Don’t Quote Me on This, But The 1924 Immigration Act Wasn’t All Bad
For a country that takes pride in being a “nation of immigrants,” the United States is surprisingly bad at passing good immigration legislation. The 1924 National Origins Act, which tightened a set of quotas that had been introduced three years earlier, did one thing extremely well, however: it reduced overall immigration dramatically. In that narrow but important sense, the 1924 Immigration Act can be called a success.