Origins of the U.S. immigration system

[archerships]

From Madison Grant and the Racialist Movement:

The effect was felt at both the state and federal level. Twenty-four states passed laws encouraging sterilization of those who were retarded, insane, or had criminal records. At the Federal level, in 1921, Albert Johnson, head of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, began a series of hearings on immigration. He appointed Harry Laughlin, who in 1922 would be one of Grant's co-founders of the American Eugenics Society, as an expert witness on eugenics. In 1922, Laughlin reported extensively on racial differences in IQ as measured by the new army intelligence test.

In 1923, Grant's close friend Henry Fairfield Osborn, the famous paleontologist who named “tyrannosaurus rex,” spoke enthusiastically about intelligence testing: “We have learned once and for all that the Negro is not like us.”


Congress restricts immigration.
This was precisely the kind of thing Grant and others had been saying for years. These ideas helped pass the Johnson Act of 1924, which established national origin immigration quotas of 2 percent of the number of foreign-born already in America as determined by the census of 1890. This greatly reduced the flow of immigrants from non-traditional sources, a policy that remained essentially unchanged until 1965.

(Note: I don't consider American Renaissance, a website devoted to white nationalism, to be a generally reliable source. However, in this case, their bias would be, if anything, to portray Grant and immigration quotas in an excessively positive light. )

Comments

[atypically-me.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's very informative. Thanks for the history.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

If we're going to have border control at all, I favor a bond system. Would-be immigrants would have to buy a bond worth say, $100 K, that would be forfeit if they went on welfare, or were convicted of a crime. Bond brokers would have a financial incentive to screen out the parasites, yet allow as many non-parasitic immigrants as possible. Most would-be immigrants are not criminals or parasites, so I expect that most would be to become bonded at relatively low expense. Such a system should also get better over time, as bond brokers become more skilled at identifying risks, and as secondary risk identification tools and systems come on the market. (immigrant credit reporting agencies, etc.)

So I suppose my exclusion criteria would be "ability to pay for risk of imposing costs on others, as estimated by a professional bond broker".

[crasch.livejournal.com]

How would you charge the country of origin?