The Racist Origins of America’s Broken Immigration System

President Calvin Coolidge signing the Immigration Act of 1924 into law.  Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Felipe De La Hoz in The New Republic offers some thoughts on “The Racist Origins of America’s Broken Immigration System.”  He claims that the contemporary anti-immigrant “rhetoric has often been mistaken as a new turn for American political discourse, but it’s more of a return to an earlier era, one cemented by a law signed a century ago this month by Calvin Coolidge: the Immigration Act of 1924, known as Johnson-Reed after its House and Senate sponsors.”

KJ