The Trump administration’s recent visa ban on 75 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, plus 10 eastern European nations, has been criticised as a revival of the racist 1924 Immigration Act. The Department of Homeland Security justified the ban by claiming immigrants from these countries are at “high risk” of becoming a “public charge”, but immigration scholar Heba Gowayed argues this economic justification is false. Immigrants have been largely disqualified from cash welfare since 1996, and those eligible for benefits like Snap and Medicaid use them at lower rates than non-immigrants. Through taxes, immigrants are net contributors, especially undocumented immigrants excluded from federal benefits.
Gowayed notes that nearly all countries on the list were also restricted by the 1924 Immigration Act’s racial quotas. That law, also called the Johnson-Reed Act, capped total immigration at a fifth of pre-World War I levels and used the 1890 census to allocate nearly 90% of slots to northern and western Europeans. Asians were totally barred, except for a few from the Levant, and African admissions were capped at 1,200 per year. The act also created the category of “illegal alien” and visa requirements, and funded the first border patrol.
Trump’s rhetoric echoes that of Albert Johnson, the act’s eugenicist author who believed immigrants were “diluting” American institutions and boasted of Ku Klux Klan violence. Trump has claimed immigrants are “poisoning the nation’s blood” and preferred people from Sweden, Norway and Denmark over those from “filthy” countries like Somalia. Both administrations evoked the “public charge” concept and required literacy tests and health screenings.
The 1924 act was popular, passing with over 80% support in Congress and signed by Calvin Coolidge, who echoed Klan rhetoric that “America must be kept American”. It succeeded in keeping America white, reducing the foreign-born population from 13% in the 1920s to less than 5% in 1970, when the US was 87.5% white. Today, 15% of Americans are foreign-born and the country is 57.8% white. Gowayed suggests concern over a non-white majority by 2045 may drive Project 2025’s mass deportation vision.
Refugees were also denied under the 1924 act. In 1939, over 900 Jewish passengers on the SS St Louis were forced back to Europe, and nearly a quarter died in Nazi camps. Even after the Holocaust, the US did not admit displaced persons until 1948.
