immigration 1820-1980

"Great Fear of the Period"

Francis A. Walker

• 1891 birth rate theory - native stock declining
  
• New Immigration from S. & E. Europe - 21 million
  
• 1891 Ellis Island - to separate, classify by federal standards
  
• Ellis Island from the i-channel
• Ellis Island and immigration photos from California Museum of Photography
• U. S. Bureau of Immigration established 1906
• U.S. must expand to stop the melting pot
  

Henry Cabot Lodge

• 1907 Immigration Commission - 42-volume report
  
• used "science" of C. Davenport, William Z. Ripley
  
• Charles Davenport's Eugenics Record Office
  
• to measure racial characteristics - cephalic index
  
• William Z. Ripley's Races of Europe - 3 head shapes
  
• Teutonic, Alpine, Mediterranean
  
• intermixing would produce "reversion"
  
• Lodge sought scientific evidence for restriction
  
• literacy test added 1917: aliens over 16 to read "not less than 30 nor more than 80 words in ordinary use" in any language
  
• Quota Act of 1924 - maximum quota for each nationality to be 164,447 (half of 1921 quota 357,803) or 2% of 1890 census (not 1921 law 3% of 1910 census); exceptions were Canada and Latin America, ministers, professors, college students; all immigration stopped for Japanese as "aliens ineligible to citizenship."