The “Scientific” Ideas That Closed America’s Doors to Jewish Immigrants https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/history-ideas/2019/05/the-scientific-ideas-that-closed-americas-doors-to-jewish-immigrants/

May 9, 2019 | Richard Starr
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The Immigration Act of 1924 effectively slowed to a trickle the previous decades’ flood of immigrants into the U.S., introducing a system of quotas that made Jewish immigration especially difficult—with well-known consequences in the late 1930s and early 40s. In The Guarded Gate, Daniel Okrent argues that the main motivation behind the legislation was eugenics. Richard Starr writes in his review:

From the distance of almost a century, some of the restrictionists of our own day have offered a bloodless defense of the 1924 Act. . . . Patrick J. Buchanan recently presented a pithy version of this argument: “All peoples to some degree resent and resist the movement of outsiders into their space. . . . Our leaders in the 1920s understood this and took steps to halt the migrations until those who had come could be assimilated, and, in a word, Americanized. It worked.”

Except that’s not what those leaders thought they were doing or why they thought they were doing it, which brings us to the less familiar part of Okrent’s story. The men whose vision was embodied in the 1924 act did not by and large believe that the immigrant masses could or even should be assimilated and Americanized. Okrent gives us the view of Kenneth Roberts, who for years had been banging the drum for restriction in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, the largest and most influential of American magazines in those pre-radio, pre-TV days: “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southeastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in return.” . . .

As Okrent notes, “this ferment of racial analysis was a direct, if almost certainly unintended, product of the Darwinian revolution: once you establish that not everyone is descended from Adam and Eve—and thus not genetically related to one another—anything goes: racial differences, racial hierarchies, racial hatred.” And though eugenics may sound to modern ears like Darwin for Dummies, it wasn’t the dummies who led the parade. It was the best and brightest, good progressives, pioneering conservationists, highly credentialed scientists and intellectuals.

Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/saving-the-nordics-from-the-mongrels/