The Progressive Professor

Tragically, the four decades between the Presidency of Warren G. Harding until the end of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidency, saw the promotion of anti immigrant legislation and actions.

National Origins quotas were established in 1921, and then, under Calvin Coolidge, in 1924, a very restrictive immigration law, the Immigration Act, was passed.

The legislation strictly limited Catholic and Jewish immigration from southern and eastern European nations, and totally banned Japanese immigration, along with the continuation of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

This law would make it nearly impossible for Jews to escape Nazi Germany, and being denied admission to America, and Italians, trying to escape Fascist Italy, faced the same tragic fate, causing many millions of deaths.

The coming of the Great Depression in 1929 and after did not convince Herbert Hoover, who like his two earlier Republican predecessors in the 1920s, were totally isolationist and pacifist to the extreme extent.

Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, authorized detention and internment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants during World War II, which was later authorized by the Supreme Court.

While some European immigrants were allowed in, Jews were not able to escape to America, and this contributed to the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe, which killed about 6 million Jews and 7 million others who wished to escape, but were unable to do do.

Even more horrendous was the Supreme Court case in December 1944, Korematsu V. US, which upheld the internment of the Japanese Americans as a militarily essential action of the federal government in wartime conditions, by a 6-3 vote.

It is considered one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history, and in 2018, in US V. Hawaii, the Supreme Court overruled the Korematsu decision, after 74 years.

However, on the same day as Korematsu, which divided the Court, the decision on Ex Parte Endo, all Japanese detainees were ordered released, a confusing situation created by the Supreme Court, one of its most degrading moments in its entire history.

Under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the Japanese Americans who were still alive, gained reparations for their imprisonment, an action supported by President Ronald Reagan near the end of his time in office.

Under President Harry Truman, he vetoed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, but both houses of Congress passed it over his veto, in a time of the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism.

There were new restrictions on migration, particularly against those who professed Socialist or Communist beliefs, but also strict quotas on many people of different nationalities.

Finally, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, mistreatment of Mexican nationals, which had gone on for decades, led to the derogatory term or slur “Wetback” being utilized in “Operation Wetback” in 1954-1955.

This led to deportation to Mexico of about 250,000 individuals by the US Border Patrol, a controversy much ignored since, but a stain on basic civil liberties, and a clearcut violation of human and civil rights.

Overall, under enforcement actions authorized by Eisenhower, over 1.1 million Mexicans were forcibly returned to Mexico by land and by sea in the year 1954, much beyond the actions alone of the US Border Patrol. And immigration quotas for all groups were strictly enforced in the Eisenhower Era.

So over these four decades from the 1920s to the end of the 1950s, overall, immigrants were treated very harshly, and without a sense of humanity—whether Asian immigrants; Jewish and Catholic immigrants; or Mexican and other Latin American immigrants.

This was a terrible violation of what the Statue of Liberty, which was given by France to the United States in 1886, promoted as the Open Door to America for those around the world who were escaping persecution and poverty, and seeking opportunity and a new lease on life in America.