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Saturday, September 23, 2023

Why 1924 Jewish Immigration to USA was Slowed Down So Much

 Nadene Goldfoot                                       

  The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe (Jews)  and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia.

The population of the USA in 1924 was 114,109,000.  

By 1930's, USA population was 131,669,000 of which 4,850,000 were Jewish.  

As it was, look at the typical case of Werner Oster who immigrated from Germany May 4-12, 1939, probably the last Jew out.  He had to have an American sponsor to be responsible for any finances.  My great uncle Max Turn took that upon himself and got Werner a job with my father who was just starting his own business.  Otherwise, Werner couldn't have entered or stayed in the USA.  He had arrived on the SS Washington at age 22. Werner married my father's sister, becoming my uncle. 

         Jewish refugees about the St. Louis Wikimedia Commons  Most notoriously, in June 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis and its 937 passengers, almost all Jewish, were turned away from the port of Miami, forcing the ship to return to Europe; more than a quarter died in the Holocaust.

It must be that a Jewish organization sponsored getting Jews into the USA.  In a long tradition of “persecuting the refugee,” the State Department and FDR claimed that Jewish immigrants could threaten national security. 

Under U.S. law today, every person who immigrates based on a relative petition must have a financial sponsor. If you choose to sponsor your relative’s immigration by filing a Form I-130, Petition for Alien Relative, you must agree to be the financial sponsor and file an affidavit of support when the time comes for actual immigration. If you do not meet the financial qualifications at that time, you still must file a Form I-864, Affidavit of Support, and accept responsibility, but you and your relative also must find other individuals who meet the requirements and are willing to make this commitment by filing affidavits of support. 

The population today is  estimated at 339,996,563 at mid year. the United States population is equivalent to 4.23% of the total world population. the U.S.A. ranks number 3 in the list of countries (and dependencies) by population. Jews make up 2% of the USA population or about 6 million.   

 The law was not modified to aid the flight of Jewish refugees in the 1930s or 1940s despite the rise of Nazi Germany.  Why didn't the House or Senate or President think of doing it?  No one?  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president from 3/4/1933 to 4/12/1945, our most crucial years of help.  His vice presidents were John Garner, Henry Wallace and then Harry Truman who backed Israel when they went to the UN and pronounced the birth of Israel when he became president..

    Welcome to the land of Freedom:  
  

 In the 1880s, more than 200,000 Eastern European Jews arrived in the U.S. In the next decade, the number was over 300,000, and between 1900 and 1914 it topped 1.5 million, most passing through the new immigrant processing center at Ellis Island.

How did the USA slow down the immigration of fleeing Jews from Europe?  The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, , enacted May 26, 1924), was a federal law that prevented immigration from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, where the Jews lived that were trying to leave eastern Europe. 

The total annual immigration quota for the rest of the world was capped at 165,000—an 80% reduction of the yearly average before 1914. The act temporarily reduced the annual quota of any nationality from 3% of their 1910 population, per the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, to 2% as recorded in the 1890 census; which has been unavailable to genealogists.  The available

 census to us has  been 1880 and the next one has been 1900.   A new quota was implemented in 1927, based on each nationality's share of the total U.S. population in the 1920 census, which would govern U.S. immigration policy until 1965.

According to the Department of State, the purpose of the act was "to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity. " the quality or state of being all the same or all of the same kind."the cultural homogeneity of our society."  One can look upon this as an act of anti-Semitism.  

The 1924 act would define U.S. immigration policy for nearly three decades, until being substantially revised by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and ultimately replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

 According to Commonweal, the act "relied on false nostalgia for a census that only seemed to depict a homogenous, Northern European–descended nation: in reality, 15 percent of the nation were immigrants in 1890."

 The 1922 and 1925 systems based on dated census records of the foreign-born population were intended as temporary measures; the 1924 Act's National Origins Formula based on the 1920 census of the total U.S. population took effect on July 1, 1929.

Annual National QuotaAct of 1921Act of 1924Act of 1952
1922[a]%1925[b]%1930[c]%1965[d]%
 Albania2880.08%1000.06%1000.07%1000.06%
 Germany                     67,60718.90%  51,22731.11%25,95716.89%   25,81416.28%
Because Eastern European immigration did not become substantial until the late 19th century, the law's use of the population of the U.S. in 1890 as the basis for calculating quotas effectively made mass migration from Eastern Europe, where the vast majority of the Jewish diaspora lived at the time, impossible. 

In 1929, the quotas were adjusted to one-sixth of 1% of the 1920 census figures, and the overall immigration limit reduced to 150,000.
2/3 of Europe's Jews were killed in the Holocaust.  

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