Excerpts from Unguarded Gates -
A History of America's Immigration Crisis
by Otis L. Graham, Jr.

Chapter 7: Immigrants and Restrictions - Results and Reflections

The United States from the early nineteenth century to 1930 absorbed 60 percent of the huge surge of Great Wave immigration. As the United States finally decided in the 1920s to limit its intake, the other four major immigrant-receiving countries of the neo-Europes - Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Australia - were taking similar measures. Canada discontinued all immigration but from the United Kingdom and France (with skilled worker exceptions), Argentina and Brazil established preference systems for the nationalities of the early settlers, chiefly Portuguese, Italian, Spanish (and with Argentina, German and Swiss), and Australia established a "white Australia" goal with preferences for those of British or American stock. Thus all five, Anglo-Saxon and Latin-dominated alike, opted for selection systems (of varying degrees of effectiveness) designed, in different ways, to replicate the nation's structure of nationalities as historically understood.

Restriction brought the numbers entering the United States down sharply, though a powerful force working in the same direction was the collapse of the American (and global) economy into the Great Depression lasting from 1929 to 1940 and after that the hazards of international travel during World War II. Recorded immigration to the United States averaged 305,000 per year from 1925 to 1929, under the interim quotas, then dropped sharply in the 1930s to an average of 53,000 a year that hides a virtual negative immigration in 1932. In the 1940s, immigration averaged about 100,000 a year, but with an upward trend after the war. Writing after the 1924 system had been in place for nearly twenty-five years, William S. Bernard estimated that, subtracting emigration, only 1.7 million people had migrated to the United States in that period, the equivalent of two years' arrivals prior to restriction.

The demographic consequences of ending the open door policy cannot be known with certainty, because no one can be sure what immigration would have been in the absence of restriction. Demographer Leon Bouvier has estimated that, assuming no restriction and prewar levels of one million a year for the rest of the century, the American population would have reached 400 million by 2000. This would have meant 120 million more American high-consumption lifestyles piled on the roughly 280 million reported in the census of 2000, making far worse the dismal figures on species extinction, wetland loss, soil erosion, and the accumulation of climate-changing and health-impairing pollutants that are being tallied as the century closes. The immigration reformers had not made the connection between immigration's contribution to population growth and other worrisome problems their generation's conservationists had thought of separately, such as depletion of forest reserves, rising pollution levels, and the extinction of species symbolized by the deaths of the last passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918. But the connection was there, and restriction was a demographic blessing, slowing population growth rates that were at the base of the problem of resource and habitat depletion. In 1933, with immigration almost halted by a combination of restriction and economic depression, the President's Committee on Social Trends predicted that U.S. population would reach a peak in 1980 somewhere between 145 and 190 million, probably closer to the lower figure, and then begin to decline. These totals, especially the lower one, are not far out of the range of most estimates of permanent carrying capacity. Good news, to which immigration restriction contributed.

The chief goals of policy reform, to shrink the incoming numbers and to tilt the sources of the immigration stream back toward northern Europe, were less decisively achieved. Numbers entering legally but outside the quotas ("nonquota immigrants," mostly relatives of those recently arrived and Europeans entering through Latin American and Caribbean countries) surprised policymakers by matching and in time exceeding those governed by quotas. Yet with numbers so low, ethnic composition did not agitate the public. International economic maladies, war, and the new American system of restriction had thus combined to reduce immigration numbers to levels more in line with the long course of American history and to some observers seemed to have ended the role of immigration as a major force in American life. Apparently the nation would henceforth grow and develop, as Thomas Jefferson had preferred, from natural increase and the cultural assets of its people.

The Great Wave, like all immigration, had deposited both benefits and costs. The arduous, unskilled work of our industrial expansion found willing hands. New ethnic communities brought many immigrant gifts, beyond enumeration. Cuisine was diversified, the American wine industry based in California established an international position due to Italian and Hungarian immigrants' skills and tastes. The Great Wave brought America the creative talents of Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Wagner, Frank Sinatra and Maria Callas, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, and Leonard Bernstein, Saul Bellow, and Lionel Trilling. No one can fully enumerate these positive contributions.

But a sentimentalist view of immigration is this era's clouded lens. Mass immigration from Europe's fringes brought high costs-wage depression, urban crowding, disease, illiteracy, cultural resistance to progressive projects such as the emancipation of women and environmental protection. It brought international crime syndicates and a cadre of violent criminals - McKinley's assassin Czolgosz; the Italian mobsters Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Frank Costello, and Al Capone; their Jewish counterparts Bugsy Goldstein, Phil Strauss, and Rich Cohen; two of the plotters of the deadly East Coast bombings of 1919, Sacco and Vanzetti; the kidnapper and murderer of the baby son of Anne and Charles Lindbergh, George Bruno Hauptmann; and the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan. Immigrants are like the rest of humanity, in Thomas Jefferson's phrase, made of equal parts of poetry and mud.

Some of the costs of an era of unrestricted immigration were much clearer when it was curbed. In local and national politics the virtual disappearance of immigration from the agenda of American politics removed (with the regional exception of Mexican agricultural labor in the Southwest) a contentious and divisive issue from the center of American life.

Many employers in both manufacturing and agriculture had predicted economic hardship due to labor shortages, but as restriction shrank the incoming foreign labor pool in the 1920s and after, the economic results appear to have been beneficial in all directions. Tight labor markets in industry stimulated capital investments and operating efficiencies that raised productivity 40 percent across the decade of the 1920s. Economic historians include the role of immigration restriction as one of the factors producing the wage gains of industrial labor and the reduction in income inequality that occurred in the interwar decades. Economist Paul Douglas found that annual manufacturing-wage growth in the United States was 0.32 percent from 1890 to 1914 but an astonishing 3.3 percent from 1919 to 1926, strong evidence of immigration's wage-depressing effect. Reviewing the data from before and after restriction, Harvard economist Claudia Golden concludes, with many others, that the perceived injury to American wages posed by the Great Wave had been a real one. The impact on native workers' wages was "generally negative and often substantial." "The [immigration] laws are on the books and are very advantageous to labor," wrote the authors of a text on labor relations in 1947.

This was especially so for unskilled American workers with rural backgrounds, and chiefly for blacks. "The decline of European migration, coupled with the increased labor demands brought on by World War I, opened the doors of Pittsburgh's mills to incoming blacks," concluded historians of the effect of tight labor markets on black labor in a city typical of the industrial centers of the East and Midwest. Commenting in 1960 on evidence of the accelerating absorption of wage earners "into what was commonly called the middle class," labor historian Foster Dulles concluded: "This process was aided by the curtailment of immigration."

Ironically, one benefit of restriction-the successful and surprisingly rapid assimilation of the New Immigrants-was in time and with much irony interpreted to mean that the reformers had been wrong to fear national fragmentation. The curbing of the Great Wave created a forty-year breathing space of relatively low immigration, with two effects favorable to assimilation. The pressures toward joining the American mainstream did not have to contend with continual massive replenishment of foreigners, and immigrant communities realized that the sojourner-and-return pattern followed by the non-Jewish elements of the wave was untenable. Writing of Italian Americans, sociologist Richard Alba concluded that "the shutting off of the immigrant flow made clear to the second and third generations that their future lay in the new society." The result, to condense a complicated story, was that the squalid ghettos of the turn of the century thinned out, and the New Immigrants and their children moved rapidly toward the mainstream of American society.

For the desire to become American was very strong among most of the New Immigrants, especially after the imposition of controls ended the easy way back and forth between homelands. To be sure, in all ethnic groups there were anti-assimilationist pressures - strong residual loyalties to the mother culture, deployed especially by clergy, ethnic leaders and politicians, and some parents and most grandparents, who were heavily invested in the maintenance of cultural solidarity But the desire and practical need to affiliate with this robust, Anglo-dominated America were stronger. Ethnic histories abound with the evidence of this restless, sometimes painful Americanization, a process in which the immigrants were caught but in which they were also aggressive actors-adding words to the language and other cultural elements to American life, changing names, embracing the public schools, moving out of ethnic ghettos, intermarrying. A survey of children of Polish immigrants in the mid-1920s found that most preferred "American" to "Polish American" as an identity. The League for Latin American Citizens (LULAC) formed in the 1920s in the Southwest, conducted all of its meetings in English and stressed the importance of learning U.S. ways. In this era of intense American nationalism, the New Immigrants, incessantly bruised by remarks that they were still foreigners, tended to accept these terms and move toward the mainstream.

The magnet was the world's highest standard of living, social acceptance, and mobility.

This invigorated assimilation process was, of course, vastly easier for the large majority who were of European descent, harder for the Asians and Hispanics, and extremely difficult for Caribbean blacks. Even for the Europeans, not all of them fully melted in one generation after restriction of the numbers, as Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963). Nonetheless, the rapid acceleration of assimilation permitted by the new controls on immigration presented Adolph Hitler, not even a generation after the Johnson-Reed Act, with an American nation far more united and formidable than the "motley," "mongrelized," and splintered America he confidently expected to meet in the great test of nations he launched in 1939. Without restriction, the American story through the middle decades of the twentieth century might plausibly have been one of rising levels of social segmentation and conflict, rather than of a remarkable and swift if incomplete consolidation. A vital next step toward national consolidation had to await the Civil Rights movement; immigration control could not bring it, though it had the capacity to contribute toward it by shielding the American labor market from low-wage foreign labor.