Trade, Immigration, and the Forces of Political Culture: America was founded as a “society of equals.” Technological or demographic changes that threaten that ideal have long provoked sharp political responses. (Stephen Haber, February 9, 2026, Freedom Frequency)
It was not long before another technological change—the fall in transport costs induced by improvements in passenger steamships—created a new challenge to America’s society of equals. Immigrants from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, China, and Japan, who would work for wages well below those of native-born workers, began arriving in large numbers.
The political response to technologically induced demographic change was sharp.
In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, which effectively banned the immigration of Chinese women to the United States. It was followed in 1882 by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers and denied Chinese already in the United States the right to become naturalized citizens. In 1905, the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League was established in California to expand the Chinese Exclusion Act to immigrants from those countries. The result was the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, in which the Japanese government agreed not to issue passports for Japanese citizens wishing to work in the United States.
Restrictions on Southern and Eastern European immigration soon followed. A 1917 law required immigrants to pass a literacy test. In 1921 an Emergency Quota Act limited the number of immigrants from any country outside the Western Hemisphere to 3 percent of the foreign-born persons of that nationality living in the United States in 1910. It therefore sharply curtailed what had been virtually unlimited European immigration and at the same time favored Northern and Western Europeans, who were numerically dominant in the United States in the 1910 census, over poorer immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.
It was followed by the even more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924, which prevented immigration from Asia, capped total immigration at 165,000, and set quotas for Europeans at 2 percent of their US population in the 1890 census (when Eastern and Southern Europeans were an even smaller minority than in the 1910 census, thereby further curtailing their numbers).
America’s restrictive immigration policies endured for decades. The Chinese Exclusion Act remained on the books until 1943, when the United States and China were allied against Japan during World War II. The quotas of the 1924 Immigration Act remained until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which established a preference system based on attracting highly skilled workers and reunifying families.