Nativist demands for immigrant exclusion have always existed in tension with employer demands for immigrants as cheap, exploitable labor. Nativists in the 1910s and 1920s tilted the immigration system toward their exclusionist agenda to limit immigration from southern and eastern Europe while further restricting immigration from Asia, but the numerical limitations embedded in legislation did not extend to immigrants from Western Hemisphere nations. Agricultural interests, vehemently opposed to any measures that would check their ability to recruit foreign labor, worked throughout the 1910s and 1920s to hold off numerical restrictions on laborers from the nations of the Western Hemisphere. Agriculturalists and their political allies did not oppose the racist arguments that drove nativist efforts, but they insisted that their economic interests required the continued migration of foreign low-wage workers, particularly from Mexico. The Immigration Act of 1924 did not settle the argument between restrictionists and agricultural interests, but it had...

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