Were U.S. Immigration Policies Racist? A Stunning Portrait

The Age of Trump is nothing new in American history. From the 1850s through the 1930s, white workers agitated over their concerns that foreigners competed unfairly against them in their labor markets.  

Labor unions organized successfully for passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese Exclusion Act, Emergency Quota Act,  and National Origins Formula.  The Supreme Court validated these racist approaches to immigration, ruling in Takao Ozawa v. U.S. that Japanese were ineligible for citizenship because Japanese were not “free white persons” within the meaning of the Naturalization Act of 1906.  

U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind reached a similar result for an Indian Sikh, declaring that he was racially ineligible for citizenship.  

Following enactment of the National Origins Act in 1924 and continuing through 1927, immigration quotas were allocated to each European country at 2% of the number of foreign-born of each nationality in the U.S. census of 1890.  As a result, this formula allocated 85% of the quotas to northern and western European nations.

The table (above) is stunning evidence of our nation’s immigration preferences for white, northern Europeans. Click on the picture to enlarge it.

When President Trump made his “shithole country” remark, he referred specifically to Haiti, a nation that is 95% black. Norway’s population, the better immigration alternative in his view, is 92% white. Simply put, President Trump was restating an American immigration policy that was prevalent for nearly 100 years.  

If you have ancestry from China, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Russia, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, India, Poland, Germany, Austria, Korea, Japan, Mexico—to name only some—you have a picture of how difficult life was in America for your ancestors.

(Source: U.S. Census records, here https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab04.html. To reduce the data to one short table, I pulled figures from regions and continents (not by countries). See U.S. Census Bureau, Table 4. Region and Country or Area of Birth of the Foreign-Born Population, With Geographic Detail Shown in Decennial Census Publications of 1930 or Earlier: 1850 to 1930 and 1960 to 1990 (U.S. Bureau of the Census).