WI the US regulated Japanese immigration by the national origins quota instead of a ban?

raharris1973

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WI, in a fit of executive courage and diplomatic adroitness, the Coolidge Administration keeps outright exclusion of Japanese from the immigration act of 1924. Instead, to achieve most of the same effect, while also avoiding offense to a major and rising power, Japanese are to get a share of the overall immigration quota based on their percent of the US population in 1890.

I imagine the 1890 based quota would keep admittances of Japanese to the US at a minimum, because I think Japanese numbers in America in 1890 were quite small. However, it wouldn't single out Japanese as "less than" Europeans in the 1924 act.

Could the US leaders (in the executive branch or majority leadership) have avoided adding insult (outright exclusion) to injury (drastically limited quotas) and remained politically healthy?

If so, how many Japanese would have immigrated to the US between 1924 and 1941?

What reverberations, if any, might this have on domestic Japanese politics, and Japanese immigration to other areas (like Brazil)?

Presuming an American-Japanese war still happens at some point by mid-century, how is the composition of the Japanese-American community changed?
 
alright, with more immigration,

more people may have personally met a Japanese-American, but with bigger numbers, the boogeyman of 'disloyality' may have been scarier.

It could go either way, you might still have internment camps :confused:
 
Probably the ones that went to South America ITTL would have gone to the US. I imagine the quotas would have been very small, like <10,000 a year. Barring butterflies, FDR would still go for internment for the same reasons IOTL. If even immigrants who came in the 1800s and early 1900s were suspect, imagine the opinions about those who had JUST ARRIVED from the enemy nation. Honestly there is greater chance that some of them, not the Taisho and Meiji arrivals, would be spies.
 
. . . imagine the opinions about those who had JUST ARRIVED from the enemy nation. Honestly there is greater chance that some of them, not the Taisho and Meiji arrivals, would be spies.
Yes, probably sad but true. A very small percentage. But you'd no longer be able to make the claim that there were zero acts of disloyalty by Japanese-Americans. Don't know if that's strictly true in OTL. Although I have heard on several different occasions that there were zero acts of desertion by Japanese-American soldiers.
 

raharris1973

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zero acts of disloyalty by Japanese-Americans
On the mainland. An ethnic Japanese Hawaiian resident, maybe a citizen, assisted a crashed Japanese pilot after Pearl Harbor, according to an account I read in Command Magazine 20 years ago or so.

By the way in southern California, I think a Korean-American informant did alot to stir the pot with the FBI.

Of course, before we even get ahead to WWII and the internment issue, there's a question of what the change would do to internal Japanese politics in the 1920s and 1930s. In the optimistic scenario, it could help Japan avoid the slide to all-out militarism and war with the United States. Racist immigration policies were a great rhetorical point Japanese militarists used whenever questioned about expansion on the Asian mainland, or about opposition to the naval treaties.
 
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