Nativism In The 1920s Essay

With the extreme social and economic changes in the United States during the 1920s, there came many cultural and religious disputes. In the beginning of the twentieth century and before it, a huge amount of immigrants came to the U.S., searching for a better life. Many of the immigrants were Catholics or Jews who came from Europe. In light of all these foreigners coming to America, U.S. citizens became hostile and felt like something needed to be done about the unrestricted immigration that was happening. Americans wanted to keep their national, cultural, and religious identities in tact and also maintain the contrast of new and old values. The Americans who wanted this were known as nativists. Expressions of nativism started to become more frequent throughout the 1920s, and in turn, stricter immigration laws began to be put into place and Americans also began to take matters into their

Many Americans disagreed with the the increasing numbers of Immigrants and those immigrants values in the United States, so some of them took action to prevent them from coming to America. In the past there had been some attempts at restricting immigration, for instance, Congress banned Chinese immigration in 1882 and Theodore Roosevelt tried to limit Japanese immigration in 1907. In the 1920s nativists were concerned there were too many European immigrants coming to the U.S. These concerns were introduced to Congress and emergency immigration restrictions were passed in 1921. In 1924 the National Origins Act was put into place. The National Origins Act did not allow the annual immigration from a country to be more than 2 percent of the nationality’s U.S. population as it was in the 1890 census data. This law especially banned Italian, Greeks, Poles, Russians, and