“America Must Be Kept American”: The Structural Violence of Colonial Legacies in United States Immigration Law

By Aria Bossone ’25

This year, 2024, marks the 100th anniversary of the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act (1). This act introduced the concept of quotas as a means of determining who was permitted to enter the country and who was barred, opening the door to decades of structural racism. To justify the strictest immigration policy in American history until that point, the President of the United States of America at the time, Calvin Coolidge, uttered a simple yet racially charged phrase: “America must be kept American” (2). While not directly articulated, the colonial undertones of this phrase suggest that through restricted immigration policy, the racial composition of the country would stay the same–or in blatant words, it would be kept white. In this essay, I argue that colonialities in quota-based migration laws created and reinforced structural discrimination on the basis of race and nationality through the promotion of white, northern European ideals. In conclusion, I demonstrate how these colonial principles of the 1920s immigration law have been reintroduced and reimagined in present-day migration rhetoric through politically charged legislation, underscoring the structural violence of Orientalism in the present day. 

Positionality

The inspiration for this paper began my first day at the University of Notre Dame in a course titled “Introduction to American Studies,” when our professor asked the class: What does it mean to be “American”? As Coolidge suggests, I wondered when and why “Americanness” became conflated with whiteness. Questions like this are at the core of my academic pursuits at Notre Dame and the inspiration behind this essay’s guiding questions and research. Like most white Americans, my ancestors immigrated from Europe, specifically the Catholic trifecta of Ireland, Poland, and southern Italy. For most of my life, I have felt most connected to my Italian heritage, both phenotypically and introspectively. From conversations with my grandfather and my academic study of the evolution of race in the United States, it appears that southern Italians, along with other southern and eastern Europeans, experienced discrimination uniquely. My Italian family, while never officially renouncing their Italian citizenship, sacrificed their native language and culture to assimilate into the product of whiteness as a means of survival. Luckily, they immigrated before the Immigration Act of 1924, with the last ancestor arriving in the United States in 1920; had they waited, they likely would not have been granted the right to immigrate under this 1924 Act, and I would not exist to write this paper. 

While I am fully aware of the privilege that I hold today as a white American, and that my ancestors did not experience nearly the same discrimination as, say, Asian migrants, it is through this nuanced lens of the evolution of racial identities and whiteness that I write this essay and expose the colonial legacies in these legislations. The critique will be directed at multiple areas: not only the racial implications of the quotas themselves, i.e. that the quotas clearly favored immigrants from the United Kingdom and Germany over anywhere else in the world, but also to expose how understandings of national belonging on which these quotas relied maintain colonial legacies even until the present day. 

Through my majors in American Studies and Peace Studies, I have been able to connect the historic synonymy of “Americanness” and whiteness to the United States’s colonial past, ultimately creating a network of structural violence hardwired to isolate, fragment, and destroy non-white communities. The concept of structural violence has a long history in Peace Studies, being formally coined by Johan Galtung in 1969 (3). He begins by defining violence as “that which increases the distance between the potential and the actual, and that which impedes the decrease of this distance” (4). He then makes the distinction between personal–or direct–and structural violence in two ways. Firstly, they are differentiated by the visibility of their actors. Personal and direct violence are typically incited by a clear actor, who can be named and may be visible to society at large. Within a system of structural violence, however, there exists no specific actor committing the violence (5). This very difference in the visibility of the actor causes another distinction between these two types of violence, in that direct violence shows fluctuations over time while structural violence goes unseen, ultimately stabilizing over time (6). While there are plenty more definitions of structural violence, my critique of the national origin quota system of the 1924 Act lies within the lens of these definitions and characteristics of structural violence proposed by Galtung.

Johnson-Reed Act of 1924

The Immigration Act of 1924—known colloquially as the Johnson-Reed Act and legally as “An Act to limit the immigration of aliens into the United States, and for other purposes”—was one of the first major pieces of immigration legislation of the 20th century. Its primary goal, as its legal name suggests, was to limit immigration to the United States via a national-origin quota system. This quota functioned to limit immigration by restricting the number of immigrants of a certain demographic who are allowed to enter the country. Through this Act specifically, the US government restricted the issuing of immigration visas based on the 1890 national census data: only two percent of the total number of people of each nationality already living in the US would be granted visas, with a minimum quota of any nationality at 100 and an overall cap of 150,000 per year (7). The following table breaks down the quotas by national origin, originally presented in Proclamation 1872, given by President Herbert Hoover in 1929 (8). In comparing some of these quota restrictions, there are clear differences that appear: Liberia, 100; Greece, 307; any northern European country (Netherlands, Belgium, France, Austria, etc.): 1000+; Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 65,721.

From these numbers alone, it is clear that the United States government wanted people of a certain nationality to enter. But, more clearly, they aimed to bar immigration for people of certain other nationalities. However, a full understanding of this Act and its intentions necessitates an explanation of the context in which it was written. This Act did not function alone. It was the culmination of immigration initiatives starting in the late 1800s, most notably, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1917 Immigration Act. The former provided an absolute 10-year ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to the United States; in 1892, it was extended for another ten years, and in 1902, it was made permanent. The latter banned any native from any Asian country from entering the United States and instated a literacy test to reduce immigration from less educated parts of Europe, such as the southern and eastern parts. These three acts worked in conjunction to bar nearly half the world’s population from immigrating to the United States and cemented a structure of violence for generations to come. 

National origin quotas as a means of reinforcing a colonial, Anglo-centric ideal of whiteness

While the function of the Johnson-Reed Act was to limit large influxes of immigrants to better accommodate groups of people, the addition of the intentionally vague phrase “and for other purposes” had its own implications. These underlying “purposes” lay in the preservation of the colonial Eurocentric ideals of the 20th-century United States. The Act and its strategic methods for quotas were designed to maintain America’s largely northern European racial composition. Of the nearly 63 million people living in the United States in 1890, over 55 million of them–or 87.5% of the population–were white (9). While there may be many reasons to explain this exorbitant percentage, there is one foundational cause: colonialism. From the original colonization of the Americas by Britain, France, and Spain since the 15th century, to the centuries-long direct and systemic genocide of Indigenous Americans, to the Transatlantic Slave Trade of the 16th to 19th centuries, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the colonial structures of the prior multiple centuries had determined who was desired in the country and who was directly and systematically eradicated, ultimately establishing the majority-white racial makeup of the country. Paul Spickard, an American historian and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, deems “racial replacement” as the motivator behind this colonial racism, exposing the clear tie between “exterminating Indians and dispossessing Mexicans, on one hand, and bringing in [northern] Europeans on the other” (10). 

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 perpetuated these colonial structures precisely through the groups it chose to exclude entirely from its quota system. These groups included, but were not limited to, “descendants of slave immigrants, […] descendants of American aborigines, [and] aliens ineligible to citizenship or their descendants” (11). As already established, the existence of Blacks and the elimination of many Indigenous groups in the United States are both seeded in colonialism. The legacy of this colonialism, or the coloniality, extends generationally onto the descendants of these people. The promotion of potential citizenship for the Black descendants of slaves and the descendants of Indigenous Americans threatened the majority-white racial composition of the country at the time. Hence, Section 11(d) of the Act justifies the elimination of the “minimum 100” rule stated in Section 11(b) for these groups, contributing to their distinct and whole exclusion from the immigration act.

The more camouflaged strategy of Section 11(d), though, lies in the exclusion of “aliens ineligible to citizenship or their descendants.” Only through a contextual lens of the Act can the strategy of this phrasing be recognized. Firstly, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred all Chinese migration to the United States for nearly a century. The 1924 Act’s two percent rule, which entirely depended on immigrant presence in the 1890 census, would then exclude anyone of Chinese nationality. Secondly, in 1917, a mere seven years before the 1924 Act, an immigration act was passed that stated that “[no] persons […] who are natives of islands of any country, province, or dependency situated on the Continent of Asia […] shall be admitted to the United States” (12). Working in tandem with one another, the Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924 continued the legacies of anti-Asian colonial sentiments for decades until the Immigration Act of 1965. So, although Table 1 shows that countries such as China, Japan, and India were granted a quota of 100 people, the superscript ^a reveals that those quotas would only be granted to those who are eligible for US citizenship. For Asian migrants post-1882 and post-1917, that number was zero.

Not only did this Act exclude those of certain nationalities, but it also reconstructed legal and cultural narratives of race and nationality themselves. As Mae M. Ngai, Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History at Columbia University, argues in “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law,” this Act constructed a new field of thought surrounding race and nationality (13). From the nineteenth century until the 1920s, race and nationality had loosely been conflated. This Act changed this philosophy: it constructed a “white American” race, thus separating race and nationality for northern European immigrants. While they all shared their white American racial identity, their nationality remained. For those deemed not white, particularly immigrants from Asia and Latin America, such a separation did not exist. Thus, because they could not attain this status of the “white American,” legal and cultural structures heavily racialized and discriminated against these groups, deeming them perpetually foreign.

The Immigration Act of 1965 and Executive Order 13769: How the Johnson-Reed Act Has Been Both Abolished and Reimagined in History

The year 1965 brought substantial change to the United States, most notably through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. As the Civil Rights Movement was forging paths, the racism of the previously utilized quota system was becoming more apparent to legislators and politicians. The Act itself intended to release immigration law of its racist legacy by replacing the old national origins-based quota system with a new system that allocated residence visas according to a neutral preference system based on family reunification and labor force needs (15). It attempted to decolonize immigration law by “undoing” the harmful quota system in place; 1965 marked an important year in Asian American history, in particular, as it was the first time since 1882 that Chinese labor migrants could legally enter the United States.

However, although the 1965 Act attempted to eradicate the harmful effects of the quota system, I argue that the colonial legacies of these quota metrics have been reimagined culturally, politically, and legally in the present day through structural Orientalism. Edward Said, renowned philosopher and scholar, defines Orientalism as a structural and cultural process of the othering of those of “the East” (16). Alexander Lyon Macfie, a British historian and philosopher, then connects this notion of Orientalism to Christian, European prejudice against Islam, which is rooted in colonial structures (17) In addition to this colonially-rooted Orientalism, the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent War on Terror are foundational in modern-day US-cultivated structural Orientalism. In the 1924 Act, Arabs remained fairly invisible, being barred alongside Asian migrants in 1917. The early 2000s, though, rendered Arab Americans hyper-visible in the political and cultural eyes (18). The national panic that ensued after the terrorist attacks of September 11 kickstarted more than two decades of structural Orientalism that continued to perceive Arab Americans as foreign, dangerous, and un-American.

This colonial structure of Orientalism is seen in present-day immigration law, most notably in President Donald Trump’s infamous 2017 Executive Order 13769, colloquially known as the Muslim Ban. This executive order banned travel to the United States for 90 days from seven predominantly Muslim countries–Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen–and suspended the resettlement of all Syrian refugees (19).

While the main function of the 1924 quota system was eradicated in 1965, this Executive Order bears a scary resemblance to the dominating rhetoric of the country 100 years prior. In the same speech that Calvin Coolidge uttered “America must be kept American,” he grounded his justification for the Act in the safety of the American public: “Restricted immigration is not an offensive but purely a defensive action. It is not adopted in criticism of others in the slightest degree, but solely for the purpose of protecting ourselves” (20). Now, compare that line with President Donald Trump’s justification for this executive order: “In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles” (21). These two lines emphasize the “invasion” rhetoric of modern-day immigration: Europeans may immigrate to the United States, but Mexicans/Chinese/Arabs ‘invade’ the country and put the ‘American’ [white] people at risk. Trump’s words are rooted in the same structure of violence as those of Coolidge 100 years before, proving the undeniable effects that structures of violence have over generations.

References

1. National Archives Catalog. An Act of May 26, 1924, Public Law 68-139, 43 STAT 153, to Limit Immigration of Aliens into the United States for Other Purposes; Immigration Act of 1924. N.p.: United States Congress. 1924.
2. Coolidge, Calvin. “Accepting The Republican Presidential Nomination.” August 14, 1924.
3. Galtung, Johan. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/422690.
4. Galtung. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” pg. 168.
5. Galtung. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” pg. 170.
6. Galtung. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” pg. 173.
7. National Archives Catalog. An Act of May 26, 1924, Public Law 68-139, 43 STAT 153, to Limit Immigration of Aliens into the United States for Other Purposes; Immigration Act of 1924. N.p.: United States Congress. 1924.
8. Proclamation by the President of the United States, no. 1872: “Limiting the Immigration of Aliens Into the United States on the Basis of National Origin.” March 22, 1929.
9. Gibson, Campbell, and Kay Jung. “Historical Census Statistics On Population Totals By Race, 1790 to 1990, and By Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, For Large Cities And Other Urban Places In The United States.” Washington, D.C., February 2005.
10. Spickard, Paul R. Almost All Aliens : Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity. New York: Routledge, 2007.
11. National Archives Catalog. An Act of May 26, 1924, Public Law 68-139, 43 STAT 153, to Limit Immigration of Aliens into the United States for Other Purposes; Immigration Act of 1924. N.p.: United States Congress. 1924.
12. Pub. L. 64-301. An Act to regulate the immigration of aliens to, and the residence of aliens, the United States. February 5, 1917.
13. Ngai, Mae M. “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924.” The Journal of American History (Bloomington, Ind.) 86, no. 1 (1999): 67–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/2567407.
14. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. 1st Harvard University Press pbk. ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999.
15. Massey, Douglas S., and Karen A. Pren. “Unintended consequences of US immigration policy: explaining the post-1965 surge from Latin America.” Popul Dev Rev. 2012;38(1):1-29. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2012.00470.x
16. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
17. Macfie, A. L. Orientalism. London: Longman, 2002. 
18. Salaita, Steven. “Beyond Orientalism and Islamophobia: 9/11, Anti-Arab Racism, and the Mythos of National Pride.” CR: The New Centennial Review 6, no. 2 (2006): 245–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949528.
19. Executive Order 13769. Jan 27, 2017.
20. Coolidge, Calvin. “Accepting The Republican Presidential Nomination.” August 14, 1924.
21. Executive Order 13769. Jan 27, 2017.
22. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.