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| Trump Should Absolutely Model 1920s Immigration Policies Because They Worked |
| 2025-12-16 |
| [Federalist] here’s a lot of talk from the left comparing the Trump administration’s immigration policies to a supposedly backward 1920. "Trump’s latest anti-immigration push echoes the nativism of the 1920s," alleges a Dec. 7 analysis by The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty. "Language such as that used by the president and those around him harks back more than a century ago to the passage of a series of laws, capped by one in 1924, known as the Johnson-Reed Act," Tumulty warns. But the reality that some of those who advocated for tighter restrictions may have done so for less-than-noble reasons doesn’t obviate the fact that the Johnson-Reed Act served an important purpose in a time when the United States was becoming increasingly fractured because of high levels of immigration from cultures different from America. In the first two decades of the 20th century, almost 15 million immigrants poured into the United States. In 1920, about 13 percent of the United States population was foreign born. (Today the number is slightly higher than 15 percent.) American citizens whose families had been in the United States for generations became increasingly concerned that large populations of recent arrivals would not be able to effectively assimilate — including by adopting English and learning the principles of American republican self-governance — since these immigrants formed ghettoized communities. Some of these immigrants were from Asia (primarily Japan, China, and the Philippines), but most of them were from European countries. The Johnson-Reed Act had a dramatic effect. Between 1901 to 1914, an average of 210,000 Italians arrived in the United States every year — the new quota placed the number of those who were allowed to enter at about 4,000 per year. Because of the act, "more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Portuguese, Rumanians, Spaniards, Chinese, and Japanese left the United States than entered," according to authors Steven G. Koven and Frank Götzke (emphasis added). |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #2 |
| Posted by: mossomo 2025-12-16 13:15 |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2025-12-16 08:24 |