The Rise and Fall of the Immigration Act of 1924: A Greek Tragedy

Center For Immigration Studies ^ | 11 November 2024 | George Fishman

[zeestephen]

The Immigration Act of 1924 ushered in a four-decade-long Great Pause in mass immigration...In 1965, Congress, in its zeal to remove the demon of national origins quotas, restarted mass immigration...The results have been disastrous for our country, with a 19 percent drop in the average real earnings of white men (from 1970 to 2014) and a 32 percent drop for Black men.

[ansel12]

“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s.

In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960.
In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin.

After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”

[dp0622]

That act in large part was to stop Italians from coming...and allow more south American in as the thought at the time was that Italians were mentally inferior.

I’ve seen articles in the NY Times and elsewhere from back then that describe Italian immigrants as mentally backwards brutes.

I may be a brute sometimes but I’m pretty smart, I think :)

And then Rs let kennedy try to destroy the country...well, a little more than try.

And now Trump must fix it.

[Macho MAGA Man]

President Eisenhower had the solution.....”Operation Wetback”. They self deported when he sent Retired Lieutenant General Joseph Swing to round them up and go after the businesses who hired them.

[Tired of Taxes]

Thankfully, my ancestors came here before that act was passed, but my older relatives remembered the Klan marching through their neighborhood in the 1920s.

[dfwgator]

One of the results of the 1924 Immigration Act was cutting out immigration from Asia.

The Japanese, which still had cordial relations with the US at the time, saw it as an insult, and led to the gradual deterioration in relations that ultimately led to Pearl Harbor.

[Albion Wilde]

bump

[Texan4Life]

I see why they got JFK !!!