Trump Should Model 1920s Immigration Policies. They Worked

There’s a lot of talk from the left comparing the Trump administration’s immigration policies to a supposedly backward 1920. “Trump’s latest anti-immigration push echoes the nativism of the 1920s,” alleges a Dec. 7 analysis by The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty. “Language such as that used by the president and those around him harks back more than a century ago to the passage of a series of laws, capped by one in 1924, known as the Johnson-Reed Act,” Tumulty warns.

But the reality that some of those who advocated for tighter restrictions may have done so for less-than-noble reasons doesn’t obviate the fact that the Johnson-Reed Act served an important purpose in a time when the United States was becoming increasingly fractured because of high levels of immigration from cultures different from America.

A Little History on the Johnson-Reed Act

In the first two decades of the 20th century, almost 15 million immigrants poured into the United States. In 1920, about 13 percent of the United States population was foreign born. (Today the number is slightly higher than 15 percent.) American citizens whose families had been in the United States for generations became increasingly concerned that large populations of recent arrivals would not be able to effectively assimilate — including by adopting English and learning the principles of American republican self-governance — since these immigrants formed ghettoized communities. Some of these immigrants were from Asia (primarily Japan, China, and the Philippines), but most of them were from European countries.

The Johnson-Reed Act had a dramatic effect. Between 1901 to 1914, an average of 210,000 Italians arrived in the United States every year — the new quota placed the number of those who were allowed to enter at about 4,000 per year. Because of the act, “more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Portuguese, Rumanians, Spaniards, Chinese, and Japanese left the United States than entered,” according to authors Steven G. Koven and Frank Götzke (emphasis added).

Immigration plummeted immediately and for decades after: The total immigration plunged from more than 700,000 in 1924 to 294,000 in 1925 and 280,000 in 1929. By 1930, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population had dropped to 11.6 percent, and in 1970, the number reached a record low 4.7 percent.

It’s true, some of the support for immigration restrictions came from unsavory sources, such as eugenicists and the Ku Klux Klan. Yet historian John Higham has argued that “Klan backing made no material difference. Congress was expressing the spirit of the nation.” As the Department of State declared, Americans simply wanted “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” These restrictions remained in place until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

What Low Immigration Achieved in America

In the decades following the Johnson-Reed Act, America emerged as the greatest power on the face of the earth. Of course, it would be beyond simplistic to assert that a single federal law is responsible for American dominance in the 20th century. But it is not unreasonable to observe that an increasingly homogenous population enabled America to weather many of the unprecedented challenges it faced.

When the United States entered World War II, it was able to draft millions of American citizens who had been inculcated in a peculiarly American brand of patriotism. Men whose ancestors came from many different countries and spoke many different languages were bound together, fought, and died for an America they shared as home.

After the war, Americans had shared the Great Depression and World War II as a common experience and as a common people. Also emblematic of this shared identity, in the 1950s and 1960s, religious affiliation and church attendance reached likely unprecedented highs, with church membership exceeding 63 percent in 1960.

During the Cold War, our country’s leaders could appeal to a common vision of national identity that appealed to everyday Americans: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and belief in God. Undoubtedly, it would have been much harder, if not impossible, to endure the many societal disruptions of the post-war era that resulted in collapses of government across other parts of the Western world.

Sadly, we seem to have forgotten that hard-won process of enculturation. Second- and third-generation Americans are encouraged by leftist institutions such as public school systems and corporate media to understand themselves in light of their ethnic or racial background rather than as Americans. Many of our institutions, including even voting procedures, dissuade people from learning English. Given such trends, is it any wonder then that as ICE has entered various urban areas that Latinos, even Latino American citizens have waved Mexican flags?

American Identity Was Hard-Won, Let’s Not Lose It

It was not easy to forge a nation like ours out of so many distinct people groups. In the last decades of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, America was flooded with immigrants who knew little or no English, who had no familiarity with republican government, and who worshiped differently than the Protestant majority, which was about two-thirds of the country.

Think about how jarring it must have been for native-born Americans, their communities transformed in the course of a few decades. It takes only a little imagination to consider how unnerving that must have been as citizens wondered: Can the republic endure huge numbers of immigrants? (Keep in mind, these were predominantly European immigrants.)

But we did. In time, people of Italian, German, Polish, Chinese, and Filipino heritage whose families had arrived at the turn of the 20th century came to view themselves as Americans first, while still retaining pride in their heritage. Giordano, Hoffman, Kowalski, Chen, and Bautista became common American names. All of us, including my father’s Polish-born grandparents, were welcomed to participate in the American dream.

The nation today faces a demographic crisis even worse than that of 100 years ago, as evidenced by stories like those of Somali immigrants in Minnesota who not only refuse to assimilate but also allegedly stole an estimated $1 billion in taxpayer revenue. (Their most well-known and vocal leader is also Ilhan Omar, who has compared the United States to Muslim terror groups and dismissed the Islamist terrorist attacks of 9/11 as a time when “some people did something.”)

To aggravate the issue, Somalis and other immigrant groups with cultural and societal values radically different from most Americans face a much more difficult path to assimilation than did the European immigrants who came to the U.S. before the Johnson-Reed Act, making the necessary enculturation all the more unlikely.

It’s not that any particular group of people is incapable of becoming fine American citizens — but when immigrant numbers are high, these groups can insulate themselves from assimilating, because they have little incentive to do so. This is compounded by an unwillingness by many of our enculturating institutions to tell them that — as much as they are free to retain pride in their nation of origin— they must be first and foremost Americans.

Restrictive immigration policies need not be racist — indeed, when properly framed and executed, they can be the very means of lowering the temperature of societal strife.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He is a regular contributor at many publications and the author of three books, including the upcoming “Wisdom From the Cross: How Jesus’ Seven Last Words Teach Us How to Live (and Die)” (Sophia Institute Press, 2026).