Читать книгу To Be An American - Bill Ong Hing - Страница 14

As economic conditions in western Europe improved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigration from Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ireland declined. But at the same time, immigration from southern and eastern Europe rapidly increased. During the first decade of the twentieth century, which remains the decade that witnessed the greatest immigration to the United States, 1.5 million immigrants entered from Russia and another 2 million from Italy and Austria-Hungary. The constant flow of Italians, Russians, and Hungarians fueled racial nativism and anti-Catholicism. This culminated in passage of the Act of February 5, 1917, which contained a controversial literacy requirement that excluded aliens who could not “read and understand some language or dialect.”

The reactionary, isolationist political climate that followed World War I, manifested in the Red Scare of 1919–20, led to even greater exclusionist demands. The landmark Immigration Act of 1924, opposed by only six senators, once again took direct aim at southern and eastern Europeans whom the Protestant majority in the United States viewed with dogmatic disapproval. The arguments advanced in support of the bill stressed recurring themes: racial superiority of Anglo-Saxons, the fact that immigrants would cause the lowering of wages, and the unassimilability of foreigners, while citing the usual threats to the nation’s social unity and order posed by immigration.

The act restructured criteria for admission to respond to nativist demands and represented a general selection policy that remained in place until 1952. It provided that immigrants of any particular country be limited to 2 percent of their nationality in 1890. The law struck most deeply at Jews, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks, who had immigrated in great numbers after 1890, and who would be most disfavored by such a quota system.