For over three years, the Trump administration has struggled to deliver his campaign promise to stop certain immigrants from entering the U.S., often running headlong into resistance from courts, popular opinion, the private sector and the administrative state. Now, Trump and administration see their opportunity: a national emergency.
It’s not the first time politicians have latched on to economic unrest and public safety concerns to press a hard-line, anti-immigration agenda. In 1921, Congress passed, and President Warren G. Harding signed, the “Emergency Quota Act,” sharply reducing the number of immigrants permitted to enter the country. A putative response to rising unemployment and social unrest, in reality the law represented the culmination of decades of racial and religious-motivated bigotry against newcomers from southern and Eastern Europe and Asia. It also portended a long, four-decade pause in the country’s openness to immigration.
But there are critical differences between then and now. A century ago, anti-immigrant sentiment reached peak levels and commanded sweeping support among America’s native-born population. Not so today. The Trump administration is using a crisis to justify unpopular policy. The reversals of 2020 are by no means certain to have a lasting effect when the country emerges from the pandemic.
Americans 100 years ago weren’t reeling from a health crisis, though the memories of the 1918 flu pandemic were surely still fresh in the public memory. Instead, the destabilizing political and economic events that followed closely on the heels of World War I brought into sharp relief tensions that had been building for decades. They gave anti-immigration zealots an opening to legislate racial biases and religious grievances into law.
In the aftermath of World War I, Americans sustained two years of jarring upheaval. As the government demobilized, unemployment soared to 20 percent even as inflation drove consumer prices 105 percent above their prewar levels. It all amounted to a world of hurt for ordinary working people and their families.
In response, unions staged a series of crippling strikes in 1919 meant to keep wages on par with the rising cost of food and durables. In Seattle, some 35,000 shipyard workers walked out, prompting a larger general strike across multiple industries that brought the city to its knees. Other cities followed suit. Steelworkers struck. The United Mine Workers closed down America’s coal industry. Even the Boston police stopped working for a time, until Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge broke the stoppage, famously declaring that “there is no right to strike against public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”