Alvarez: The underlying argument in Cotton and Perdue’s proposed bill is that immigrants are a hindrance to the economy, though there’s substantial evidence that foreign-born workers boost economic activity. How does this compare with the reasoning behind immigration legislation in the past?
Kraut: If you take a look at the 1924 national-origins quota system that was installed, [under] the Johnson-Reed Act, it was aimed at southern and eastern Europeans, and its main targets were southern Italians and eastern European Jews. Neither group was particularly loved by Americans because of their religious differences. The perceived threat was that they would work for wages below those that American workers could command. So much so that in the debate over that legislation in Congress, you had some strange bedfellows: You had the American Federation of Labor arguing on the same side as the Ku Klux Klan and the Immigration Restriction League, because they were concerned about keeping up the wages of American workers.
There’s always been a concern about what the economic impact will be on Americans of foreign-born labor coming to the United States.
Alvarez: The Immigration Act of 1917 included a provision that banned immigrants from the Asiatic Barred Zone—which included most of Asia—from entering the United States. How restrictive were the policies implemented through this piece of legislation?
Kraut: They were quite restrictive. But that law lasted only from 1917 to 1921 and then they went to the first of several temporary laws that culminated in the 1924 legislation, the Johnson-Reed bill. And that was quite restrictive—it was a dramatic drop in migration from southern and eastern Europe.
It took between 1924 and 1929 to get all the percentages squared away of how many people from each country could come [under the quota system]. What the legislation said was that each country in the world would be allotted a quota of 2 percent of those of their nationality already in the United States according to the 1890 census. And the 1890 census was used because it reflected a time before the mass migration of eastern and southern Europeans to the United States that happened between 1890 and the 1920s.