Immigration Act of 1924 signed

On May 26, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924 in Washington after Congress approved the Johnson-Reed bill. The law established national-origins quotas that sharply reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe and barred the entry of immigrants ineligible for citizenship, a provision aimed chiefly at Asians. Congress also created a visa system enforced through American consulates abroad and authorized the new U.S. Border Patrol to police the nation's land frontiers.

The act intensified the interwar struggle over whether the United States would define citizenship through constitutional equality or through racial hierarchy and ethnic restriction. Supporters such as Representative Albert Johnson and Senator David Reed argued that the quota system would preserve what they called the country's historic national stock, while critics warned that the law elevated pseudoscientific eugenics and nativism into federal policy. The statute also reflected the post-World War I backlash against radicalism, labor unrest, and mass migration that had already shaped the Red Scare and earlier quota laws.

The U.S. Border Patrol began operations in 1924 as an immediate institutional result of the act, and the consular visa system became the framework for later immigration enforcement. The national-origins quota structure remained federal law until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 dismantled it and replaced it with a different admissions system.