American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [190]
Though La Guardia may have thought the new overseas inspection process was an improvement, he was no fan of the new quotas. The former Ellis Island interpreter was now representing a Manhattan district in the U.S. House of Representatives. With little actual power in Congress, La Guardia took on the role of gadfly, denouncing restrictive legislation and defending the contributions of immigrants. A child of immigrants, he condemned the quotas as being in the “spirit of the Ku Klux Klan.”
These new quotas covered immigrants from Europe, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. But nearly as many immigrants arrived from the Western Hemisphere, which was exempt from the quota system. Throughout the 1920s, 60 percent came from Canada and 30 percent came from Mexico.
Since the 1890s, more than 70 percent of immigrants entered through the Port of New York; throughout the 1920s, that number was about 50 percent. While the twenty-seven acres of Ellis Island served as the legal border for most immigrants, the new gate of entry became the nearly two-thousand-mile border with Mexico and the even longer border to the north with Canada. The future of American immigration, little grasped at the time, would not be with Europeans, but with those coming from south of the border.
Stricter quotas led to greater efforts to evade the new law. Illegal immigration began to attract the attention of the nation’s leaders. In 1923, Labor Secretary James J. Davis warned President Harding that as many as one hundred thousand immigrants were crossing into the United States surreptitiously. Other reports, no doubt exaggerated, put the figure at a thousand a day. After taking office later that same year, President Calvin Coolidge warned the nation’s governors of this “seepage over the borders,” which he called a “considerable menace” to the success of the new immigration legislation.
Deportations also increased during the 1920s. From 1910 to 1918, an average of 2,750 immigrants were deported each year. By 1921, over 4,500 immigrants were deported annually, and by 1930, that figure had skyrocketed to 16,631, as the nation’s mood increasingly soured toward immigrants. As more people were being stopped at the front door by quotas, still more were being kicked out the back door with stepped-up enforcement of the law.
By far the most important change brought by the new law would not go into effect for a few more years. Not happy with the near-complete exclusion of most southern and eastern Europeans, restrictionists saw a gross disparity in these quotas: they were based upon the foreign-born population. If the goal was to maintain America as an Anglo-Saxon nation, why not figure the quotas on the ethnic background of the entire population, both native- and foreign-born. In fact, the 2 percent quota based on the 1890 Census had actually reduced the quota on immigrants from the United Kingdom by more than half. The big winners of the 1924 quota law were midnineteenth-century immigrant groups such as the Irish and Germans.
To rectify the situation, Congress authorized a study to determine the precise ethnic makeup of all American citizens living in the country in 1920. The result was a so-called national origins plan. In keeping with the rigid racial boundaries of the era, the study included only white Americans and omitted blacks, Asians, and American Indians.
The commission calculated that by 1920, the United States was no longer a majority Anglo-Saxon