Immigration In The 1920s Essay

Immediately following the end of World War I and the United States’ “return to normalcy” under President Warren G. Harding, the 1920s marked the beginning of an exciting new era in American history. Rapid economic growth fueled by easy credit and a booming stock market brought prosperity and leisure to large swaths of the citizenry. Sales of consumer goods such as automobiles, telephones, and radios spiked as the average household suddenly possessed both the disposable income and spare time in which to broaden their intellectual, political, and cultural horizons. However, these expansions of liberty were not uniform for historically minority and marginalized groups. Women, African Americans, and immigrants all achieved various degrees of success

The 1920s heralded an era of anti-immigration on a scale never before seen in the nation’s history. In reaction to increasing nativism and the influx of refugees from World War I, Congress passed the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, which “reduced European immigration to three percent of the foreign-born population.” Then, with the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, Congress “imposed a numerical limit of 155,000 admissions per year…compared to an average of one million a year before the war.” Moreover, while Mexican immigration was not formally restricted, border enforcement regularly apprehended and deported those they deemed the “illegal aliens” from a “mongrel race,” while engaging in racial profiling and detaining and interrogating thousands more. The 1920s represented a significant departure from the relatively more open immigration policies of the nation’s past, introducing unprecedented levels of immigration restriction, racial profiling, and discrimination against those viewed as inferior or dangerous races. Immigrants faced additional prejudice once inside the United States. In 1920, police arrested two Italian anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, accused of robbery and killing a security guard. Their subsequent murder trial sparked intense controversy and was marred by both anti-immigrant and anti-radical sentiment, in which “the judge was biased, evidence was manipulated, Italian immigrant eyewitness testimony was undermined, and ballistics tests may have been tampered with.” Despite “eight motions for a new trial,” the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared that there had been no legal errors,” and executed the two men in 1927. The fact that Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted despite very little evidence linking the two men to the crime, in a clearly biased and