The New Immigration
From 1880 to 1924, more than 2 million Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe and Russia, fled from the pogroms and difficult living conditions within the Russian Empire to the United States. During the first decade of the twentieth century, immigration from Italy to the United States reached its peak. During the same time period as the Jewish immigration over 5 million Italians went to the United States. White protestant Americans viewed the influx of the largely Catholic Italians and the Jews with alarm. Most entered the United States through New York and other Eastern ports, and efforts were made to redirect them to other states, in a veiled attempt to prevent the creation of large potential voting blocs by those attaining citizenship.
The increase in immigration from countries other than those of Northern Europe, which had been predominant prior to 1880, was called the New Immigration. The growing communities which featured their native languages, customs, holidays, and religious practices were a concern for many Americans. Many cities of the Midwest had large German communities, where the German language was spoken and newspapers were published in German. These were tolerated, and even patronized by Americans descended from northern Europeans. Emerging Italian and eastern European ethnic neighborhoods were less readily accepted.
World War I changed the way the German communities were perceived, and many German place names and street names were changed to reflect American patriotism. Public clamor for immigration reform, which had begun before the war, was taken up by Congress in its immediate aftermath. In 1921 Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, a supposedly temporary measure which caused permanent changes to American immigration policy. The Emergency Quota Act used the most recently fully analyzed census in the United States, that of 1910, to establish the number of immigrants which would be allowed to enter the United States each year.
The Act restricted immigrants from a given country to 3% of the number coming from that country residing in the United States as of 1910. In other words, if 100 Italians were living in the United States in 1910, 3 would be allowed to enter the United States in 1922, 3 in 1923, and so on. The limits were known as the National Origins Formula. The limits did not apply to professionals, that is, doctors, certified engineers, scientists, and others. No limits were established for immigrants coming from South America and Mexico. The exclusion of Chinese and other Asian nations was continued, and literacy tests (which had been imposed in 1917) extended.
Despite the reduction in immigration resulting from the Emergency Quota Act, many Americans believed that it did not sufficiently curtail new immigration. It was believed that the Act would cause a larger number of Northern Europeans entering the United States – because they were represented by larger numbers in the US population in 1910 – than those of Southern and Eastern Europeans. But the influx of the latter had been large during the decades between 1890 and 1910. This allowed for what to many Americans was a still too large immigration from the Catholic and Jewish populations of the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, and Congress was prodded to create further restrictions.