Emergency Quota Act Establishes First Numerical Immigration Limits Based on National Origin

President Warren G. Harding signs the Emergency Quota Act (also called the Emergency Immigration Act or Johnson Quota Act), establishing for the first time numerical limits on immigration to the United States based on national origin. The law restricts annual immigration from any country to 3% of the number of foreign-born persons from that country living in the United States according to the 1910 census, capping total immigration at approximately 357,000 per year. The legislation specifically targets Southern and Eastern European immigrants, whom nativist groups characterized as racially inferior, politically radical, and economically threatening to American workers.

The bill passes with overwhelming support following intensive lobbying by the Immigration Restriction League, founded by Harvard-educated Boston Brahmins in 1894 and now allied with eugenics organizations promoting “racial science.” Business interests initially opposing immigration restriction reverse course after the 1919 steel strike and Red Scare, recognizing that immigrant workers had proven willing to organize. The American Federation of Labor supports the bill, reflecting organized labor’s longstanding fear of immigrant wage competition and its willingness to embrace racial exclusion as organizing strategy.

The Emergency Quota Act is explicitly temporary, intended to serve as stopgap while Congress develops permanent restrictive legislation. However, it establishes the fundamental architecture of race-based immigration restriction that the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act will entrench for four decades. The 1910 census baseline is already manipulated to disadvantage recent immigrant groups; the 1924 act will shift to 1890 census data specifically to further reduce Southern and Eastern European quotas. The law effectively ends the era of relatively open immigration that brought over 25 million Europeans to America between 1880 and 1920, institutionalizing xenophobia as federal policy and demonstrating how economic anxiety and labor competition could be channeled into racial exclusion rather than class solidarity.