IQ testing legitimated the US 1924 Immigration Act’s racial exclusion

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Like today, immigration policy was a race issue. Relying on eugenics, the Dillingham Commission’s Report recommended that immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe be severely curtailed because of racial difference and inassimilability. … All men are born with equal rights has been confused with the political sophistry that all men are born with equal character and ability to govern themselves and others, and the educational sophistry that education and environment will offset the handicap of heredity.” As a result, the American nativist movement labeled Celts, Italians, Hebrews, and Slavs an inferior stock of Whites that warranted their exclusion from American shores. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 241 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The 1921 quota law locked in racial composition as nationality limits — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1878; Postwar IQ testing data grouped immigrant whites into inferior racial ranks — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1664; A literacy test aimed to cut southern and eastern European immigration in half — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 602 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Eugenicist ideas provided the scientific cover for the 1924 Immigration Act #corroborates (0.93) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 834
• US immigration restriction laws were explicitly justified by eugenic racial science #corroborates (0.92) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 241