Immigration: The Guarded Gate

Okrent, Daniel. The Guarded Gate. New York:Scribner, 2019.

An examination of US history reveals a pattern of xenophobia and nativism which often leads to discrimination and hostility towards immigrants and different ethnic groups. Germans, Irish, and Italians found themselves the target of anti-immigrant hysteria and discrimination. The rhetoric used against recent immigrants also appears to bear some similarities to past discussions. The early decades of the twentieth century appear as a watershed in the history of American immigration as thousands of migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe poured into American docks. The United States previously banned immigration from China and Japan through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 forbidding Japanese immigration. The concern over immigration increased as largely Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe poured into the United States threatening in the eyes of the elite the dominance of the Protestant majority culture. Daniel Okrent in his book, The Guarded Gate tells the story beginning in 1895 of anti-immigrant or restrictionist politicians and elites who strived to not only limit immigration but halt the large number of migrants from areas deemed too alien for the United States to successfully assimilate.  The move to limit immigration soon discovered an ally within scientific racism and eugenics as many progressive elites believed that the large numbers of Catholics and Jews derived from an inferior racial grouping which would dilute the superior Northern European ancestry of most Americans.

            The core concern of many progressive elites was the theory that if immigration continued that the inferior genetic immigrants threatened to replace the majority Northern European Protestant with their substandard racial characteristics and supposed lower intelligence. Politicians led by Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge initially sought to limit immigration trough a literacy test for new immigrants. But failure to institute literacy tests led to a use of scientific racism along with eugenics to provide a scientific basis for immigration quotas. Charles Benedict Davenport, a descendent of New England Puritans sought to use eugenics to improve an evolving humanity and established the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for the study of human improvement through eugenics. Henry Goddard’s Kallikak study of “defectives” convinced many states to impose sterilization upon those judged feeble minded or slow. Goddard also examined recent immigrants at Ellis Island and judged that 79% of Italians, 80% of Hungarians, and 83% of Jews were feeble-minded or imbeciles. Madison Grant, the founder of the Bronx Zoo, caused great concern of racial replacement in his book The Passing of the Great Race, where he declared that the white race faced extinction due to intermixing with inferior racial groups and low birth rates. According to Grant and most who expressed fears of immigration the immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were definitely not white but a different racial stock altogether.  Interestingly, Grant’s ideas and writings later found great reception in Nazi Germany and still find enthusiastic acceptance among white supremacists and nationalists today.

The concern over immigration and the “science” of racial classifications culminated in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 which placed strict quotas on new immigrants and based the quotas on the 1890 census. Areas such as Britain and other Northern European countries received higher quotas based on the descendants within America in 1890 while other areas received only a pittance in the number of migrants allowed in the USA. The comprehensive was not only meant to limit immigration but to preserve and protect White Protestant society in the United States. Not only did the quotas inspire Hitler and the Nazi Party, who verbally praised American efforts, but placed roadblocks to fleeing Jews desperate to escape the horrors of the coming Holocaust. Okrent’s work presents serious arguments regarding the consequences of the bigotry and racism which drove much of the anti-immigrant hysteria of the early 20^th century. The appearance of the same arguments used by white supremacists groups and even the use of the replacement theory by respected commentators demonstrates the importance of examining this history and makes The Guarded Gate a valuable tool in examining this important history.