Immigration History

Learn about Immigration history with these old magazine articles. Find information on immigration in the 1920s.

‘The Real Yellow Peril” (The Independent, 1921)

Three cheers for the late Earl S. Parker, long-suffering secretary of the now-defunct American League of Justice (California) who recognized the tyranny inherit in the California Alien Land Bill of 1921! Seeing that the Japanese immigrants had been dealt enough cruelty by being denied citizenship, he was quick to point out that it was wrong to deny them real estate as well.


Click here to read about the Yellow Peril in Canada.

‘The Real Yellow Peril” (The Independent, 1921) Read More »

A Call to Repeal the Japanese Exclusion Act (Literary Digest, 1935)

The anonymous journalist opened this 1935 magazine article explaining how the Indian caste system took root and reasoned as to why he believed such a system was an inevitability in the United States as well.

With the California Council on Oriental Relations waging an eloquent campaign for repeal of the Japanese Exclusion Act, a quota-basis solution is suggested.


Read another article about Asian immigration to California


Click here to read about the 1921 [anti-]Alien Land Bill in California.


You might also be interested in reading about the Yellow Peril in Canada.

A Call to Repeal the Japanese Exclusion Act (Literary Digest, 1935) Read More »

Immigrant Literacy Tests Passed (NY Times, 1915)

In 1915, some newspaper readers might have preferred to interpret the passage of the Smith-Burnett Immigration bill as a legal measure that would insure a higher standard for immigrants to meet in order to guarantee citizenship; while others tended to interpret the legislation as a restrictive law that was intended only to exclude from citizenship Italians and Eastern-European Jews. This article reported on a massive New York protest decrying the Smith-Burnett bill that was attended by Louis D. Brandeis (1856 – 1941; appointed to the Supreme Court a year later), Episcopal Bishop David Hummel Greer (1844 – 1919) and former president of Columbia University Seth Low (1850 – 1916).


Green Card holders are to this day still required to show fluency in the English language, although the swearing-in ceremony and their voting ballots are often in their native language. Go figure.


In this article Vladimir Lenin speaks of his fondness for The New York Times.

Immigrant Literacy Tests Passed (NY Times, 1915) Read More »

No Citizenship for Japanese Immigrants (Literary Digest, 1922)

An article that marks the date of November 13, 1922 as a poor one for the assembled masses who happened to have been of Japanese ancestry in the United States. On that date Justice George Sutherland (1862-1942), of the United States Supreme Court, handed down the ruling that the Japanese can not be citizens of this country. The opinions of many American Newspapers are presented herein, among them an excerpt from the St. Louis Star which summed up the opinion just so:

The law which prevents the naturalization of Japanese is plainly intended to exclude the Japanese because they are racially unassimlable and their presence creates economic difficulties.


You can read more about Justice Sutherland HERE…

No Citizenship for Japanese Immigrants (Literary Digest, 1922) Read More »

Citizenship Denied (Literary Digest, 1922)

This article reported that as of 1922, the United States Government saw fit to deny 19,000 immigrants U.S. citizenship. This number, when added to the other repatriated applicants of the previous ten years, totals up to 760,000 people; which was, at that time, more than the entire population of North Dakota. The Ellis Island based naturalization service classified all rejected immigrants in fifteen different categories, this reporter preferred to name just two: Ignorance and Immoral Character. Immoral Character speaks for itself. And Ignorance covers those who didn’t appear to know enough to exercise the rights of citizenship intelligently. Oddly, there seemed to have been no talk of amnesty.

Citizenship Denied (Literary Digest, 1922) Read More »

Citizenship Denied (Literary Digest, 1922)

This article reported that as of 1922, the United States Government saw fit to deny 19,000 immigrants U.S. citizenship. This number, when added to the other repatriated applicants of the previous ten years, totals up to 760,000 people; which was, at that time, more than the entire population of North Dakota. The Ellis Island based naturalization service classified all rejected immigrants in fifteen different categories, this reporter preferred to name just two: Ignorance and Immoral Character. Immoral Character speaks for itself. And Ignorance covers those who didn’t appear to know enough to exercise the rights of citizenship intelligently. Oddly, there seemed to have been no talk of amnesty.

Citizenship Denied (Literary Digest, 1922) Read More »

The Fear of the ‘Nipponification’ (The Independent, 1920)

Interesting figures revealed by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1920 served to relieve much of the race-conscious anxiety among some of the members of the Anglo-Saxon majority:

The report of the Census Bureau on the number of Japanese residents in the United States shows that the number has been much exaggerated by those panic-stricken persons who affect to dread the rise of a new Japan in America…the Japanese population of the three states on the Pacific coast increased more slowly from 1910 to 1920than it did in the previous decade. There are 70,196 Japanese in California, which has a total population of 3,426,861; in other words about one Californian in every fifty is a Japanese.

The U.S. Census figures for 2011 indicated that the Asian-American population numbered over 17 million, with the lion’s share still residing in the West and the vast majority having arrived after 1965.

The Fear of the ‘Nipponification’ (The Independent, 1920) Read More »

In The Country Illegally (Pathfinder Magazine, 1931)

[President Hoover’s Secretary of Labor, William N. Doak] placed the number of aliens now illegally residing in the United States at 400,000. Of this number he thought 100,000 were subject to deportation… The illegal entries were made, he said, under the quota laws of 1921 and 1924, the larger part coming through Mexico and Canada, while ship’s deserters amounted to about 11,000>

In The Country Illegally (Pathfinder Magazine, 1931) Read More »

Immigration Hollywood-Style (Rob Wagner’s Script, 1935)

Apparently during the pit of the Great Depression there were complaints coming from a few frustrated corners about the number of foreign talents that were being hired to entertain us in the movie business. An old Hollywood salt answered this complaint head-on:

The average world-fan cares nothing that Chaplin is an Englishman, Garbo a Swede, Novarro a Mexican, Bergner a German or Boyer a Frenchman.

Immigration Hollywood-Style (Rob Wagner’s Script, 1935) Read More »