Nationalism, Immigration Control, and the Ethnoracial Remapping of America in the 1920s

Abstract

In Strangers in the Land (1955), John Higham wrote, anti foreign wave that flowed without pause for two decades in the early twentieth century . . . must stand alone in its persistence, in its complexity, and in the massiveness of its institutional deposit. . . The country would never be the same again, either in its social structure or in its habits of mind (1). Higham's classic book remains one of the best studies of anti-immigrant thinking in American politics, especially with its analysis of the evolution of race-based nativism in the early twentieth century, which led Congress to pass restrictive immigration legislation in the 1920s. In the long history of American immigration, the so-called quota was arguably the most important change in official policy. It marked a fundamental shift in orientation toward foreign immigration, from normatively open to normatively restrictive. Higham and other immigration historians of his day wrote mostly about European immigration. It was not until the advent of ethnic studies in the 1970s that the experience of non-European immigrant groups, notably Latino/as and Asian Americans, began to receive sustained attention from scholars. Recently, immigration and ethnic historians have pushed the field further in two respects. First, they consider immigration, race, and ethnicity in comparative terms. How do the experiences of European, Mexican and other Latino/a, and Asian migrants compare? How do they compare with that of African Americans? How have changes in law and policy altered the racial landscape During and immediately after World