One hundred years ago, on May 26, British citizens pressed Congress to stop the immigration wave from Ellis Island and to reduce the number of new immigrants entering the country.
The legislation is being lamented , by David Bier, an activist from the Cato Institute, which is funded by investors who oppose borders, non- business cooperation, and another nationalist curbs on their businesses and share portfolios:
It is plausible that the United States would be twice its]population ] size today if immigration had continued. If China and other nations ‘ economies and customer bases were twice as large as they are now, the United States would not have lost much of their political, social, and business impact in recent years. The population growth may result in a stronger economy, a stronger market, and more goods and services output, which may benefit all Americans.
The 1924 legislation was signed on May 26 by President Calvin Coolidge, and it ended the Ellis Island flood of quick movement.
Visitors dropped by two- quarters, from 70o, 000 in 1924 down to an annual ordinary of 200, 000 from 1926 to 1970. In 1939, that inflow added only one immigrant for every 12 birth, which is far below President Joe Biden’s plan of adding approximately one migratory for every American birth. By 1970, workers comprised only 5 percentage of the U. S. people — far below the 15 percentage seen in 1910 and again in 2024.
The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which was signed by President Lyndon Johnson, was sidelined 41 times afterwards.
That 1965 regulation is now rapidly transforming the United States ‘ people, culture, and economy, amid little public debate over Biden’s mass immigration and President Donald Trump’s promises of reform in 2025.
1930s: A family of immigrants looking out at the Statue of Liberty from Ellis Island in reverse. ( Photo by FPG/Getty Images )
Today’s economic- minded critics of the 1924 law are politically powerful, partly because Biden’s inflow of immigrant workers, consumers, and renters spins off a huge wealth to fund pro- migration advocacy, lobbying, and political campaigns.
A significant portion of the advocacy funding is distributed through the various ethnic groups, who logically want to draw in more of their native-country population. Even more importantly, the investor receives the funds from adjacent progressives, who viscerally detest the international borders that restrict their ambitions to every demographic group in the world. Despite the multiracial makeup of the United States, progressives call the borders of the United States racist because they impede the aspirations of racially diverse people outside the country.
As they denounce the 1924 law, pro-immigration advocates are now trying to combine both economic and racial claims.  ,” Today, we face conditions eerily similar to those leading up to the 1924 law”, said , Zeke , Hernandez, a pro- migration professor at the Wharton School. He wrote in the TheHill.com:
100 years ago today, America committed its biggest immigration blunder when President , Calvin Coolidge , signed the , National Origins Act. As we commemorate the anniversary, most of the , conversation , focuses on , condemning , the , racist , motivation of excluding Asians and Southern and Eastern Europeans. ( Suffice it to say that , Adolf Hitler , was a , fan. )
…
This time, we’ve experienced a mass arrival of , Asians , and , Latin Americans. Like 100 years ago, many today worry that they’re poor, uneducated, do n’t speak English and bring unassimilable cultures and religions. The combination of 9/11 and a leaky border now serves as a pretext for severe restrictions, as WWI did in the past. And a group of well-funded, politically motivated pundits is using the same old “villain” argument to defend immigration, which hurts our economy, and threatens our precious heritage.
But Roy , Beck, former head of the NumbersUSA reform group, has a more optimistic view of the 1924 law:
Benefits were provided for all classes and ethnies of American workers. However, once expanding industrial opportunities made it easier for them to demonstrate their productivity, their status rose nearly twice as quickly. Between 1940 and 1980, for example, the real incomes of Black men rose four- fold. By 1980, more than 70 % of Black Americans had discovered they were in the middle class, up from 22 % in 1940.  , Combined, lower rates of migration and lower fertility caused around  , one- third , of a great reduction in U. S. inequality during those decades, according to economic historians Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert.
No wonder W. E. B. DuBois observed, in the NAACP magazine Crisis, that the 1924 legislation’s” stopping…the importing of cheap White labor on any terms has been the economic salvation of American Black labor”.
That “economic salvation” could have arrived decades earlier, if Congress had simply ended mass immigration. Williamson and economist Timothy J. Hatton calculated that, without foreign immigration from 1890 to 1910, real wages for urban workers could’ve been 34 % higher in 1910.
In Wilmington, where the negro laborers have proven so unreliable, the preference for north Europeans has given way before necessity, and Italians are being brought in to furnish more efficient labor. Texas has secured colonies of northerners, of Germans and of Italians, and smaller numbers of Japanese rice farmers.
According to Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, the slowdown in migration made it possible for American society to absorb the diversity of 25 million immigrants who had been imported during the Ellis Island era.
The pause from 1924 to 1965] in immigration led to a half- century- long decline in the foreign- born share of the population, from a level that fluctuated between 13 % and 15 % of the nation’s inhabitants during the Great Wave, to a low of less than 5 % in 1970.
Thus, immigrants were not constantly re-energized by newcomers, which, in addition to vigorous and self-assured Americanization efforts in schools and elsewhere, helped create the strong national identity that helped America triumph over Nazism and Communism.
The post- 1924 gain for ordinary Americans would be reversed by the 1965 law,  , Princeton University economist Leah Boustan wrote in her 2017 book,  , Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets. According to Boustan, economists “estimate that immigrant arrivals can account for one-third of the declining wages of black high school dropouts from 1950 to 2000.” By 1980, black Americans were returning to southern cities as a result of a wave of foreign immigration.
Employees have seen an irregular decline in their share of the new wealth produced annually since 1970, when the new immigrants allowed by the 1965 act began to arrive, according to federal data released by the , Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The employees ‘ share of the U. S. economy dropped from almost 52 percent in 1970 down to 43 percent in President Joe Biden’s high- migration economy. That drop moved 9 percent of the economy — roughly$ 1.5 trillion in 2022 — from 160 million employees to their employers, investors, and government.
Similarly, a 2023 report by the Census Bureau showed that median income climbed from$ 55, 000 in 1970 to an inflation- adjusted$ 60, 000 in 2015 amid the massive inflow enabled by the 1965 law and the subsequent 1990 immigration law. That rise is just 9 percent over 45 years, or 0.2 percent per year.
The H- 1B program allowed companies to hire foreign graduates via the 1990 law for positions sought by American graduates, roughly double the annual inflow of immigrants. The 1990 migration law also established the informal policy of Extraction Migration, which imports millions of consumers, renters, and workers to compensate for Wall Street’s export of the nation’s high- productivity manufacturing sector and white- collar jobs to the citizens of low- wage developing nations.
According to a May 22 Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City bulletin, average income has been slashed since 2021 due to Biden’s massive inflow. In the home state of Sen. Chris Murphy (DCT),  , for example, wages fell by roughly 8 percent amid an 8 percent rise in employment due to immigration, the report showed.
The 1924 law’s supporters today are careful to criticize the ethnic politics that were mingled with civic and economic arguments during the 2024 debate.
Hasia Diner, a former professor and author, gave the politics a sketch to JTA. org in April 2024:
There]were ] multiple forces at work. First, … the white, Protestant, Anglo- Saxon]Americans ] — were really disturbed by World War I. During the war, ethnic groups [and their home countries ] allied, so everyone wants their voices heard based on what they thought would benefit their ancestral home. And many” Americans” really feared that the United States was becoming balkanized in the same way as the Austro-Hungarian empire was disintegrating [into several countries after the war]. I think of the 1924 act as an effort to end that process of balkanization.
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When you have Henry Ford and America First, antisemitism certainly ratchets up in the 1920s and 1930s. But again, every opinion poll done after 1935 shows that the American public does not want immigration, period.
The law barred millions of migrants during the 41 years, including Jews subsequently killed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazis in 1942 and 1943. ” Between 1938 and 1941, 123, 868 self- identified Jewish refugees immigrated to the United States” , , according to the U. S.  , Holocaust Memorial Museum. ” Many hundreds of thousands more had applied at American consulates in Europe, but they were unable to immigrate. Many of them were trapped in , Nazi- occupied territory and murdered in the , Holocaust.
Some of the leading advocates of the 1924 law denied racial hostility”. It makes no difference from whence they come — too many come,” said , Rep. Albert Johnson ( R- Wash ).
But Beck claimed that the taint of ethnic politics contributed to the 1965 eradication of the 1924 law.
Its system of national quotas, which favor northern Europeans and completely excludes many nations on other continents, was perceived as incompatible with the country’s transition to a race-blind society. In 1965, Congress was inspired by the need to pass new immigration laws that unintentionally re-enter the mass immigration of today, which none of the law’s sponsors claimed they intended…
The Immigration Act of 1924 fumbled on who should immigrate. However, in deciding how many should be allowed to prove that, despite racist domestic laws and still-existing social norms, they could prosper in tight labor markets even more quickly than white workers did when they did.
” We need to do something similar today,” Krikorian told Breitbart News”. But without the natural origins baloney and by simply reducing]immigration ] numbers.”
Unsurprisingly, today’s proponents of more immigration are eager to rally Donald Trump and other proponents of immigration reform around the ethnic politics of the 1924 law. ” Hernandez wrote in TheHill.com” that we are now facing the same precipice as our forebearers did exactly 100 years ago. Will we be smarter this time?”
Larry Fink, founder of the$ 10 trillion BlackRock investment firm, is asking the same question.  ”, I can argue, in the developed countries, the big]economic ] winners are the countries that have shrinking populations,” Fink , said , last month:
That’s something that most people never talked about. We always used to think]a ] shrinking population is a cause for negative]economic ] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries ]such as , China, and Japan ] that have xenophobic anti- immigration policies, they do n’t allow anybody to come in —]so they have ] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology …
” If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which , most of us think it will , ]emphasis added ]  , — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations,” Fink said.
