9. Believing that Anglo-Saxons were racially superior to even other white Europeans, the Immigration Restriction League campaigned for decades to introduce racial screening and quotas into American law
Founded in 1894 by three Harvard alumni – Charles Warren, Robert DeCourcy Ward, and Prescott F. Hall – the Immigration Restriction League was instituted upon the core belief that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were racially inferior to the superior Anglo-Saxon species. Concerned about the impact of these lesser beings upon the American way of life, blaming them for introducing crime and poverty into the previously utopic nation, the group supported and promoted stringent restrictions on immigration. Attracting endorsement from several prominent scholars of the New England elite, the group attempted to build a broad-church coalition against migration.
Proposing several “solutions” to the supposed ethnic crisis, the League submitted suggestions including the increase of passenger duties for foreign aliens from two to five dollars, a rapid increase in immigration inspectors and deportation facilities, and the compulsory medical screening of prospective migrants including the right to reject those deemed “unsuitable” in accordance with eugenics. Most prominently, in 1918 the League introduced a bill in Congress to rectify the racial imbalance among migrants, restricting the almost one million southern and eastern Europeans entering America to less than three hundred thousand whilst augmenting the two hundred thousand northern and western Europeans to more than one million.