The quota acts: the door closes

After the war the view prevailed in America that immigration must be stopped. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 limited entry to three per cent of the foreign-born of each nationality counted in the 1910 census. The Johnson–Reed Act, signed on 26 May 1924, tightened it twice over: two per cent, and by the census of 1890—that is, before the East European Jews arrived. The choice of year was not technical: it set the composition of the America to come.

The result: Poland received about six thousand places a year, Russia a little over two. Entry from Asia was barred altogether. Jewish immigration fell from 119,000 in 1921 to 10,000 in 1925.

What the act meant became clear fifteen years later. When people fled Germany, there was almost nowhere to flee: in 1938 more than one hundred and forty thousand were on the German quota list against a quota of twenty-seven thousand. The Évian conference of 1938 gathered thirty-two countries and changed nothing. The Wagner–Rogers bill to admit twenty thousand children outside the quota died in committee in 1939.

The national-origins quota system was abolished only in 1965.