This article from THE SMART SET was published at a time when America was marking the three-hundredth anniversary of the Puritan arrival at Cape Cod and written by H.L. Mencken with his characteristic sense of hopelessness, this small piece remarks that (up to that point in time) immigrants to America were all cut from the same Puritan cloth. The Puritan has been a reoccurring figure in America "and will not die out...until the delusion of moral perfection is lost and forgotten". "The measure is not intended as a basis for permanent immigration policy, but simply as an emergency" injunction" to halt immigration until Congress... can determine the policy it wishes to adopt" A single column from 1921 reported on a proposal before the U.S. Congress to drastically reduce the numbers of immigrants who were entering the United States at that time.
The bill passed. A brief notice from the 1930 Census reporting on that percentage of the United States population that was born on foreign shores. Within the confines of this small paragraph some details were provided as to how many arrived prior to 1900, how many between 1901 and 1910; 1911 and 1919; 1920 and 1930. Additional information appears concerning the assorted racial make-up of these new American and how many of them originated from both quota and non-quota nations. "[President Hoover's Secretary of Labor, William N. Doak] placed the number of aliens now illegally residing in the United States at 400,000. Of this number he thought 100,000 were subject to deportation... The illegal entries were made, he said, under the quota laws of 1921 and 1924, the larger part coming through Mexico and Canada, while ship's deserters amounted to about 1
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1,000." Three cheers for the late Earl S. Parker, long-suffering secretary of the now-defunct American League of Justice (California) who recognized the tyranny inherit in the California Alien Land Bill of 1921! Seeing that the Japanese immigrants had been dealt enough cruelty by being denied citizenship, he was quick to point out that it was wrong to deny them real estate as well.
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