Literacy Testing Changed Immigration: How Morris S. Povich Makes America Great

I took this picture in Bath, Maine two weeks ago. Mr. Povich probably immigrated to the U.S. from eastern Europe (Maury Povich’s family is from Lithuania). The key point is that he arrived before 1917, when America passed a highly restrictive immigration law (Chinese were already entirely barred from entering).

Context: The Trump administration favors an English-fluency requirement for legal immigration. You may also know that America had a similar policy 100 years ago. The Immigration Act of 1917 required arriving immigrants to read four lines of text. The text was in their native language, not English, so it was a true literacy test.

But when Congress passed this law in 1916, President Wilson vetoed it, stating: “The object of such provisions is restriction, not selection.” He then noted that such a policy would “reverse the policy of all the generations of Americans that have gone before them.” 

In 1917, Congress overrode Wilson’s veto.

What was the effect of the law? Prof. Louis Bloch’s 1922 study shows the following:

“During the period 1899-1917, 13,821,126 immigrants from the races shown in the table were admitted into the United States. 

Of this number 3,029,752, or 21.9 per cent were illiterates who could neither read nor write.…  

It is evident that the effect of this clause has been to reduce considerably the numbers of illiterates seeking admission into this country.

The point of this research? People in other nations simply stopped coming to America. The much lower illiteracy rate after 1917 is conclusive evidence of self-selection. 
Mr. Povich arrived before 1917. The odds that he would have come to the U.S. and started his business after 1917 are very small.

Consider this, too. The 1917 law was based on the Dillingham Commission, a four-year investigation of immigration that ended in 1911. It concluded that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe posed a serious threat to American society.

Back to Morris S. Povich's store. He established it in 1910. It's still open for business. Mr. Povich made America great. And he is still making America great.