Despite its seismic impact on US society, the Immigration Act of 1924 is unknown by most Americans and barely registers with scholars, save for those specializing in immigration policy or the history of the interwar period. Century-old national laws very rarely escape the historical dustbin. Yet the contemporary significance of the 1924 immigration legislation—also called the Johnson-Reed Act for its primary sponsors, Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington and Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania—is unmistakable. My goal in this essay is to highlight two key features of this major reform that have had a lasting influence on immigration politics and policy-making in the United States. One of these legacies flows logically from the spirit and substance of one of the most restrictive and anti-immigrant laws ever adopted, while the other highlights the extent to which a nativist law accommodated employer demands for cheap migrant labor.
One of the most important contemporary...
