Just over a century ago — on May 26, 1924 — U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Immigration Act of 1924. Also known as the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, it was without precedent in the history of the United States — a country that had been built by immigrants from every part of the world — in its pronouncement of isolationism and its exclusion of people of specific nationalities and ethnicities.

The spread of communism following World War I in Europe had instilled fear in the American public as well. It was also a time of racial discrimination, and a resentment of the loss of jobs to the large number of unskilled, uneducated immigrants seeking opportunities in the promised land.

Coolidge’s new law allowed the continuation of immigration for those with college educations and/or special skills, but denied admission to Eastern and Southern Europeans and Japanese. More welcome were those from Northern European nations such as Great Britain, Ireland, and the Scandinavian countries.

In 1907, then President Theodore Roosevelt had entered into a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with Japan, allowing for more liberal immigration quotas from that country. That, too, was abolished by the 1924 Act. So angered were the Japanese people that anti-American sentiment became rampant; one Japanese citizen committed suicide outside the American Embassy in Tokyo in protest. [“This Day In History,” History.com, May 26, 2025.]

It wasn’t until four decades later that Coolidge’s law was abolished by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act. It put an end to the National Origins Formula that was the basis of the earlier act, and ended de facto discrimination against Southern and Eastern Europeans, as well as Asians and other non-Western and Northern European ethnicities. [Id.]

America was once again the land of opportunity for the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Until now.

Sixty years after Lyndon Johnson put an end to America’s spate of xenophobia, it’s back . . . not because of fear on the part of the general public, but because of the policies of an administration that doesn’t know a good thing when they see it. And that good thing is an America that has worked well, and grown, and thrived, for 250 years.

America doesn’t need to be made great again. It always has been, and still is, great.

In short: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
5/26/25