Roy L. Garis

In 1921 Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, which for the first time placed a limit on the number of immigrants allowed into the United States. There were two main provisions of the 1921 law. First, it permitted a total of 350,000 immigrants to enter the United States per year. A second provision of the act limited the number of immigrants from a particular country to 3 percent of that country’s population already in the United States as determined by the 1910 census. For example, the 1921 quota act permitted forty-two thousand Italians and thirty-one thousand Poles to immigrate to the United States. When the 1921 quota act came up for renewal in 1924, anti-immigrationists made the act even more restrictive. The Immigration Act of 1924 reduced the percentage allowed from each country to 2 percent of the...