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Home > Immigration Act of 1924


The United States Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of person from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890. It superseded the 1921 Emergency Quota Act. The law was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans who had begun to flood into the country beginning in the 1890s, as well as East Asians and Asian Indians, who were totally prohibited from immigrating. It set no limits on immigration from Latin America.

It passed with strong congressional support (only 6 dissenting votes in the Senate). Some of its strongest supporters were influenced by Madison Grant and his 1916 book, The Passing of a Great Race . Grant was a eugenicist and advocate of the racial_hygiene theory. His data, which is now considered flawed, purported to showed the superiority of the founding Northern European races.

As an example of its effect, in the ten years following 1900 about 200,000 Italians immigrated every year. With the imposition of the 1924 quota, only 4,000 per year were allowed. At the same time, the annual quota for Germany was over 57,000. 86% of the 165,000 permitted entries were from the British IslesThe British Isles is a traditional term used to identify the group of islands off the northwest coast of Europe consisting of Great Britain, Ireland and the many smaller adjacent islands. These islands form an archipelago of more than 6,000 islands off th, FranceThe French Republic or France ( French: Republique francaise or France is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in western Europe, and which is further made up of a collection of overseas islands and territories located in other continents., GermanyThe Federal Republic of Germany ( German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland is one of the world's leading industrialized countries, located in the middle of the European Union. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark and the Baltic Sea, to the east, and other Northern European countries.

The quotas remained in place with minor alterations until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965The Immigration Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act abolished the national-origin quotas that had been in place in the United States since the Immigration Act of 1924. Immigrants were to be admitted by their skills and professions rather than b.


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