Eugenicist ideas provided the scientific cover for the 1924 Immigration Act

Evidence

The Democrats came within a single vote of endorsing the anti-Black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic platform promulgated by the powerful Ku Klux Klan. The platform would have been anti-immigrant, too, if Congress had not passed the Immigration Act on a bipartisan vote earlier in the year. … Politicians seized on the powerful eugenicist demands for immigration restrictions on people from all countries outside of Nordic northwestern Europe. President Calvin Coolidge, the Massachusetts Republican who replaced Harding after his sudden death in 1923, happily signed the legislation before his reelection. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote as vice-president-elect in 1921. “The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 834

Categorization

• XREF: Direct instance of Kendi’s inversion — restrictionist policy already desired, then eugenicist ‘biological laws’ marshaled to justify it — a test case for the reader’s stated discomfort. — connects to: By 1924 racial restrictionism had fully displaced economic arguments for restriction — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1911