World War I and National Origins Act-American immigration?
World War I (1914-1918) marked an important turning point in the history of immigration to the U.S. Wartime nationalism led many native-born Americans to become even more distrustful of recent immigrants, whose loyalty to the U.S. they suspected. Calls for "unhyphenated Americanism" (in the sense that Americans should consider themselves "American," rather than, for example, "Italian-American") and "100 percent Americanism" were widespread during the war. Because the U.S. was at war against Germany, distrust of German-Americans was especially severe. Many states passed laws forbidding schools to teach the German language, and the state of Iowa even outlawed speaking German in public or over the telephone!
Few immigrants traveled from Europe to the U.S. during the war, but many Americans feared that immigration, which had been at a high level before the war, would become even greater when the war ended. They feared that refugees would flee war-ravaged nations. They also feared Russians whom they expected to flee the newly created communist government, known as the Soviet Union. When the war ended, nativists urged a severe restriction on immigration to the U.S., and in 1921 Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act. This law limited the number of immigrants who could move to the U.S. from any nation and set a maximum number of 357,000 new immigrants per year.
In 1924, Congress passed the National Origins Act, which further reduced immigration. The act cut the total quota from the 1921 act in half, and established quotas for the number of immigrants from any nation equal to 2 percent of the number of Americans from that nation according to the 1890 Census. Nativists selected 1890 as their standard in order to keep quotas for Southern and Eastern Europe low, since relatively few Southern or Eastern Europeans had arrived in the U.S. by that date. After 1929, the act provided for quotas that established how many immigrants could enter the U.S. from other nations and limited total annual immigration to 150,000. The act also declared Japanese-Americans "aliens ineligible for citizenship," meaning that they could never become naturalized citizens of the U.S. With some slight alterations, this law governed American immigration policy until the nation's immigration laws were rewritten in 1965.