Top 10 Examples of Racism in History of the American Labor Movement

4. Immigration Act of 1924

After an Immigration Commission was started by then President Theodore Roosevelt, to study whether or not mass immigration caused depressed wages, unemployment, poverty, and impaired the organization of unions, the Immigration Act of 1924 (IA of 1924) was passed. Strongly supported by AFL President Samuel Gompers, IA of 1924 significantly lowered the amount of immigrants that would be accepted from the Eastern Hemisphere, while setting quotas from favored areas like Northern and Western Europe. Though the commission used mixture of legitimate economic arguments and questionable ethnocentric biases it still help set the ground work for what had become US immigration law. This would be just a start to the Labor Movements lobbying of US anti-immigration laws.