| | | " the first decade of the 20th century. The immigration policies back then can't be applied to the immigration policies of today because the needs of the nation were vastly different."
You couldn't be more wrong.The early decades of the 20th century were much like today. Immigration was considered a threat to the nation, bringing in disease and crime and masses of people that were objectionable on the basis of their race, which was considered an indicator of culture and morality. Eugenicists said those were inborn traits. Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans were thought to be un-assimilable. Asians even more so. IOW those times were much like today. Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson would've been right at home.
Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece and all of Asia were the shithole nations of the time. The ancestors of the fubho's, sdglas, longnshorts were the undesirable shithole immigrants of that time.
Beginning in the 1890s, the majority of arrivals were from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. In that decade alone, some 600,000 Italians migrated to America, and by 1920 more than 4 million had entered the United States. Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing religious persecution also arrived in large numbers; over 2 million entered the United States between 1880 and 1920.
The peak year for admission of new immigrants was 1907, when approximately 1.3 million people entered the country legally. Within a decade, the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) caused a decline in immigration. In 1917, Congress enacted legislation requiring immigrants over 16 to pass a literacy test, and in the early 1920s immigration quotas were established. The Immigration Act of 1924 created a quota system that restricted entry to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in America as of the 1890 national census–a system that favored immigrants from Western Europe–and prohibited immigrants from Asia.
history.com
There was a more sinister attitude toward immigrants in the country at the turn of the 20th century. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it government policy to restrict an ethnic group's ability to enter the country. In 1896, an Atlantic author called immigrants "a hopeless burden" that would dilute the industriousness of the nation.
theatlantic.com
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