19 Spring 2026 An 1891 comprehensive immigration act “defined new categories of women and men as ineligible to immigrate, whether on the basis of class, gender and sexuality, physical and mental disability, or political affiliation.”13 A 1917 law sought to reduce immigrants from “exotic” places, non-Protestants, and those with radical political ideas. The law required an eight-dollar tax on immigrants and barred immigrants who might become a “public charge.”14 This provision would later be used to exclude many Jews trying to escape from Germany in the 1930s. The 1917 law also required literacy tests for immigrants. If Congress had been trying to exclude Jews, the law could have required literacy in the language of an immigrant’s “home country,” because many Jews were not literate in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and other local languages. Instead, the legislation welcomed Jews. While not naming any other languages, the statute specifically declared that literacy in “Hebrew or Yiddish” would qualify for admission into the country. The law also waived the literacy requirement for immigrants “seeking admission to the United States to avoid religious persecution”15 which would have allowed illiterate Jews into the country. Closing the Door Open immigration ended with acts in 1921 and 1924, which created quotas for every country. The 1921 Act was a temporary, “emergency act,” but the 1924 law, the Johnson-Reed Act, limited total annual immigration to 165,000 people and set very low quotas for countries in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, and the former Ottoman Empire. Congress explicitly favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe, and (with the exception of Ireland and to some extent Germany) discriminated against non-Protestants. National quotas were based on the ancestors of people in the United States in 1890, which favored immigration from the British Isles, Germany, and the Nordic countries. Many Protestant ministers, supporters of eugenics, and leaders of the newly revived antisemitic, anti-Catholic, and racist Ku Klux Klan supported the law. But bigoted White nationalists were not the only backers of the law. Samuel Gompers, the Jewish president and founder of the American Federation of Labor, supported reduced immigration because he believed immigrants lowered wages for his union members.16 Representative John Tillman of Arkansas complained that “We have admitted the dregs of Europe” and “mongrelized” the nation so “that our genius, stability, and greatness, and promise of advancement, and achievement are actually menaced.”17 In the wake of the Soviet Revolution, led in part by Leon Trotsky, who was Jewish, and the prominence of Jewish radicals like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, such arguments resonated with many in and out of Congress. Henry Ford expounded “conspiracy theories and menacing stereotypes of Jews,” through articles in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and his four-volume The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.18 Jews were hardly the only target of the quotas. Debate over the law took place shortly after two immigrant Italian anarchists, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, were charged and tried for murder, while Italian immigrants and 13. Act of March 3, 1891, supra note 11, at 1084a; Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner, IMMIGRATION: AN AMERICAN HISTORY 5 (2022). 14. An Act to regulate the immigration of aliens to, and the residence of aliens in, the United States, Act of Feb. 5, 1917, ch. 29, 39 Stat. 874-898. This would have been about half of the weekly wages of semi-skilled male factory workers and about a full week’s wages for women. This tax would have been levied for the immigrants who had already paid for passage from Europe; see National Industrial Conference Board, “Wartime Changes in Wages, September, 1914-March, 1919,” Research Report No. 20, at 22-74 (2019). Large numbers of peasants from Poland, other parts of Central and Eastern Europe, Italy, other places bordering on the Mediterranean, and elsewhere owned small plots of land which they could sell, enabling them to move to the United States and pay the tax. Most Jews coming at this time owned no land in Europe and had little cash when they arrived. 15. Act of Feb. 5, 1917, supra note 14, at 877. 16. Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner, supra note 13. 17. Id. 18. Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR AND THE JEWS 21, 22 (2013).
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