Jews, Italians and the Eugenics Era
The next wave of anti-immigrant paranoia started in late 19th century. More than 14 million Europeans immigrated to the United States between 1870-1900. Before 1880, the Germans, the Irish, the English and Scandinavians made up 85 percent of immigrants arriving in the United States. After 1880, immigration from Europe dramatically shifted, with Italians, Hungarians, eastern European Jews, Turks, Armenians, Poles, Russians and other Slavic people accounting for 85 percent of all immigrants by 1896.Such numbers lead Theodore Roosevelt in warn in an 1906 address to Congress that the fast reproduction of these new immigrants, and the low birth rate among Anglo women, raised the specter of “race suicide.” Roosevelt charged that white women who did not have children represented criminals “against the race.” To many Anglos, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe seemed culturally backwards, ignorant, and bizarre in appearance. "These people are not Americans," the journal Public Opinion declared. "They are the very scum and offal of Europe." As a Midwestern coal miner complained, “Italians and Hungarians is spolin’ this ‘yere country for white men.”
These critiques of immigrants shared common features with earlier attacks on the Irish: that Jews and other Southern and Eastern Europeans lacked whiteness, and thus lacked the work ethic, thrift, energy, intelligence and morals to make it in this country. Popular magazines disseminated this message, encouraging the rebirth of the long-dormant Ku Klux Klan, which became a dominant force in not just Southern but national political life by the early 1920s.
Hoping to preserve the nation’s “racial stock,” nativists passed a series of immigration restrictions between the 1880s and the 1920s. The Congress banned Chinese immigration n the 1880s and excluded laborers from most Asian countries in a 1917 immigration law. The Immigration Restriction League successfully lobbied for the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which set immigration quotas at 2 percent of nationals from a particular country present in the United States in 1890, a move drastically reducing the immigration quotas permitted Southern and Eastern Europeans. The Italian quota, for instance, fell from 42,000 to about 4,000 and the Polish quota from 31,000 to 6.000. This act barred the door to America for Jews who attempted to flee the Holocaust. America’s 1924 immigration restriction law doomed many Jews to Hitler’s gas chambers, though the total number who might otherwise have found safety in the United States remains a mystery.
Article Continues: Mexicans, Central Americans and the Immigration Hysteria