Immigration Act of 1924 Imposes Racist National Origins Quotas Based on Eugenics

President Calvin Coolidge signs the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act), establishing the first permanent comprehensive restrictions on immigration in American history through a national origins quota system explicitly designed to preserve white racial dominance. The law reduces annual immigration from 3% of each nationality’s 1910 population to 2% of their 1890 census count—a deliberate choice to maximize Northern and Western European immigration while minimizing Southern and Eastern European arrivals. The act completely bans immigration from Asia and caps total annual immigration at 165,000, an 80% reduction from pre-1914 levels.

The quota system emerges directly from eugenics advocacy, with Representative Albert Johnson, the bill’s sponsor, chairing the Eugenics Research Association and editing an anti-immigrant newspaper promoting “blood purity.” At Johnson’s behest, Congress establishes a eugenics subcommittee chaired by Madison Grant, author of “The Passing of the Great Race,” which advocates white racial superiority. The committee employs Harry Laughlin, a prominent eugenicist, as expert advisor who later praises the act as “a political breakthrough in the adoption of scientific racism as a theoretical foundation for immigration policy.” The 1890 census baseline is chosen specifically because it predates mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, enabling Congress to engineer a return to an earlier, whiter demographic composition.

The legislation has catastrophic humanitarian consequences when it blocks Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s and 1940s, contributing to Holocaust deaths. Japanese officials protest the Asian exclusion as a violation of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, increasing tensions that contribute to deteriorating U.S.-Japan relations before World War II. The national origins quota system remains the foundation of American immigration law until the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 abolishes it. Historian Mae Ngai observes that the law “constructed a White American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common Whiteness distinct from those deemed to be not White”—a legal architecture of racial hierarchy that shapes immigration policy for four decades and establishes precedents for race-based exclusion that persist long after the quotas themselves are eliminated.