Louis Marshall

In an attempt to restrict immigration from southern and eastern Europe, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. However, many anti-immigrationists believed that the act was ineffective at limiting the number of “undesirable” immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Russia, among others, and so Congress once again began examining ways to restrict these immigrants. A bill proposed in 1924 limited new immigration from a given country to 2 percent of that country’s immigrant population in the United States in 1890, a date that was chosen because there were few immigrants from southern and eastern Europe in the United States at that time. The bill would also completely prohibit immigration from Japan, which had been strictly limited under an informal treaty known as the Gentlemen’s Agreement.

The following viewpoint is an excerpt of a letter written...