Laughlin was convinced that the science of eugenics dictated racism. In other words, he took the step that Davenport had refused to take, that some races were superior and others were inferior. This led him inexorably to immigration policy. He became a consultant to New York’s Chamber of Commerce, which was a staunch advocate of the national origins quota system, and to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, which drafted the legislation of the twenties. One may note that, while Laughlin’s ideas were finding policy expression in the U.S., an obscure German political figure named Adolf Hitler was writing a book, Mein Kampf, which voiced the same racist views. The most committed spokesman against the racist legislation in the U.S. was a young liberal Democratic congressman from Brooklyn, Emanuel Celler. Franz Boas, the great anthropologist at Columbia, considered these race and blood ideas pernicious nonsense and fed Celler arguments against them.
Laughlin was obsessed by immigration and wrote extensively about it. A nation, he argued, could be conquered either by military force or by the immigration of inferior races. The latter was the great threat to the U.S. He found a lesson in the house rat, which had spread all over the world via commercial shipping vessels.
The American race, he wrote, had been shaped by more than 300 years of history. It consisted of “white people who have fused into a national mosaic composed originally of European stocks.” In origin it was British, Irish, German, Scandinavian, French, and Dutch. This American race, Laughlin asserted, “must protect its own interests by filtering the incoming stream of immigrants as thoroughly and as many times as may be necessary, in order to admit only the number and quality of immigrants whom it desires.” Above all, the nation must protect itself biologically.
This race, Laughlin contended, had been reasonably pure until about 1890 because the “American people are derived basically from the people of Great Britain.” But the new immigrants had introduced debased blood lines which were undermining its quality. Laughlin believed immigration should be abolished or, at the very least, that strict standards should be imposed on any immigrants.1
During the colonial period and most of the first century of the Republic the door for immigrants was wide open. Land was plentiful and cheap and the great majority became farmers. In the mid-nineteenth century unskilled immigrants, Vernon Briggs pointed out, were in demand to “staff the emerging factories, to work the mines, and to build the railroads and the public works infrastructures associated with a nation on the verge of entering the industrial revolution.”
The importation of Chinese coolie labor to work in the California gold mines and to build the western railroads created a powerful backlash, particularly by organized labor in California. Thus, the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 between China and the U.S. prohibited the forced migration of these workers. But this did not still the clamor on the Pacific Coast. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration law to discriminate on the basis of race or nationality. In effect, it forbade the Chinese to enter the country and denied persons of Chinese extraction citizenship.
A similar problem arose with the far more sensitive Japanese after the turn of the century. President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the face-saving Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan in 1907. The U.S. would not exclude Japanese immigrants, but the Japanese government would forbid its citizens to emigrate to America.
In the years before World War I the flow of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe was enormous, with over a million persons entering the country annually. The peak was reached in 1907—1,285,349. The historic ethnic composition of the American population was changing. There was an outcry from xenophobes and more reasonable people, including scholars, who felt that some restriction on numbers was needed. In 1907, therefore, Congress created the Joint Commission on Immigration to study the problem and to recommend a policy. Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont was chairman and his investigation yielded 42 fat volumes published in 1911.
Although the commission was, unlike Laughlin, circumspect in its use of nouns, it swallowed the eugenics analysis. The U.S., it held, was a nation of northwestern Europeans. The new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe posed formidable, if not insurmountable, problems of assimilation. To drive this point home, the commission issued a Dictionary of Races or Peoples. Thus, the Dillingham Commission recommended immigration restriction based on a discriminatory national origins quota system.
The Immigration Act of 1917, passed over President Wilson’s veto, was the first statute to express this theory against Europeans. At that moment it was not necessary because World War I prevented southern and eastern Europeans from emigrating. The authors of the law assumed that northwestern Europeans were literate and southern and eastern Europeans were illiterate. Thus, they imposed a literacy test. A new Asiatic Barred Zone, skirting the Japanese Gentlemen’s Agreement, banned immigration from Asia. Because American farmers and ranchers were beginning to suffer a wartime shortage of labor, an exception was made for the temporary importation of Mexican workers if the Secretary of Labor certified their need.
But the literacy test did not work because many southern and eastern Europeans could read and write. The Italians established special schools to teach peasants how to pass. In 1921 the number of immigrants mounted to 805,228 and it seemed that the prewar flood had resumed. Thus, Congress passed and President Harding signed the temporary Immigration Act of 1921. It limited entry by national origins quotas based on the distribution of the U.S. population by nationality shown in the census of 1910. It was in effect for three years. The Western Hemisphere, which produced few U.S. immigrants, was excluded from the system.
The National Origins Act of 1924 was signed by President Coolidge and established a very restrictive system. It took effect incrementally and became permanent in 1929. At the outset the entire Eastern Hemisphere received an annual ceiling of 164,000. But the distribution by nationality would be based on the percentages shown in the census of 1890, thereby substantially eliminating the new immigration. The results were dramatic: the Italian quota fell from 42,000 to 4000, the Polish from 31,000 to 6000, the Greek from 3000 to 100. In 1929 the Eastern Hemisphere total dropped to 154,277. The British quota alone was 65,000. Every nation received at least a token quota of 100. The law was also known as the Japanese Exclusion Act. Many Japanese-American residents of Hawaii were emigrating to the mainland and there was a renewed demand from the West Coast to keep Asiatics out. The Supreme Court had held that persons of Japanese ancestry were ineligible for naturalization as American citizens. The Gentlemen’s Agreement, of course, was repudiated and the Japanese were humiliated. The day the law took effect became a day of national mourning in Japan.
This quota system remained on the books until 1965. But its extreme restrictiveness proved unworkable and required many exceptions. A preference for family reunification, at first of wives and children and later of husbands, was adopted. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Stalin’s Soviet Union created an enormous number of refugees in the late thirties and forties. The U.S. insisted that they must be admitted under quota restrictions. The issue arose dramatically in 1939 when Congress refused the entry of 20,000 German refugee children with U.S. families as sponsors because the quota was full. World War II created an immense European population of refugees. The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 allowed 205,000 to enter the U.S. But this was done under the quota system by allowing each nation to mortgage up to 50 percent of its future quotas. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, for example, took the maxima for 67, 76, and 65 years respectively.
The Refugee Relief Act of 1953 widened the holes in the system. Now Communist China had also created many displaced persons and they were added to the Europeans. A total of 215,000 would be admitted outside the quotas on condition that each person was sponsored by an American citizen who became responsible for finding the refugee a job and a home and guaranteed that the refugee would not become a public charge. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 caused th
e flight of 200,000. President Eisenhower admitted 6,150 under unused quotas and others under the parole authority given the Attorney General by the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. Similarly, after Castro came to power in 1959, many Cubans fled to Miami and President Kennedy used the parole power to exempt them.
At the end of World War II opponents of the national origins system and those concerned about refugees urged Congress to overhaul the immigration system. But the Cold War bred a powerful opposition to Communism, expressed as McCarthyism. It made the abolition of national origins politically impossible. The McCarran-Walter Act in 1952 reaffirmed the old quota system, converted the Asiatic Barred Zone into the Asia Pacific Triangle (excluding Australia and New Zealand), and made the control of Communism an immigration issue, barring Communists, along with Fascists, from entry and requiring their deportation. President Truman vetoed the bill on the grounds that national origins was racist and insulted many American citizens. He was overridden.
Wholly aside from its discriminatory character, the national origins system was grossly inefficient. Between 1955 and 1964 Great Britain used only 25,000 of its annual quota of over 65,000, Ireland but 7000 of almost 18,000. On the other hand, China, with an annual quota of 105, contributed 4,209; Greece, with 308, supplied 5000; Hungary, whose quota was 865, sent 5,721; Italy, with 5,666, contributed close to 22,000; Japan, with 185, produced 4,973; and so on.2
Legislatively considered, immigration reform suffered from an almost fatal defect of narrow public focus. It had a great appeal to such organizations as the American Jewish Committee, the Lithuanian Immigration Service, Catholic Relief Services, the Church World Service, the Sons of Italy, United Ukrainian Relief, the Greek Archdiocese, the Japanese-American Organization, the Chinese Welfare Council, and several industrial unions with memberships drawn heavily from the more recent immigrants. But in the aggregate they represented only a small minority of the American people. Congressional Quarterly pointed out, “Many of the immigration bill’s most ardent supporters … believed the public at large was not greatly interested in immigration reform or especially concerned about the national origins quota system.” This was most evident in the South, which had the fewest new immigrants. Southerners were overwhelmingly descended from old immigrants and members of Congress from the region voted for McCarran-Walter and liked the quotas. Even Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a moderately liberal Georgian who supported civil rights for blacks, told Abba Schwartz, “After all, we are an Anglo-Saxon country.”
The Irish immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century, while technically old immigrants, were, as John Fitzgerald Kennedy, himself a descendant, wrote, “the first to endure the scorn and discrimination later to be inflicted, to some degree at least, on each successive wave of immigrants by already settled ‘Americans.’ ” The Fitzgerald and Kennedy offspring in Boston received this message with their mothers’ milk. This, doubtless, contributed to John Kennedy’s sense that the world was unfair and the pleasure he took in making it a little more fair. In the fifties when he was a senator from Massachusetts, that state had a higher percentage of recent immigrants than any other.
Thus, Kennedy became a leading spokesman for immigration reform. He voted against McCarran-Walter and to sustain President Truman’s veto. He sponsored the Displaced Persons Act, the Refugee Relief Act, and the 1957 bill to unite families. In 1958 he published a little book, A Nation of Immigrants, in which he argued that the population of the U.S. consisted almost entirely of peoples from overseas, each of whom had made an important contribution to American life. During the 1960 presidential campaign Kennedy spoke out for immigration reform, though it was hardly an important issue.
But when he became President in 1961, he was unable to move immigration reform. It was near the bottom of his agenda and Congress showed little interest. Francis E. Walter, the aged Pennsylvania Democrat who had authored the 1952 law, was still chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Nationality and had blocked every previous attempt at reform. James O. Eastland of Mississippi was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and strongly opposed change. As if this were not enough, the President bumped into an obstruction in the State Department’s Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs.
This monstrosity, a monument of the McCarthy era, had been created by the McCarran-Walter Act. Abba Schwartz described the bureau as it took shape in the fifties under Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as follows:
The Bureau was given the responsibility for investigating the loyalty, the manhood and the morality of the twenty-five thousand employees of State in Washington, and its embassies and consulates throughout the world. It was also charged by Dulles with the physical security of the Department’s property at home and abroad and with the protection of visiting foreign dignitaries.
At the same time, it had the statutory responsibility for administering the immigration and nationality laws which had themselves become part of the McCarthy problem in the 1950’s. In those years, there was great concern over both the admission of subversives and other undesirables to the United States and of communists who were not entitled to passports under the Internal Security Act of 1950.
To a considerable extent, in other words, the Bureau assumed in those years the negative functions of a police agency.
The first administrator, Scott McLeod, was, in fact, a policeman. He had been an FBI agent and an investigator and had a close relationship with Joe McCarthy. When he left, one of his main assistants, Frances Knight, stayed on as head of the passport office. She saw her function as that of preventing communists, very broadly defined, from entering the country and of compelling them to leave. She was especially close to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and two of its key members, Eastland and Thomas Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, who gave her political clout.
Schwartz was an authority on refugees and the related questions of visas, passports, and immigration. His interest started at the Harvard Law School, where he joined other students in a committee to assist German student refugees from Hitler. While practicing law in Washington after the war, he worked with several international organizations on refugee matters. He also counseled Senator Kennedy on immigration.
In January 1961 the new President asked Schwartz if he would be interested in taking over the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs. He said he would if changes could be made in its operations. The next month Kennedy told him he had run into a problem of “ethnic politics.” The Italian-American members of Congress had complained to Larry O’Brien that Italians had not been adequately recognized in appointments. Peter Rodino, the New Jersey Democrat, who represented Italian-Americans in Newark, lobbied for Salvatore Bontempo for the job at State. In July 1961 Secretary of State Rusk named this New Jersey politician head of the bureau.
But Bontempo hardly got his feet under the desk. He resigned in December. Kennedy went back to Schwartz. He said he would accept if he became a presidential appointee and if security matters were removed from the bureau, which required a change in the law. Walter said he wanted to help that “fine young man,” as he referred to the President, and he and Senator J. William Fulbright proposed legislation which was enacted in June 1962.
Kennedy told Schwartz that he wanted America to become an “open society,” a term they had often discussed and which both understood to embrace the end of the national origin, quota system, freedom of aliens to visit the U.S. even if they held hostile views, the right of Americans to travel anywhere in the world except in wartime, and a revival of the full traditional policy of welcoming refugees from oppression. The President submitted the Schwartz appointment to the Senate, which approved with only one vote in dissent, and he became Assistant Secretary of State on October 5, 1962.
In effect, more than two years had been lost in Kennedy’s plan to reform the immigration law. His Immigration Message to the Congress did not go up until July 23, 1963.
The quota system, he declared, is “without basis in either logi
c or reason” and should be abolished. It was heavily weighted in favor of northern Europe. On the other hand, “an American citizen with a Greek father or mother must wait at least 18 months to bring his parents here to join him.” The use of the 1890 census to determine quotas was “arbitrary” and intended to discriminate.
He proposed that the shift to the new system take place over a five-year period. Each year 20 percent of the quota would be placed in a reserve pool to be allocated by the new formula. During the transition no country would have a quota in excess of 10 percent of the total. The President also asked for a new immigration board to advise him and to set standards for the admission of those with skills.
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