Trump’s Immigration Policy Is 100 Years Old
“The Trump administration’s immigration policy, influenced by advisor Stephen Miller, aims to reverse the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which abolished the 1924 racial quotas. This 1924 law, driven by fears of foreigners and eugenic thinking, severely limited immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and banned it from Asia and Africa, aiming to preserve a white, Christian America. The 1965 Act, championed by figures like John F. Kennedy, embraced a more inclusive vision, recognizing immigrants as integral to American identity.
The White House seems to be mining the Coolidge era for inspiration. But America is not the country it was in 1924.
Jia Lynn Yang is the author of the book “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965.”
The American public is now finding out what Donald Trump and his team really meant when they promised mass deportations — the upending of communities in a ferocious effort to ferret out every last undocumented person in the country, terrifying people of legal status along the way.
This audacious agenda is proving less popular by the day. When asked about Trump’s handling of immigration in a recent poll by The New York Times/Siena, he received a net negative approval rating on what used to be one of his strongest issues. Sixty-one percent said they thought the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had “gone too far” with its tactics. This was before federal agents shot and killed a second U.S. citizen in the streets of Minneapolis.
Chastened briefly, Trump promised to “de-escalate” in Minnesota. On Wednesday, his border czar, recently dispatched to take control of the operation in Minneapolis, announced that 700 agents would be pulled from the city, though some 2,000 will remain. But however ICE changes its operations, the Trump administration, led by the president’s most influential policy adviser, Stephen Miller, is in pursuit of a radical vision for America. They want the country’s immigration policy blasted back in time — and not just to before the Biden era.
They are channeling an immigration regime instituted in 1924, when strict racial quotas — driven by fears of foreigners and a rise in eugenic thinking — led to a bottoming-out of foreign-born Americans that lasted for decades. The quotas signed into law in 1924 were not about securing the border as we understand it today, but about protecting a white, Christian character for the country.
In the years after the 1924 immigration law was passed, however, a liberal backlash took hold and created a new identity for the United States, internalized by generations of Americans since: We are a nation of immigrants.
Americans are, in fact, widely partial to immigrants — and these days even open to admitting more. Last year, as border crossings sharply fell, the share of people who wanted immigration reduced dropped to 30 percent from 55 percent in 2024, according to Gallup. A record-high 79 percent say immigration is a good thing for the country, including even Republicans, who have become more likely to take this view since Trump took office.
Today many act as if America’s identity as a nation of immigrants was written into the Constitution itself. In reality, it was the product of a political effort less than a century ago — one that was so successful at creating a new national story that it birthed the sheer ethnic diversity in this country that the Trump administration is now determined to undo.
‘Immigrants Were American History’
As recently as 50 years ago, the country’s population was almost entirely descended from people who came from Western Europe. This was by design.
At the turn of the 20th century, enormous numbers of Southern and Eastern Europeans, many of them Italian and Jewish, were arriving daily in the United States and transforming the cultural fabric of cities like New York and Boston. At a time when antisemitism was ubiquitous in American life, the sheer volume of these migrants constituted a national emergency for white Protestant Christians. Eugenicists, at the peak of their influence, warned that the foreigners were polluting the nation’s “blood plasma.”
In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed a law imposing strict ethnic quotas, allowing only a trickle of migration from Southern and Eastern Europe and banning it nearly outright from Asia and Africa. Strong preference would be given to immigrants from Western Europe, who could, it was believed, help the country restore its racial roots.
“We no longer are to be a haven, a refuge for oppressed the whole world over,” wrote Representative David A. Reed, who cosponsored the 1924 law in Congress. “We found we could not be, and now we definitely abandon that theory. America will cease to be the ‘melting pot.’” In Germany, Adolf Hitler, still on the political margins, praised America’s new immigration law as offering a bold model for his own country.
The quotas were immediately effective, and merciless. During World War II, the country’s immigration rules were so stringent that Jews fleeing the Holocaust had practically no chance of entering the United States. For more than 40 years after 1924, the number of immigrants in this country dwindled to the point where Americans could barely remember a time when there was mass migration.
But just as the country was approaching its nadir in immigration, a group of liberal leaders began a long-shot campaign to undo the discriminatory 1920s quotas. And they employed a conception of national identity that turned the anti-immigration argument on its head.
Immigrants did not make the country less American, these advocates argued. In fact, their very presence was what made this country American in the first place.
The person most responsible for this narrative was historian Oscar Handlin, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. In works of history that became remarkably popular, Handlin chronicled the waves of German and Irish immigrants, then Italian and Jewish ones. “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history,” Handlin wrote in the opening lines of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1951 book, “The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People.”
This new conception immediately captivated much of the country. It gave the children and grandchildren of the immigrants once derided as outsiders a pride of place. More important, it proved to be just the message that would convince the country that it needed a new system of immigration.
While Handlin himself became involved in the effort to rewrite the laws, Democratic leaders began to adopt his framework. John F. Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, was asked by the Anti-Defamation League to write a slim book lauding the country’s many waves of migration. The proposed title: “A Nation of Immigrants.”
This modest project would not be published until October 1964, nearly a year after Kennedy was assassinated. But in a country still in mourning, the first printing sold out. “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies,” read the introduction written by the Kennedy family, perhaps overstating the president’s interest in the issue. Nonetheless, the book positioned itself as a powerful, posthumous plea for overturning the ethnic quotas, spoken from the grave by the country’s first Catholic president and an Irish American icon.
A year later, after a four-decade fight, immigration advocates prevailed. Led in part by Ted Kennedy in the Senate, Democratic lawmakers voted to undo the quotas with the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The law, signed by Lyndon Johnson at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, codified that immigrants could not be discriminated against based on their race or nationality. Family members would also be prioritized.
The 1924 quotas had altered the course of the country’s demographics by effectively freezing them in place. The 1965 law unleashed a level of ethnic diversity that not even its proponents could have fathomed. Immigrants soon began arriving from every conceivable corner of the globe, and in growing numbers thanks to the priority given to reuniting families.
After the number of foreign-born residents hit a bottom around 1970, it climbed and climbed until it rebounded to nearly 15 percent, where it had been before the quotas.
Last January, the month Trump was inaugurated, it reached a record 15.8 percent.
Who Is Considered an American?
Without passing a single law through Congress, the Trump administration has revived the 1924 quotas in spirit by halting visas for people from 75 countries, a vast majority of them outside Europe. No credible evidence has been offered for why immigrants from these nations are inherently less worthy of admission than Afrikaners from South Africa, for instance, who have been given expedited refugee status. But on top of Trump’s insults against Haitian, Somali and Mexican immigrants and the Muslim travel ban from his first term, the collective implications of racial selection are clear.
Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, appreciates the history of American immigration policy. We know this because of emails that have been unearthed by the Southern Poverty Law Center in which he admires the 1924 quotas and Coolidge’s anti-immigration legacy.
In one 2015 email, Miller wrote that Immigrant Heritage Month “would seem a good opportunity to remind people about the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge, which covers four decades of the 20th century,” a reference to the restrictive period between 1924 and 1965. He also complained that new museum galleries at Ellis Island would ignore the legacy of the 1924 law. “Something tells me there is not a Calvin Coolidge exhibit.”
In Miller’s eyes, the 1965 law deserves to be known as a key moment for when the country fell from greatness. In other emails, he coached a Breitbart writer to produce a piece called “Ted Kennedy’s Real Legacy: 50 Years of Ruinous Immigration Law,” timed to run on the day that a new center honoring Kennedy was to open in Boston. Miller wrote to the writer after the piece’s publication, “Just let this sink in: Kennedy was honored today, 50 years after pushing through this law, and you’re the only writer in the country who published a piece even mentioning the law and what it did.”
For conservatives like Miller, the idea of “a nation of immigrants” has lured the country into admitting far too many people, without enough vetting. Indeed, during Trump’s first term, the agency responsible for processing citizenship and naturalization removed the phrase from its mission statement.
Trump and Miller learned the last time around, though, how hard it can be to bring down the overall percentage of immigrants in the country, which only grew between 2017 and 2021. This time, their efforts are beginning to yield results: Immigration has dropped by more than 50 percent, and the percentage of foreign-born residentshas fallen for the first time since the 1960s. Theirs is a long-term project, with success measured in decades.
“A nation of immigrants” is an old slogan, but its spirit has proved difficult to dislodge. America today is in many ways a nation remade by the 1965 Immigration Act, with millions of citizens descended from those who came to the country after Coolidge’s quotas were revoked.
Support for carrying out some deportations has been a mainstream political view for decades. But most American voters want to see the highly focused removal of unauthorized immigrants who are violent criminals, according to recent polling. There is far less support for deporting those who are married to U.S. citizens, or who haven’t committed any crimes.
For all the anti-immigrant vitriol from Trump these many years, people in both urban and rural America are by now largely used to living peacefully with immigrants as their neighbors, co-workers and family members. And a large majority, not only in Minneapolis, simply do not want to see their neighbors brutally removed from their homes by men in masks without warrants.
From the start of Trump’s first term, the president’s immigration agenda was always about more than the border. It was a project to rewrite who can be considered American. Because this was not the mandate that most voters gave in 2024, the administration could pay a political price in the midterms in the fall. In the meantime, it can wake up every day and treat the time remaining as a chance to press ahead, by any means and at any cost.
Jia Lynn Yang is a senior Times writer.“
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