The first comprehensive federal immigration legislation in the history of the U.S., the 1924 law solidified features of the immigration system with us today: visa requirements, the Border Patrol, and the category of the “illegal alien.” Even as the primary targets of immigration restrictionism have shifted over the century, the consequences for immigrants and their communities remain profoundly shaped by the system created in 1924.
With the founding of the country, the First Naturalization Act in 1790 stipulated that only a “free white person” could become an American citizen. After the Civil War, Black Americans gained citizenship, and naturalization law was extended to people of “African nativity…and descent.” But Asian immigrants were denied access to citizenship, and federal laws sought to cement a system of Asian exclusion that began in 1882 and culminated in the restrictive law passed in 1924.
The chief architect of the 1924 law was a congressman from Washington State, Republican Albert Johnson, who sought to apply the principles he initially articulated in his home state at the national level. Before being elected to office, Johnson had been a journalist—first for the Seattle Times and then for his own newspaper. He used his media platform to support mob violence (which he himself may have joined in) against South Asians working in lumber mills in Bellingham in 1907, to oppose interracial marriage, to advocate for the forced sterilization of the mentally disabled, and to rapidly oppose labor organizing and left wing politics.
In 1912, as a known public figure in his state, he successfully ran for Congress on an anti-immigration platform. Washingtonians sent him to Congress for ten consecutive terms. Johnson’s hatred of all non-Northern European peoples and his Pacific Northwest style of nativism—where an influential white supremacist movement in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho took root—went national.
In clippings collected in scrapbooks in the WA State Library, from his earliest days in office, Johnson advocated that the U.S. not only close its doors to immigration but also “put up bars.” He was endorsed as Chairman of the House Committee on Immigration by leading white supremacists of the era, such as Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race and proponent of the idea that if non-Anglo-Saxon Protestants continued to immigrate, the U.S. would be committing “race suicide.”