What was the goal of the National Origins Act of 1924?

The goal of the National Origins Act of 1924 was to ensure that fewer of the “wrong” kind of immigrants entered the United States.  This act came about because many people in the US felt that the most recent wave of immigration had brought undesirable people to the country.

The National Origins Act set up a quota system for who would be allowed to immigrate to the US.  The act set quotas for various countries.  The number of immigrants from any given country each year was to equal 2% of the people born in that country but living in the United States according to the 1890 census.  In other words, if many people from a given country were living in the US in 1890, many immigrants from that country could continue to enter.  However, if the population from that country in the US in 1890 was small, only a very few people from that country would be allowed to immigrate to the US.

The point of this was to limit immigration from countries that had sent many people to the US between 1890 and 1920.  This was the time period in which the wave of “new immigrants” had come to the US.  Many Americans felt that these new immigrants were not likely to become good Americans.  The new immigrants tended to be from southern Europe (countries like Greece and Italy) or Eastern Europe (countries like Poland or Russia).  They were often Roman Catholic or Jewish at a time when many Americans distrusted people of these faiths.  Many of the immigrants held radical political views.  For all these reasons, many Americans wanted to cut off immigration from these countries.  Because they wanted to do this, they passed the National Origins Act of 1924. 

What was the purpose of the 1924 National Origins Act?

The purpose of this act was to limit the number of the “wrong” kinds of immigrants who could come to the United States.

In the three or four decades before 1924, there had been a large wave of “new immigrants” coming to the United States.  These people were called “new” because they were from different countries than previous immigrants had been.  They were from Eastern and Southern Europe instead of from Northern and Western Europe.  Many of the immigrants from Eastern Europe were Jewish.  Many of the immigrants from both areas were politically radical.  All of these factors made many Americans very worried about the country’s society.  They felt that it was being changed by these immigrants who came to the US and did not (it was said) want to assimilate.  They feared that these immigrants were from racially inferior groups.  (In those days, different kinds of white people were seen as very different from one another.)  They wanted therefore, to limit the immigration of such people.

This was the point of the National Origins Act of 1924.  It set quotas for immigration that gave preferences to the sorts of nationalities that had been in the US prior to 1880.  By doing so, it permitted more immigration from those countries and less from the Eastern and Southern European countries from which the “new immigrants” came.