Nativists redefined discriminatory quotas as restoring racial fairness.

Evidence

Trevor saw that if the aim of the Johnson bill (shifting the quota base from 1910 to 1890) was to keep the new immigration from encroaching on the dominant position of the Great Race that founded and developed America, then the bill amounted to an effort to preserve the racial status quo. … With these assumptions, Trevor formulated an attack on the percentage scheme adopted in 1921, and in doing so he completely turned the tables on the charge of discrimination leveled against Johnson’s proposal. Clearly, quotas based on the number of foreign-born of various nationalities in the United States in rg1o did not reflect the racial status quo: by 1910 northwestern Europeans had lost the preponderant position among the foreign-born which their descendants still retained among the native-born. By a racial yardstick, the existing law could be charged with actually discriminating against the old stock, because it gave northwestern Europeans a smaller share in the annual quota immigration than they had in the total American population. Thus the use of the 1910 census really favored southeastern Europeans! Congress should base quotas on an earlier census, when the old immigration furnished the vast majority of America’s foreign-born, in order to do justice to everybody’s ancestors. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1923

Categorization

• XREF: Trevor’s clever inversion — flipping the discrimination charge by showing the rival scheme itself ‘discriminated’ against the old stock — is a textbook manufactured-threat rationalization relevant to the reader’s backfire-correction question. — connects to: Nativists had to dress racial discrimination in the language of equality. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1920; Racial nativists reframed discrimination as equal justice to justify the 1890 census base — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1926; Neoliberalism redefined affirmative action as the racism it was designed to oppose — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1762 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Racial nativists reframed discrimination as equal justice to justify the 1890 census base #expands (0.93) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1926
• Neoliberalism redefined affirmative action as the racism it was designed to oppose #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1762