Thread by @ErikLoomis

This Day in Labor History: May 26, 1924. Calvin Coolidge signs the Immigration Act, effectively shutting off immigrant labor from entering the nation, except from Mexico, and ending an era of our history, demonstrating how racism can often trump other concerns.

Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe seemed to threaten American values for reasons outside their funny religions, peasant clothing, and garlic-eating ways. Most people came to the U.S. for the precise reason they do today: to make money for their families back home.

Like Mexicans and Guatemalans today, many hoped to make money and then return and maybe buy some land and build a little house in their home village. And many did that–for groups like the Italians and Greeks there was significant out-migration.

But some of these immigrants, even if they just wanted to work, also believed in the need for a better world. That was especially true among the immigrant group least likely to return to Europe–Jews. This was true of the Irish too, but they were basically grandfathered in in 1924

Jews, and to a lesser extent other groups such as the Italians, Greeks, and Finns, had been introduced to socialist ideas in Europe and brought them to the United States.

The Jewish women leading the Uprising of the 20,000 against apparel company exploitation in 1909 and after the Triangle Fire in 1911 were the cheap labor the department stores and clothing designers wanted.

But those Jewish women had radical tendencies of standing up for their rights that was definitely not what the capitalists wanted.

The corporations intentionally brought in different and competing ethnic groups to undermine workplace solidarity (not to mention basic communication).

This could be successful but as companies found out at Lawrence, Paterson, and Ludlow, diverse workforces could unite for decent wages and living conditions.

Acts like Jewish immigrant Alexander Berkman trying (and failing) to assassinate plutocrat Henry Clay Frick after Homestead or the son of immigrants Leon Czoglosz killing William McKinley was a sign of the very real violence that some would commit to punish capitalists.

While unions like the Industrial Workers of the World embraced these new workers, mainstream organized labor considered them competition for jobs already poorly paid and thus disdained them, a choice that was as much cultural and racial as it was about principles of labor.

The American Federation of Labor strongly supported all anti-immigration legislation despite being headed by English immigrant Samuel Gompers. But Gompers came out of an older Protestant immigration that had caused little American history

It was Catholics and others that led to greater tensions, starting with the anti-Irish sentiments. Gompers had no patience for southern and eastern Europeans and especially those with ideas about labor movements more radical than he. Which was a lot of people.

Despite the strikes many of these new immigrants engaged in, for most corporate leaders, the need for cheap labor won out over concerns about radicals. The plutocrats buying the Republican Party managed to keep the door open long after nativists wanted it shut.

The events of World War I changed the equation.

The unfair equation of the IWW with pro-Kaiser sentiment (absurd on the face of it) meant that immigrants were more suspect than ever and that everything about them needed watching.

This is also how the 18th Amendment also finally gathered the necessary support to pass since even beer drinking was now German.

The Espionage and Sedition Acts, the Bisbee Deportation, the Palmer Raids, and the deporting of radicals including Emma Goldman all influenced a comprehensive solution to the fears Protestants had of what this nation was becoming, which was just ending immigration almost entirely

This trend had been coming for some time and the 1924 act, properly known as the Johnson-Reed Act, was only the final straw.

The Immigration Act of 1917, passed over Woodrow Wilson’s veto, barred “undesirables” from entering the U.S., a category which included criminals, the insane, and alcoholics, and imposed a literacy test which led to 1,400 immigrants being denied entry in 1920 and 1921.

Perhaps the most notable feature about the Immigration Act was setting the racial quotas to 1890 level. The quotas of immigrants from each country would be based upon their numbers in the United States according to the 1890 census.

It meant that Germans, Irish, and English could still come over in relatively undiminished numbers. It meant basically no Asians, which eliminated the rather sizable immigrant stream of “Syrians” (mostly what we would call today Lebanese Christians).

There was one core exception to the Immigration Act, which was Mexicans crossing into the U.S. to provide cheap farm labor in the Southwest.

This would begin a long history of American labor law making exceptions for farmworkers, eventually creating long-term inequality in the sector that continues today.

Was the end of immigration the boon for organized labor that its proponents claimed it would be? Not really. The same conservative movement that ended immigration also crushed organized labor.

The powerful union movement flexing its muscles in 1919 was at a low point a mere decade later. And that was before the Great Depression created 25 percent unemployment and another 25 percent underemployment.

In 1927, Albert Johnson said of the act he sponsored that it protected America from “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherent misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed.” Or in other words, people who would challenge capitalism.

The nation would finally revise its racist immigration policy with the Immigration Act of 1965.

The irony of American labor often opposing immigration is that immigrants have traditionally been a lot more open to organizing than native-born Americans, especially white men who continue to dominate the labor movement and also be the demographic least interested in unions.

Basically, you don't really support worker rights in the United States if you don't support immigrant workers. The future of American unions, if there is one, is an immigrant-eccentric movement. Luckily, it is increasingly moving in that direction today.

Today is also the anniversary of the Battle of the Overpass, when Henry Ford's private army of thugs beat up UAW leaders trying to organize the River Rouge plant in Dearborn.

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Back on Wednesday to talk about Rosie the Riveter and women laborers in World War II.