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“THE NEw MECCA OF IMMIGRANTS”...
(non-WASP) and religious (mostly Catholic) composition of the immigrants,
their social and economic status, as well as their unwillingness to assimilate into
American society, anti-immigrant and nativist sentiment gradually appeared
and became more and more widespread, culminating in calls for general
restriction of immigration (especially form East and Central Europe).
Anti-immigrant sentiment was already present in the United States in the
1850s, taking the form of anti-Catholic and anti-Chinese activity. The latter
culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was “the hinge on
which Emma Lazarus’s ‘golden door’ swung almost completely shut.”!°
The nativist prejudice that newly arriving immigrants would destroy the
country was held against Eastern Europeans, including Hungarians. From the
1880s onwards more and more restrictions were introduced, ending the former
free immigration policy of the country and barring more and more groups
from entering the US. The anti-Catholic American Protective Association was
formed in 1887, while the Immigration Restriction League was established in
1894. The latter advocated the introduction of a literacy test to improve the
“quality of incoming immigrants” and close out “undesirables.” World War I
gave a boost to American restrictions (especially the fear of enemy aliens in
the country), and in 1917, the year the US entered the Great War, the Literacy
Act came into force, representing the “first significant general restriction of
immigration ever passed; in the future all adult immigrants would have to be
literate...”!°
Although it reduced the number of immigrants, the literacy test did not
stop another major wave after the war, thus more and more people demanded
the introduction of quotas. The principle behind this was to limit the total
number of people admitted per year and also restrict particular nationalities
to a percentage of their population. The first such act (the Emergency Quota
Act) was passed in 1921 and it set the maximum number of immigrants
allowed per year at 356,995 and specified the national quota as 3% of the
population from a given country based on the 1910 census. This was made
even stricter in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which effectively ended New
Immigration to the country from Hungary. The total quota was set at 153,700
and the baseline census was moved back to 1890 (clearly showing that the
target of restrictions was East-Central European migration), and reduced
the quotas from 3 to 2%. The quota meant a significant cut in the number
of immigrants arriving in large numbers only after 1890 and did not apply
to immigrants from the Western Hemisphere. The measures hit East and
Central Europeans hard but also excluded Chinese (and Asian) immigration.
4° For an overview see the chapter titled “The Triumph of Nativism” in Daniels, Coming to
America, 265.
15 Ibid., 271.
16 Ibid., 278.
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