Walker's ideas mobilized popular support for immigration restriction, especially among the educated elite, in ways that had not happened before. In the spring of 1894 the Immigration Restriction League was formed by group of recent Harvard graduates, led by Prescott Farnsworth Hall and Robert DeCourcy Ward. Both made use of Walker's theory in a most polemical way. Hall ("Selection of Immigration," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 19 [1904]: 182) used it to liken immigration to genocidal infanticide: "the main point is that the native children are murdered by never being allowed to come into existence, as surely as if put to death in some older invasion of the Huns and Vandals." Ward ( "The Restriction of Immigration," North American Review 179 (1904): 236) exploited its racial dimension: "The question is a race question, pure and simple.... It is fundamentally a question as to what kind of babies shall be born; it is a question as to what races shall dominate in this country." Edward Alsworth Ross ("The Causes of Race Superiority," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (1901): 88) boosted the political potency of the theory by labeling it "race suicide":"For a case like this I can find no words so apt as 'race suicide.' There is no bloodshed, no violence, no assault of the race that waxes upon the race that wanes. The higher race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates itself rather than endure individually the bitter competition it has failed to ward off by collective action. The working classes gradually delay marriage and restrict the size of the family as the opportunities hitherto reserved for their children are eagerly snapped up by the numerous progeny of the foreigner. The prudent, self-respecting natives first cease to expand, and then, as the struggle for existence grows sterner and the outlook for their children darker, they fail even to recruit their own numbers."President Theodore Roosevelt (A Letter from President Roosevelt on Race Suicide," American Monthly Review of Reviews 35 (1907): 550) adopted and gave wide currency the the notion of "race suicide" by claiming that it was "the greatest problem of civilization" since it resulted in "the elimination instead of the survival of the fittest."Walker's use of Darwinism and Teutonism proved fortuitous. At the turn of the century, the rediscovery of Mendel's research and the power of Weismann's contentions led many to believe that science had proven heredity's transcendent role in molding human destiny. Lamarckian beliefs about the inheritability of acquired characteristics were discredited, and the significance of race greatly enhanced. A Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association was formed in 1906, largely by natural scientists, marking the formal establishment of the American eugenics movement. Its goal was "to emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood." Demographic trends assumed an ominous importance to eugenicists. They, like Walker, were firmly convinced that the new immigrants were innately inferior and that immediate intervention in the nation's population dynamics was needed to prevent a biological catastrophe. In 1908 the Eugenics Section established an Immigration Committee to end the flow of "defective germ plasm" into the country. Restrictionists and eugenicists shared a biologic Malthusianism, and increasingly overlapped in policies and personnel. Immigration restriction was considered (Hall, "Selection of Immigration," p. 170) a form of eugenics: "some advanced persons are talking of regulating marriage with a view to the elimination of those unfit for other purposes than mere survival; yet most people fail to realize that here in the United States we have a unique opportunity, through our power to regulate immigration, of exercising artificial selection upon an enormous scale."
By framing the issue in racial terms and by claiming that immigration lowered the general American living standard, Walker's actual theory was an ideological marvel. It worked to defuse a potentially problematic class issue. Restrictionists blamed the explosion in late nineteenth century immigration on a fiendish coalition of steamship lines, railroad companies and large industrialists. This coalition searched the outlying areas of Europe, selling now-inexpensive passages to America and drumming up low-wage workers for the industrialists' factories. This class analysis pitted the interest of a tiny few (who were not generally from "established" families) against that of the mass of Americans. Farmers, factory workers, shopkeepers and mill owners would undoubtedly be affected quite differently by restricting immigration. Yet Walker's theory allowed restrictionists to claim that all "natives" had a common interest in closing the door (Hall, "Selection of Immigration," p. 180): "To put the matter concretely, the greatest danger of unselected immigration is its effect upon the native birth rate" Race replaced class and consensus was possible. By claiming that the actions of the inferior were causing the demise of the superior, Walker's theory enhanced the appeal of biologic Malthusian thought. Native couples were not responsible for their deficient fertility, native workers were not responsible for their economic failures, and the higher classes were not responsible for the conditions of the poor. The new immigrants were responsible for all these ills, and preventing their entry would remedy them.
In the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 , Congress passed a new type of immigration law. It limited the number of immigrants entering the United States in any one year to 3 percent of the size of each nationality group that had been living in the United States in 1910. This policy favored the older Anglo-Saxon and northern European stock, who were more numerous than immigrants from southern and eastern Europe in that year.The maximum annual quota was set at 357,802. Of this total, approximately 56 percent was allotted to immigrants from northern and western Europe. Eastern and southern European immigrants received a quota of about 44 percent. The quota system drastically limited immigration from eastern and southern Europe, which had been running four times as large as that from the rest of Europe.
Many Americans were unhappy with the Immigration Act of 1921 because they felt that it still admitted too many of the "wrong" kinds of foreigners. To some extent, this attitude was a product of the times. The most extreme position was taken by the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish--against everybody not white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.
The vast majority of Americans had little interest in the KKK. Yet at the same time many felt some of the same feeling--concern about radical political ideas, the impact of Catholics and Jews on American society, and the "race degradation" of the American "stock" that supposedly was due to the influx of inferior Southern and Eastern Europeans. Many believed that too many foreigners would upset the "racial" balance of America and that immigration had gone far enough.
As immigration again reached high levels after the lull during World War I, popular pressure for a more stringent policy increased. Congress responded by passing a new and more drastic immigration law in 1924. The Immigration Act of 1924 created a permanent quota system (that of 1921 was only temporary), reducing the 1921 annual quota from 358,000 to 164,000. In addition, the Act reduced the immigration limit from 3 percent to 2 percent of each foreign-born group living in the United States in 1890. Using 1890 rather than 1910 or 1920 excluded the new wave of foreign-born from southern and eastern Europe from quotas truly proportionate to their new numbers in the population. Finally, the act provided for a future reduction of the quota to 154,000.
The new law cut the quota for northern and western European countries by 29 percent, but slashed that for southern and eastern Europe by 87 percent. Italy's quota, for example, was reduced from 42,057 to 3,845 persons.