The 1924 quota law deliberately favored Northwestern European immigrants

Evidence

The 1924 Immigration Act limited the total number of immigrants to approximately 150,000 per year and restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern European countries to a mere 2 percent of American residents from each country as recorded in the 1880 US Census. Because most Eastern European Jews and Southern European Catholics immigrated after 1880, the law prescribed larger allocations for immigrants from Northwestern Europe. As a result, for the next forty years, 70 percent of immigrants would come from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 244

Categorization

• XREF: The 1880 census baseline trick parallels the way institutional design can encode bias, as seen in Milgrom on law merchant institutions. — connects to: The 1921 quota law locked in racial composition as nationality limits — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1878; Chinese exclusion in the 1880s supplied no precedent for European-immligrant restriction — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 996