On this day in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Johnson-Reed Act, which established a permanent race-based quota system for immigration to America. The law excluded those ineligible for citizenship (that is, Asians and Africans), and moved immigration inspection from American ports to foreign ones. A coalition of restrictionists had lobbied intensely for the Johnson-Reed Act. Their primary objective was to restore the ethnic makeup of the country’s white population to that of the early nineteenth-century. They planned to erase the demographic changes of the “new” immigration of the late nineteenth century from southern and eastern Europe.
The Johnson-Reed Act was a project of racial engineering, but it was also an expression of foreign relations. In addition to severely restricting immigration, the Johnson-Reed Act redefined American foreign policy. In the past, immigration had been brokered through international treaties and negotiations. With the Johnson-Reed Act, America alone would control immigration, and it would do so according to a nationalist vision. The worldview laid out in the Johnson-Reed Act is still the foundational principle of immigration law today.
Upon signing the bill into law, President Coolidge issued a statement asserting that the bill “expresses the determination of the Congress to exercise its prerogative in defining by legislation the control of immigration, instead of leaving it to international arrangements.” This remark signaled the importance the Johnson-Reed Act would have on American foreign affairs. Before the 1920s, the United States was party to treaties and other agreements that placed American immigration policy within a larger context of cooperative migration control. But with the Johnson-Reed Act, the United States largely disengaged from multilateral efforts, ushering in a new era where American laws and regulations, irrespective of diplomacy, decided who could cross American borders. To be sure, since the late nineteenth century, the federal government claimed the sovereign prerogative to regulate its borders, but with the Johnson-Reed Act, the mechanics of exercising the prerogative changed. An intentionally rigid border regime built on unilateral acts of control thus supplanted a multilateral one built on cooperation and reciprocity.
In the course of developing the new immigration regime that resulted in the Johnson-Reed Act, some policymakers argued that foreign governments could no longer be trusted partners in regulating migration. Policymakers instead wanted a new system where American officials could turn away would-be immigrants on foreign soil before even reaching an American port.