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THE U.S. IMMIGRATION QUOTA SYSTEM OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH century is usually represented as a linear progression of increasingly restrictive policies that starts with the establishment of federal immigration control in the late nineteenth century and culminates in the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the 1924 National Origins Quotas Act. According to this interpretation, a wide range of measures adopted between 1880 and 1930-from the LPC clauses (exclusion of all categories of people "likely to become a public charge") and the Asiatic exclusion laws (1882 Chinese Exclusion Law, 1907 Gentlemen's Agreement, 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone) to the literacy test and immigration quotas- were all the result of a general convergence of nativism, nationalism, and eugenics. This ideological convergence supposedly facilitated the growth of racism against immigrants, and especially against those who did not belong to the "Anglo-Saxon race." The work of Daniel J. Tichenor is a clear illustration of this point of view:
But if economic and national security were important concerns of early-twentieth-century immigration reformers, the primary intent and effect of their national origins quota system were manifestly racist. In the face of increasing ethnic pluralism, restrictionists saw the literacy test and national origins quotas as means of "rationally" controlling the nation's ethnic and racial composition . . . Eugenics provided scientific confirmation of these racist conclusions, offering seemingly powerful evidence that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe lacked the advanced hereditary makeup of earlier immigrant groups (Tichenor 2002: 147).
The most studied policy of this period is the literacy test, and its passage in 1917 is described as the turning point in the struggle between restrictionists and liberals. The 1917 victory supposedly gave restrictionists a free hand to implement all the racist and eugenicist exclusion laws they desired, most notably the 1921 and 1924 Quota laws, which, according to this logic, should have easily passed in Congress.1
However, a detailed study of the origin of Quota laws suggests that these conventional understandings of early-twentieth-century U.S. immigration policy are misguided. First, the notion of a clear split between restrictionists and liberals has to be questioned. In addition, the conflation of "restrictionist," "racist," and "eugenist" ideas into one homogeneous way of thinking appears misguided. As Aristide Zolberg has demonstrated, at that moment of history, "the...