Essay for Myth2

RACE AND IMMIGRATION – 1924 NATIONAL ORIGINS QUOTAS ACT

• Impact of these exclusions:

• Slaves, descendants, African immigration - “had they been included in the base population governing the quotas, the African nations from which they originated would have received 9 percent of the total immigration quota, resulting in 13,000 fewer slots for the European nations” (p. 72)

• Asian countries included, but excluded due to ineligibility for citizenship. Created quotas for non-Chinese persons from China, etc.

• South Africa – white settler country. 200 slots for black Africans (Ethiopia, Liberia)

“ranked [immigrants] in a hierarchy of desirability. At another level, the law constructed a

white American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common whiteness that

made them distinct from those deemed to be not white. Euro-Americans acquired both

ethnicities – that is, nationality-based identities that were presumed to be transformable – and

a racial identity based on whiteness that was presumed to be unchangeable. This distinction

gave all Euro-Americans a stake in what Matthew Jacobson has called a “consanguine white

race” and facilitated their Americanization. But, while Euro-Americans’ ethnic and racial

identities became uncoupled, non-European immigrants – among them Japanese, Chinese,

Mexicans, and Filipinos – acquired ethnic and racial identities that were one and the same.

The racialization of the latter groups’ national origins rendered them unalterably foreign and

unassimilable to the nation. The Immigration Act of 1924 thus established legal foundations for

social processes that would unfold over the next several decades, processes that historians have

called, for European immigrants, “becoming American” (or, more precisely, white Americans),

while casting Mexicans as illegal aliens and foredooming Asians to permanent foreignness.”

(p. 70)