Businesses’ racial fears outweighed their labor needs by 1924.

Evidence

Instead of turning back the current of race-thinking, industrialists found their own ranks increasingly infected by it. In December 1923, the National Industrial Conference Board, a research and publicity agency for thirty-one leading industrial associations, held a big conference on immigration at the Hotel Astor in New York. Over a thousand businessmen attended, and their discussions revealed a paralyzing uncertainty. On the one hand, most of them disliked the prospect of further restrictions on immigrant labor. On the other hand, there was much concern over the effects “of mixture of races upon the virility and social progress of our nation.” In opening the conference the N.I.C.B.’s director conceded that immigration was “essentially a race question-a question of the kind of citizenship and national life we desire to develop in the United States.” One delegate unwittingly summed up the dilemma in business thinking by proposing this as a guiding principle: “Immigration from, and emigration to countries peopled by races with which inter-marriage gives deteriorated (or ‘half-breed’) and unsatisfactory results- races socially and politically unassimilable-should be permitted by all governments concerned only for commercial purposes.” — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1906

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Shows ideology (race-thinking) penetrating and overriding the class/economic interest of employers — powerful evidence against purely materialist accounts of nativism, and for ideology having autonomous causal force.
• SEED: Essay angle: when do material self-interest calculations lose to ideological threat-frames — the N.I.C.B. conference as a case of a class adopting a belief against its own economic interest.
• XREF: connects to: By 1924 racial restrictionism had fully displaced economic arguments for restriction — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1911

Broader Connections

• By 1924 racial restrictionism had fully displaced economic arguments for restriction #corroborates (0.85) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1911