May 19th marks the 100th anniversary of a pair of 1921 events that together embody the worst and best of American history, the most exclusionary and inclusive visions of our collective identity. On May 19, 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act (also known as the Johnson Quota Act, after its author Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington), the first truly national immigration law and one that was designed entirely to discriminate against immigrants deemed less desirable through a white supremacist lens. The law especially targeted arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe, paralleling the restrictions already placed on immigrants from Asia by the more focused 1917 Immigration Act. While initially framed as a temporary response to an immigration “emergency,” the law was made permanent by its immediate sequel, the Immigration Act of 1924 (or Johnson-Reed Act), which made such discriminatory quotas the basis of federal immigration policy for more than four decades.
Arguing for that 1924 extension of the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, South Carolina Senator Ellison DuRant Smith made plain the exclusionary intent and behind these laws. As he put it,
"Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock; certainly the greatest of any nation in the Nordic gbreed. It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us that I would make this not an asylum for the oppressed of all countries, but a country to assimilate and perfect that splendid type of manhood that has made America the foremost Nation in her progress and in her power."
These first truly national immigration laws were not simply about limiting arrivals from particular nations and parts of the world; they were also an effort to substantiate a specific, mythic, white supremacist vision of America’s history and identity. That same exclusionary logic was behind another federal policy created two decades later: Japanese Internment. As General John DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command that helped organize the internment camps, put it at a 1943 news conference, “A Jap’s a Jap. It makes no difference whether the Jap is a citizen or not…I don’t want any of them here.”
These internment camps were the catalyst for the efforts of one Japanese American activist; in addition to the date of the Emergency Quota Act, May 19th also marks the 100th birthday of Yuri Kochiyama, who was one of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans interned in the camps. Kochiyama’s activism across her long and inspiring life exemplifies an inclusive vision of American community.