Last updated Prescott F. Hall, one of the founders of the Immigration Restriction League
The Immigration Restriction League was an American nativist and anti-immigration organization founded by Charles Warren, Robert DeCourcy Ward, and Prescott F. Hall in 1894. According to Erika Lee, in 1894 the old stock Yankee upper-class founders of the League were, "convinced that Anglo-Saxon traditions, peoples, and culture were being drowned in a flood of racially inferior foreigners from Southern and Eastern Europe."[1] Established during a period of increasing anti-immigration sentiment in the United States, the League was founded by Boston Brahmins such as Henry Cabot Lodge with the purpose of preventing immigrants from southern and eastern Europe from immigrating to the U.S. due to a belief that they were racially inferior to western and northern Europeans. The League argued that the American way of life was threatened by immigration from these regions, and lobbied Washington to pass anti-immigration legislation restricting the entry of what they perceived as "undesirable" immigrants in order to uphold Old Stock Americans hegemony.
The league was founded in Boston, and soon had branches in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.[2] It attracted hundreds of prominent scholars and philanthropists and other establishment figures, mostly from the New England social and academic elite. An umbrella group, the National Association of Immigration Restriction Leagues was created in 1896, and one of the founders of the original League, Prescott F. Hall, served as its general secretary from 1896 until his death in 1921.
The League used books, pamphlets, meetings, and numerous newspaper and journal articles to promote their campaign of anti-immigrationism and eugenics. As the first American anti-immigrant think tank, The League also started to employ lobbyists in Washington after 1900 and built a broad anti-immigrant coalition consisting of patriotic societies, farmers' associations, Southern and New England legislators, and eugenicists who supported the League's goals.
Active in lobbying for the passage of what became the Immigration Act of 1917, The League disbanded after Hall's death in 1921.
Demands
Numerical limitation
On April 8, 1918, the League introduced a bill into the Congress to increase the restriction of immigration by means of numerical limitation. The goal of this bill, called "An Act to regulate the immigration of aliens to, and the residence in, the United States," was to reduce as much as possible the number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe while increasing the number of immigrants from Northern and Western Europe who the League thought were people with kindred values.
The bill asked for an increase of the duty paid by alien passengers to enter the United States from two to five dollars.[4] It excluded the citizens of the United States, Canada, Mexico and Cuba. The League demanded an increase in duty in order to properly support and maintain the inspection and deportation of immigrants. Among other things, the funds obtained from the increase in duty would be used for:
Enlargement of immigrant stations
The development and perfecting of the service along the Mexico–US and Canada–US borders.
More immigration inspectors
Enlarged immigration office facilities
With this bill, the League also hoped to diminish the immigration of people from the poorer countries, who were considered less beneficial for the United States.
Additions to the excluded classes
The National Conference on Immigration, held in New York, proposed to add imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, and epileptics to the excluded classes.[5] Persons of poor physique were more susceptible to diseases because of the unsanitary places where they lived. The Bill also demanded an extension of fines to steamship companies for bringing imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, insane persons or epileptics into the U.S.
Prevention of unlawful landing
Previously, transportation companies were only asked to exercise care not to transport illegal immigrants into the United States when returning home from Europe. This bill ordered transportation companies to prevent the landing of "undesirable aliens".
Deportation of public charges
It was a law that would allow deportation of immigrants who entered the United States in violation of law and those becoming public charges from causes arising prior to their landing. Furthermore, it stated that the company that provided the transportation of such individuals would pay half the cost of their removal to the port of deportation.
Literacy test
The IRL made common cause with blue collar workers in labor unions[6] in advocating a literacy requirement as a means to limit poorly-educated immigrants who would lower the wage scale.[7] Potential immigrants had to be able to read their own language. Congress passed the literacy bill for the first time in 1896, which set the ability to read at least 40 words in any language as a requirement for admission to the United States. President Grover Cleveland vetoed that bill in 1897.[8]
President William Taft also vetoed a literacy test in 1913. Again in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson vetoed such a bill. But in 1917 Congress overrode Wilson's veto and instituted the first literacy requirement for naturalization as part of the Immigration Act of 1917.[9] The law stated that immigrants over 16 years of age should read 30 to 80 words in ordinary use in any language. The test however proved to be largely irrelevant, as literacy rates by the late 1910s had improved dramatically in southern and eastern Europe; furthermore, the most radical (and most dreaded) immigrants often turned out to be the most literate ones.[10]
Barkan, Elliott Robert. And Still They Come: Immigrants and American Society, 1920 to the 1990s (Harlan Davidson, 1996), ISBN978-0-88295-928-3
Decker, Julio. "Citizenship and its Duties: The Immigration Restriction League as Progressive Movement", in Immigrants & Minorities, v. 32, 2 (2014), 162–182
Decker, Julio. "The Transnational Biopolitics of Whiteness and Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1894–1924", in Norbert Finzsch, Ursula Lehmkuhl, Eva Bischoff (eds.): Provincializing the United States: Colonialism, Decolonization and (Post)Colonial Governance in Transnational Perspective, (2014) 121–153 ISBN9783825363604
Gratton, Brian. "Race or Politics? Henry Cabot Lodge and the Origins of the Immigration Restriction Movement in the United States." Journal of Policy History 30.1 (2018): 128–157.
Higham, John. "Origins of immigration restriction, 1882-1897: A social analysis." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39.1 (1952): 77–88. online
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (Rutgers University Press, 1955) ISBN978-0-8135-3123-6
Lee, Erika. America for Americans a history of xenophobia in the United States (2019) excerpt
McSeveney, Samuel. "Immigrants, the Literacy Test, and Quotas: Selected American History College Textbooks' Coverage of the Congressional Restriction of European Immigration, 1917–1929," in The History Teacher, v. 21 (1987), 41–51
Solomon, Barbara Miller. Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (1956), the standard history of the League
Tichenor, Daniel J. Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (2002)
Vought, Hans P. The Bully Pulpit and the Melting Pot (Mercer University Press, 2004), ISBN978-0-86554-887-9
Spiro, Jonathan P. (2009). Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. University of Vermont Press. ISBN978-1-58465-715-6.
Henry Cabot Lodge was an American Republican politician, historian, and statesman from Massachusetts. He served in the United States Senate from 1893 to 1924 and is best known for his positions on foreign policy. His successful crusade against Woodrow Wilson's Treaty of Versailles ensured that the United States never joined the League of Nations and his reservations against that treaty influenced the structure of the modern United Nations.
The Cabot family was part of the Boston Brahmin, also known as the "first families of Boston".
A literacy test assesses a person's literacy skills: their ability to read and write. Literacy tests have been administered by various governments, particularly to immigrants. In the US, between the 1850s and 1960s, literacy tests administered to voters had the effect of disenfranchising African Americans and other groups with diminished access to education. Other countries, notably Australia, as part of its White Australia policy, and South Africa adopted literacy tests either to exclude certain racialized groups from voting or to prevent them from immigrating to the country.
Madison Grant was an American lawyer, zoologist, anthropologist, and writer known for his work as a conservationist, eugenicist, and advocate of scientific racism. Grant is less noted for his far-reaching achievements in conservation than for his pseudoscientific advocacy of Nordicism, a form of racism which views the "Nordic race" as superior.
The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act, was a federal law that prevented immigration from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. It also authorized the creation of the country's first formal border control service, the U.S. Border Patrol, and established a "consular control system" that allowed entry only to those who first obtained a visa from a U.S. consulate abroad.
Immigration reduction refers to a government and social policy in the United States that advocates a reduction in the amount of immigration allowed into the country. Steps advocated for reducing the numbers of immigrants include advocating stronger action to prevent illegal entry and illegal migration, and reductions in non-immigrant temporary work visas. Some advocate tightening the requirements for legal immigration requirements to reduce numbers, or move the proportions of legal immigrants away from those on family reunification programs to skills-based criteria.
Harry Hamilton Laughlin was an American educator and eugenicist. He served as the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office from its inception in 1910 to its closure in 1939, and was among the most active individuals influencing American eugenics policy, especially compulsory sterilization legislation.
Jeremiah Whipple Jenks (1856–1929) was an American economist, educator, and Professor at Cornell University, who held various posts in the US government throughout his career. He served as a member of the Dillingham Immigration Commission from 1907 to 1914 in which he led research projects on the state of immigration to the United States.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran–Walter Act, codified under Title 8 of the United States Code, governs immigration to and citizenship in the United States. It came into effect on June 27, 1952. The legislation consolidated various immigration laws into a single text. Officially titled the Immigration and Nationality Act, it is often referred to as the 1952 law to distinguish it from the 1965 legislation. This law increased the quota for Europeans outside Northern and Western Europe, gave the Department of State authority to reject entries affecting native wages, eliminated 1880s bans on contract labor, set a minimum quota of one hundred visas per country, and promoted family reunification by exempting citizens' children and spouses from numerical caps.
The Immigration Act of 1917 was a United States Act that aimed to restrict immigration by imposing literacy tests on immigrants, creating new categories of inadmissible persons, and barring immigration from the Asia-Pacific zone. The most sweeping immigration act the United States had passed until that time, it followed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in marking a turn toward nativism. The 1917 act governed immigration policy until it was amended by the Immigration Act of 1924; both acts were revised by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.
Augustus Peabody Gardner was an American military officer and Republican Party politician from Massachusetts. He represented the North Shore region in the Massachusetts Senate and United States House of Representatives in the early 20th century. Through his marriage to Constance Lodge, Gardner was the son-in-law of Henry Cabot Lodge.
John Bond Trevor Sr. (1878–1956) was an American lawyer and influential lobbyist for immigration restrictions. A wealthy nativist, he was an architect of the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned Asian immigration and established quotas that stood for forty years until 1964.
The United States Immigration Commission was a bipartisan special committee formed in February 1907 by the United States Congress, President of the United States and Speaker of the House of Representatives, to study the origins and consequences of recent immigration to the United States. This was in response to increasing political concerns about the effects of immigration in the United States and its brief was to report on the social, economic and moral state of the nation. During its time in action the Commission employed a staff of more than 300 people for over 3 years, spent better than a million dollars and accumulated mass data.
Nativism is the political policy of promoting or protecting the interests of "native-born" or established inhabitants over those of immigrants, including the support of anti-immigration and immigration-restriction measures. Despite the name, and in the US in particular, this position is usually held by the descendants of immigrants themselves, and is not a movement led by Indigenous peoples, as opposited to Nativists in Europe who are descended from native peoples such as Celts, Anglo-Saxons or Norsemen. However, some anti-immigrants who hold this position maintain a different definition of "indigenous".
Joseph Lee was a wealthy Bostonian who trained as a lawyer but never practiced law, and is considered the "founder of the playground movement". He was a social worker, author, and philanthropist. Lee believed that community life could be strengthened by playgrounds and play. Lee was also a proponent of eugenics and a major financial supporter of the Immigration Restriction League, a Boston-based group that promoted race-based eugenics as a basis for restricting immigration from eastern and southern Europe.
Eugenics, the set of beliefs and practices which aims at improving the genetic quality of the human population, played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States from the late 19th century into the mid-20th century. The cause became increasingly promoted by intellectuals of the Progressive Era.
The League to Enforce Peace was a non-state American organization established in 1915 to promote the formation of an international body for world peace. It was formed at Independence Hall in Philadelphia by American citizens concerned by the outbreak of World War I in Europe. Support for the league dissolved and it ceased operations by 1923.
Robert DeCourcy Ward was an American climatologist, author, educator and leading eugenics and immigration reform advocate in the early 20th Century. He became the first ever professor of climatology in the United States and made contributions to the study of the climate. His advocacy for immigration reform and eugenics led him to co-found the Immigration Restriction League which was instrumental in the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 which reduced Jewish and Italian immigration to the U.S. by over 95% and completely barred Asian immigration until 1952.
Prescott Farnsworth Hall was an American lawyer and author who championed nativism, eugenics and anti-immigration views.
Nativism in United States politics is opposition to an internal minority on the basis of its supposed “un-American” foundation. Historian Tyler Anbinder defines a nativist as:
someone who fears and resents immigrants and their impact on the United States, and wants to take some action against them, be it through violence, immigration restriction, or placing limits on the rights of newcomers already in the United States. “Nativism” describes the movement to bring the goals of nativists to fruition.
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