--David Crosby, Déjà Vu
With immigration policy at the center of our national conversation, I went to the library last week to find a specific book that was referenced in an online debate. What I found (among other things) was another intriguing title: One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over Immigration.
Before tackling our current immigration issues I wanted to set the stage by outlining the various stages of our own immigration history, The Seven Eras of U.S. Immigration History.
Jia Lynn Yang's book, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide, is a well documented deep dive into the decades-long battle over U.S. immigration policy from the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 through the enactment of the transformative Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. In other words, it covers Era Five of the seven periods.
The 1920's was a strange time in our history. Many people have images of flapper girls and wild parties, inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It was also an era of gangsters and turf wars generated by the Volstead Act (Prohibition). Simultaneously, we have images of a "lost generation," the young veterans of WWI having returned to a society they didn't understand, that didn't really understand them either. (See "Soldier's Home" by Hemingway in his first small volume of short stories, In Our Time.)
The early 1900s was also a time when the Eugenics movement gained significant traction, legalizing sterilization in 33 states lest "inferiors" reproduce. Eugenics was seen as a means for addressing overpopulaton and "over-multiplication of the unfit and unintelligent," among other societal problems. Promoted by intellectual elites, the eugenics movement reached its apex in the early 1930s. More han 66,000 Americans were sterilized against their will.
We should also note here that the Ku Klux Klan had had a rebirth at the beginning of the last century as well and were well represented in politics. According to the Congressional Record the Klan elected about 16 U.S. Senators as well as 11 governors, along with an undetermined large number of congressmen. "Undetermined" means that not all federal officeholders were openly affiliated with the Klan, but owed their electoral success, in part, to Klan support. (This surge in Klan power also contributed to mass migration of blacks from the Deep South to industrial centers in the North. But that's another story.)
The combination of these factors contributed to passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which imposed ethnically based national quotas on immgration, sharply curtailing immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and nearly banning immigrants from Asia, reflecting widespread nativism and racial prejudice of the era.
Yang's book follows the political struggle to dismantle these discriminatory quotas over the next forty years, focusing on the efforts of key lawmakers, activists, and presidents—from Emanuel Celler, Herbert Lehman, and civil rights advocates to presidents like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson—who worked to build coalitions for reform.
This long campaign culminated in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the national-origins quota system and created a new immigration framework emphasizing family reunification and skills. That legislation dramatically reshaped America’s demographic landscape and opened U.S. immigration to people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America in unprecedented numbers.
Yang frames much of this history through personal context—drawing on her own family’s immigrant experience—while illustrating how the yesterday's debates over immigration policy resonate with ongoing controversies today.
