WI: no 1924 immigration act

The fears that led to the act, the same fears that led to the revival of the KKK, to more restrictive Jim Crow laws, & related social movements would still be in place and lead to other outlets, including the above. However the reasons for the act failing to pass will have their effect as well.
 
no Act in 1924 means a lot of Congressmen get voted out with the next election in November

OTL it was
  1. Passed the House by 323 to 71
  2. the Senate by 69-9
Limiting immigration was really, really wanted after the economic downturn after the war.
_1920s-kkk-membership.png

kkk-membership-by-state-in-1924_for-kylie-pine.jpg


And even those who didn't pay out to joint the Klan, agreed with many of thier aims, as is stopping near all immigration


As Dick Tuck put it best 40 years later, 'The People have spoken, the Bastards'
 

raharris1973

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With those congressional margins so huge, it seems like naturalized immigrants did not even feel terribly insulted by or mobilized against this legislation, nor did employers losing labor sources. Why? The minorities with some something to lose seem to have just rolled over with the herd. I can't think of anybody who opposed the legislation except for Manny Celler from Brooklyn.
 
With those congressional margins so huge, it seems like naturalized immigrants did not even feel terribly insulted by or mobilized against this legislation, nor did employers losing labor sources. Why? The minorities with some something to lose seem to have just rolled over with the herd. I can't think of anybody who opposed the legislation except for Manny Celler from Brooklyn.
Because they had come in, taken their licks, earned the right to be there. How dare these Johny-come-latelies think that they can get in so easily.

It is all pretty normal. First generation immigrants tend to be pretty conservative and defensive of their hard won places in society. 2nd Gen are the ones stuck between two worlds. 3rd Gen are part of the scenery.

I have long since stopped thinking how horrible our ancestors were with these kinds of kick the foreigners out kind of reactions to bad times. Resource hoarding and looking after one's own is a logical response, even if the long term results are bad.

I find the Why more interesting. Identify and threat the cause of the bad times rather than treating the symptoms.
 
With those congressional margins so huge, it seems like naturalized immigrants did not even feel terribly insulted by or mobilized against this legislation, nor did employers losing labor sources.
Previous Northern European immigrants felt that they were far superior to the latest Southern and Eastern European immigrants.

Business owners didn't have to worry about labor trouble, after they had been discredited by links to anarchists and Communists. By 1922, Labor was at 1890s levels. Labor didn't pick up till the Depression, and before that, the business owners thought they had 'won' and didn't need mobs of Scabs to bust Unions anymore. They had been busted.
 
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Business owners didn't have to worry about labor trouble, after they had been discredited by links to anarchists and Communists. By 1922, Labor was at 1890s levels. Labor didn't pick up till the Depression, and before that, the business owners thought they had 'won' and didn't need mobs of Scabs to bust Unions anymore. They had been busted.

That and labor was not so tight in supply as the economic boom of the 1920s would have you think. Mechanizattion of farming caused the 1920s to be the peak in the shift of labor from agriculture. Lots of former farm hands & kids, with a good work ethic and mechanical skills applying for work in the towns & cities. Continued mechanization in factories reduced requirements for labor growth as well. The advent of the technical trade or vocational education replacing the less efficient apprentice system contributed as well to lots of youths with entry level mechanical skills for the industrial managers to choose from. The demand for 'cheap' foreign labor was not so great as previously.
 
Prevent the Red Scare, probably by a complex set of PODs including no Dreyfus Affair, Alexandra not marrying Nicholas, and a Thera-sized eruption in Sicily that wipes out all the Italian anarchists.
 
Chart a industrial growth trajectory that requires more labor immigrant skills can fill.

Maybe China avoids the warlord era and places a demand for US exports that approaches Europe.
 
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raharris1973

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OTL it was
  1. Passed the House by 323 to 71
  2. the Senate by 69-9

Who where the 71 and the 9 who voted against ?

Were they randomly distributed throughout the country or represent urban districts with substantial numbers of naturalized immigrants from southern and eastern Europe? Did they represent low population districts keen on development at any cost?

What I find interesting on many US national issues before say, 1960, is that the national consensus could really change really quickly and overwhelmingly, within something nobody would propose becoming something nobody dared oppose a decade later. Post 1960, their seems to have been more polarized wars of attrition between opposing camps on cultural, economic and social issues, with people fighting over the same stuff for several decades in a row.

So, where that fits in to this example is that in 1913 and 1914, nobody was demanding such drastic immigration restriction against Europeans. Previous anti-immigrant movements tinkered at the margins or focused on slowing naturalization. Then by 1924, everybody was like, slow it to a trickle.

I have long since stopped thinking how horrible our ancestors were with these kinds of kick the foreigners out kind of reactions to bad times. Resource hoarding and looking after one's own is a logical response, even if the long term results are bad.

Well hopefully you got some exploration of those types of questions from later posters.

Whether the long term results were bad depends on the who is excluding whom question.

Exclusion bad for Europeans who otherwise might have emigrated out of Europe before WWII, the Holocaust, the initial hard postwar years, and Communist rule.

Exclusion might well have been good for the standard of living of the American working middle class as a whole, and without it many native rural whites, blacks, and hispanics probably would have had even fewer opportunities for employment, education, home ownership, etc, in the metropolitan industrial regions of the United States than they did in OTL. The Great Migration of southern whites and blacks north largely coincided with the great immigration pause.
 
The current theory seems to be that population growth (natural or immigration) grows GDP and by extension standard of living.
This seems counter intuitive because the simple version is to have fewer eating the pie rather than more people growing the pie.
There is a similar point in my own country with the White Australia Policy. It is understandable why they did it, but afterwards standard of living and economic growth went from above the US to below. Now there are other factors at play (end of a mining boom, drought, national union accords) but it is an interesting point of change. Especially when compared to the last 30 years of no recession around the end of a mining boom and drought with the immigration gates held firmly open.
 

raharris1973

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The current theory seems to be that population growth (natural or immigration) grows GDP and by extension standard of living.
This seems counter intuitive because the simple version is to have fewer eating the pie rather than more people growing the pie.
There is a similar point in my own country with the White Australia Policy. It is understandable why they did it, but afterwards standard of living and economic growth went from above the US to below. Now there are other factors at play (end of a mining boom, drought, national union accords) but it is an interesting point of change. Especially when compared to the last 30 years of no recession around the end of a mining boom and drought with the immigration gates held firmly open.

Australia is an interesting case in point. I think each country will have its own experience. And is this true at all levels of development? What about the idea of the positive effects on social mobility of the population losses of the black death?

In any case in terms of good things and bad things happening in the US after the immigration tightening of 1924, which lasted through 1965:

+5 years - Great Depression - bad, very bad
+10 years - Wagner Act - good for Labor, collective bargaining
+21 years - GI Bill - good thing
1946-1973 generally considering the peak of the spending power of the American industrial labor, and the peak of income equality -- good things, with no evidence that gradually increasing immigration post 1965 was needed for the post 65 piece of broad prosperity
1954-1965 advance of federally recognized civil rights - good thing
1934-1968 increase in social safety net -good thing
1966- steep rise in street crime and hard drug use - bad thing, and can't be causally correlated with the loosening of immigration rules post-1965 for its first couple decades because rising numbers were slow to pick up through the 60s and 70s.

So if increasing the population through immigration could have somehow averted the great depression and helped stabilize farm incomes, maybe its a good trade.

Or, maybe if the US was open to all comers from in the 20 years after WWII it might not have weakened labor's position or median living standards at all. Good question.
 
You'd get an identical 1925 act.
Or one would get a Ku Klux Klan that virtually rules the entire country except a small number of heavily Catholic states like North Dakota and lower New England. Then, there is the question of how such conflict between heavily Catholic “frost belt” states (and perhaps some others like Louisiana and New Mexico) would play out in the long term??
1954-1965 advance of federally recognized civil rights – good thing
It’s interesting to note that low levels of immigration seem to have a very strong correlation with advances for blacks. During a previous period of very low immigration analogous to the middle twentieth century, as shown by Mark Thornton in his ‘Slavery, Profitability, and the Market Process’ the free black population grew quite rapidly, but duirng eras of increasing immigration after about 1810 this declined with:
  1. extremely strict manumission laws
  2. slave patrols in the South
  3. “sundown” laws in ever-increasing proportions of free states
 
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raharris1973

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Was the literacy test legislation brought forward ever during the Taft, TR, McKinley, Cleveland or Harrison administrations?

What was Wilson’s rationale for vetoing this obviously popular measure in 1917?

When was the national origins quota first ever proposed to preserve or roll back ethnic balances? Right before the 1921 emergency quota, or years earlier?
 
this immigration act drastically cut immigration. How would it never existing impact the development of America?
It's unfortunate that nobody has accepted the premise, and after me, probably nobody will, but I would say that the US would have many more Jews, Italians, and Slavs going to it. You'd see more prejudice towards them, but in time they'll be integrated. You'd see more neighborhoods based on those cultures and perhaps many more Americans will carry those types of last names. America would have a larger Jewish and orthodox religious demographic. Probably more references to the foods from those places, particularly from Eastern Europe. If the Midwest is seen as Germanic, then the North East is seen as Slavic/Romantic. I think Polish culture would be more prominent in American culture.
 
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