Summary
In response to peaking levels of immigration, three Harvard University alumni, lawyer Charles Warren, climatologist Robert DeCourcy Ward, and attorney Prescott F. Hall, established the Immigration Restriction League to press for laws to check the burgeoning influxes which now originated in greater proportion from eastern and southern Europe. Unlike idealized earlier waves of western and northern Europeans who were seen as becoming independent farmers, these new immigrants were settling primarily in urban areas and employed in the U.S.’s industrializing economy. In numbers and attributes, they were perceived as not assimilating, a problem exacerbated by their different countries of origin and attributions of diminished capacities. The Immigration Restriction League and other restrictionists claimed authority from Social Darwinist beliefs and the “science” of eugenics to advocate a literacy test as a measures to keep out the nonassimilating and undeserving. It would take Congress and the White House until 1917 to attain sufficient consensus about the need to limit European immigration and what rationales to apply in identifying what kinds of persons to exclude.
