Period of Severe Restrictions
During the period of 1917 to the present time immigration has.been severely restricted. As immigrants continued to flow into the country, more and more concern was felt about admitting such large numbers. As a result more laws were passed restricting the number of immigrants who might come to our shores. In 1917 an act was passed requiring a literacy test for all immigrants over 16 years of age. In 1918 an act was passed which excluded anarchists and others who advocated the overthrow of the government by violence. These acts and the ones previously passed excluded only about 1. 4 per cent of the total number of immigrants who wanted to come to the United States, so the number of immigrants arriving here was not greatly reduced.
The first drastic measure taken to reduce immigration was the quota law passed in 1921. This law limited the number of immigrants from any one country to 3 per cent of the nationality of that country which was in the United States in 1910. The law of 1924 reduced the quotas to 2 per cent based on the 1890 census. As a result, in 1925 only 294,000 immigrants were admitted. Later amendments were made to the law of 1924 in 1929. These amendments stated that the total annual quota could not exceed 150,000.
The 150,000 to be admitted from all nations under the 1929 amendment were to be apportioned in terms of the number of people of a given nations origin living in the United States in 1920 and the total population in the same year. This meant that a national origin which represented 10 per cent of the total population in 1920 would have a quota of 15,000 from the foreign country which sent the respective immigrants. This law, in addition to still further restricting immigration, assigned 83 per cent of the total to nations of western and northern Europe and the remainder to southern and eastern European nations. During the following ten years only 528,431 people sought a new home in our United States. This was fewer than arrived in the decade of the 1830s, a century earlier. This effect may be attributed to the restrictive legislation combined with the consequences of the economic depression of the 1930s. It is important to note that during this ten-year span of 1931 to 1940, 459,738 emigrated from our country back to the countries of their origin, in most instances. The war years of the 1940s and the continuation of the 1929 legislation kept immigration at an average of 100,000 per year in the decade of 1941-1950.
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