On
May 26th,
1924 the Congress enacted and President Calvin Coolidge soon
thereafter signed into law the Immigration Act of 1924 which included
the National Origins Act and the Asian Exclusion Act limiting “the
annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to
2% of the number of people who were already living in the United
States as of the 1890 census, down from the 3% cap
set by the 'Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which used the census of
1910.
The law was
primarily aimed at further restricting immigration of Southern
Europeans and Eastern Europeans, especially Italians, Slavs and
Eastern European Jews. In addition, it severely restricted
immigration of Africans and banned the immigration of Arabs and
Asians.” (1) The Act is
commonly known as the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, authored by
Congressman Albert Johnson and Connecticut Senator David Reed.
Johnson,
representing Tacoma Washington, became Chairman of the House
Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, a plumb committee
assignment for a man who was head of the 'Eugenics Research
Association”, “a group which opposed interracial
marriage and supported forced sterilization of the mentally
disabled.” In 1927 he
defended his hallmark claim to fame by calling the Immigration Act of
1924 “ a bulwark against 'a stream of alien blood, with
all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the
governing power to the governed” (2)
. To further clarify his views, Johnson “in support of
his 1919 proposal to suspend immigration he included a quote from a
State Department Official referring to Jewish people as 'filthy,
un-American, and often dangerous in their habits.”(3)
Johnson
was not alone in his racist predispositions. He brought on the
Committee staff Harry Laughlin “a leading American
Eugenicist in the first half of the 20th
century. He was the Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office
from its inception in 1910 to its closing in 1939, and was among the
most active individuals influencing American eugenics policy,
especially compulsory sterilization legislation.” (4)
Laughlin was a close associate of Johnson and the Congressman had
previously collaborated Laughlin while head of Eugenics Research
Association. Laughlin not only worked on drafting the legislation
but “provided extensive statistical testimony to the
United States Congress in support of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act
of 1924. Part of this testimony dealt with 'excessive' insanity
among immigrants from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe. He was
eventually appointed as an expert eugenics agent to the Committee on
Immigration and Naturalization ...At least one contemporary
scientist, bacterial geneticist Herbert Spencer Jennings, condemned
Laughlin's statistics as invalid because they compared recent
immigrants to more settled immigrants. (5) Laughlin
not only went so far as to launch a eugenics investigation of the
United States Senate but the House itself had on staff a
Congressional Eugenicist.
Eugenics
has, in the wake of World War II and the death camps, become widely
discredited. Indeed, the “Reichstag of Nazi Germany
passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring in
1933, closely based on Laughlin's model. Between 35,000 and 80,000
persons were sterilized in the first full year alone. (It is now
known that over 350,000 persons were sterilized). Laughlin was
awarded an honorary degree by the University of Heidelberg in 1936
for his work on behalf of the 'science of racial cleansing'....By the
end of the decade, eugenics had become associated with Nazism and
poor science. Support for groups like the American Eugenics Society
began to fade. In 1935, a review panel convened by the Carnegie
Institute concluded that the ERO's research did not have scientific
merit. By 1939, the institute withdrew funding for the ERO, and the
office was forced to close” (6)
Nevertheless, the law that Eugenics
inspired remained the law of the land until the Immigration reform
acts of 1952.
By using the census base of 1890
instead of the previous benchmark of 1910, the quotas established by
Johnson, Reed and Laughlin would be based on a much 'whiter', more
Western European America. The result as shown by the following graph
illustrates the impact of the legislation of subsequent migrations:
Relative proportions of immigrants from Northwestern Europe[a] (red) and Southern and Eastern Europe[b] (blue) in the decades before and after the immigration restriction legislation.(7)
Rachel Maddow, in a recent broadcast on MSNBC, has connected the
dots. Citing an article in The Atlantic Monthly, Maddow
pointed to the origins of tRUMP's immigration policy.
“Senator
Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Justice
Department, once praised a 1924 immigration law whose chief author in
the House once declared was intended to end “indiscriminate
acceptance of all races.”
Sessions
has long been a proponent of immigration restriction, and was one of
the first to back Trump’s call on a ban on Muslims entering the
United States during the primary.During an October 2015 radio interview with Stephen Bannon of Breitbart, now a top adviser to the president-elect, Sessions praised the 1924 law saying that:
In seven years we'll have the highest percentage of Americans, non-native born, since the founding of the Republic. Some people think we've always had these numbers, and it's not so, it's very unusual, it's a radical change. When the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly, we then assimilated through the 1965 and created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America. We passed a law that went far beyond what anybody realized in 1965, and we're on a path to surge far past what the situation was in 1924.” (8)
There you have
it. Congressman Luis Guttierez of Illinois is right. The administration isn't simply seeking to deal with illegal immigration, but legal immigration as well. But the Rescumlican approach is much more disgusting, for the inspiration of the Bannon/Sessions-inspired immigration policy is
the eugenics based deeply racist law of 1924. Racial discrimination
based on ethnic cleansing; Making America White Again.
“An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh
and laugh”.
Impeach and Imprison
_____________________
- ibid
- ibid
- ibid
- op.cit
-
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