainly the unfortunate aftermath of discriminatory racial theories of nativism and antiforeignism, other factors influenced also Congress to pass the restrictive act, including the arise Red Scare and the spread of the sweet Ku Klux Klan.The self-aggrandizingst factor in the congressional head of the immigration locomote of 1920 was the total the Statesn belief that native Americans were superior to foreigners, including the 800,000 immigrants who aim the farming in 1920-1921. Ab off two-thirds of them were from grey and east Europe. The one-hundred-percent Americans, recoiling at the sight of this resumed sunrise(prenominal) Immigration, were disgusted at the influx of ailing Europeans. Senator Ellison D. Smith expressed his nativist concerns in his 1924 Congressional Record by stating, I think we now have comfortable population in our country for us to shut the door and to breed up a pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon Ame rican citizenship It is for the preservation of that splendid express that I would involve this not an asylum for the oppressed of alone countries.Congress temporarily plugged the recrudesce with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which restricted European immigration in any apt(p) year to a definite quota of 3 percent of the people of their nationality who had been living in the unify States in 1910. However, this national-origins system was comparatively favorable to the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, for by 1910 immense numbers of them had already arrived. consort to the unite States Bureau of the Census, southern and eastern European immigration r each(prenominal)ed 1,250,000 in 1905 and a considerable 700,000 in 1910.Thus, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was replaced by the Immigration Act of 1924. The unite States Bureau of Immigration explained in its yearbook Report of the Commission-General Immigration of 1924 that the number of each nationality who ma y be admitted annually is restrict to 2 percent of the population of such nationality resident in the United States consort to the census of 1890 (when comparatively few southern Europeans had arrived). Southern Europeans bitterly denounced the device as unfair and discriminatory, but their complaints were drowned out by the triumphant cheers of the nativists who believed that blue-eyed and fair-haired blue Europeans were of better blood.The purpose was clearly to hoar Americas existing racial composition, which was largely northern European. A flagrant discriminatory percentage of the Immigration Act of 1924 slammed the door absolutely against Japanese immigrants. Henry P. Fairchild explained in Immigration that the new immigrants come beca go for they believe that the enlist which they can receive in America can establish a higher(prenominal) standard than the one to which they have been given over and this wage for which they are willing to ex careen their repel is in oecumenic appreciably below that which the native American artificer requires to support his standard which means that the American workman is continually underbid in the labor market by large numbers of noncitizen laborers. So antiforeign were the Americans that they close to hung a No Vacancy family on the Statue of license, claiming that the nation was filling up.Antiforeignism grew to an unprecedented height when the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 spawned a tiny Communist party in America. Tensions were heightened by an epidemic of strikes that convulsed the Republic at wars end upstanding Americans jumped to the conclusion that labor troubles were fomented by bomb-and-whisker Bolsheviks from red Russia. A general strike in Seattle in 1919, though modest in its demands and orderly in its methods, prompted a call from the mayor for national troops to head off the riot of Russia. In the same year, the Philadelphia Enquirer printed a political cartoon depicting an evil-look ing beard man wielding a large sword labeled BOLSHEVISM and a ardent torch labeled ANARCHY, burning the United States flag. Apparently, the evil Bolsheviks posed an immediate jeopardy against the very core of Americas beliefs.Threatened by the Red Scare, evangelist Billy sunlight described a Bolshevik as a guy with a formula like a porcupine and a breath that would scare a bet on cat and stated that he would fill the jails so full of them that their feet would stick out the window. The American Legion, superpatriotic voice of veterans, raze joined the anti-Bolshevik chorus by zealously attacking political leftists in the United States as enemy reds. In 1924 Mr. Moran Keaton send a telegram to Honorable bathroom E. Raker expressing his 100 percent support in your scramble to make this coast a gabardine mans country. Naturally,the American Legion was listed as an make-up in favor of the bill to detain the immigration of aliens into the United States in the 1924 Congressio nal Record other groups included autochthonal Sons of the Golden West and the Patriotic exhibition of the Sons of America.A 1920 editorial from The Saturday Evening suffer stated that Americans see the negro task but they cannot grasp the Russian problem. They do not understand that many of these alien peoples are temperamentally and racially unfitted for wakeful assimilation. It seemed that idolize was fueling the close-mindedness of a large section of America. Unfortunately, the inflamed antiredism and antiforeignism translated into a bigoted aversion to immigrants, contributing significantly to the fugacious of the Immigration Act of 1924.Spawned by the postwar reaction, a new Ku Klux Klan mushroomed fearsomely in the early 1920s. Spreading anti-foreign, anti-Catholic, anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-pacifist, anti-Communist, anti-internationalist, pro-Anglo-Saxon, pro-native American, and pro-Protestant sentiments, the Klan led an extreme, extreme right-winger uprising aga inst many of the forces of diversity and modernness that were transforming American culture. The KKK spread with astonishing rapidity, specially in the Midwest and the Bible rush South, wielding potent political influence and an extension of nearly 5 million dues-paying members.As Hiram W. Evans explained in The Klans Fight for Americanism from The North American Review, we are intolerant of every social function that strikes at the foundations of our race, our country or our freedom of worship. Evans felt endanger by any attempt to use the privileges and opportunities which aliens hold only as by dint of our generosity as levers to force us to change our civilization. The Klan was indeed an alarming locution of the intolerance and prejudice plaguing people earnest about the dizzying pace of social change in the 1920s the last thing they wanted was unrestricted immigration.The Ku Klux Klans spread did not reach the North and the East as much as it reached the Midwest and Sout h, as revealed in the 1924 Congressional Record. Of the sixty-two members of the brook of Representatives who voted nay on the Immigration Act of 1924, only one was from the South (W. turner Logan from South Carolina). American sectionalism unsurprisingly showed its patchyface the North has usually been to a greater extent morally superior and tolerating of different cultures, so naturally the North would vote against an anti-immigration act.The fear of Communists and the degradation of one-hundred-percent Americans far outweighed the desire to be hospitable. The passing of the Immigration Act of 1924 show that the Red Scare, combined with nativism, could produce gimcrack bigotry. Ironically, the Americans attempt to preserve their splendid stock resulted in the blatant violation of the fundamental American principle of welcoming foreigners. very frightened for their livelihood, the American people switched into pick mode and tried to save themselves with particular disregard for the immigrants, whose welfare was not a priority. The poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty may be etched in stone, but even such fully grown idealism becomes trivial when Americans feel that their benefit is at risk.Sources* The American Pageant school text* 1973 DBQ