National Origins Formula
The National Origins Formula is an umbrella term for a series of quantitative immigration quotas in the United States used from 1921 to 1965, which restricted immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere on the basis of national origin. These restrictions included legislation and federal acts. Since there is no one formula that can account for each law or restriction across the decades, as the scale, variables, and demographic characteristics change per law, the concept of National Origins Formula is best described as a collection of quantitative data considerations in immigration and migration laws in the United States.
History
Temporary measures establishing quota limits per country based on the makeup of the foreign-born population residing in the U.S. were introduced in 1921 and 1924 ; these were replaced by a permanent quota system based on each nationality's share of the total U.S. population as of 1920, which took effect on July 1, 1929 and governed American immigration law until December 1, 1965. The National Origins Formula aimed to preserve the existing ethnic proportions of the population as calculated according to data from the 1920 Census of Population.The 1921 Emergency Quota Act restricted immigration to 3% of foreign-born persons of each nationality that resided in the United States in 1910.
The Immigration Act of 1924, also called the National Origins Act, provided that for three years the formula would change from 3% to 2% and the basis for the calculation would be the census of 1890 instead of that of 1910. After June 30, 1927, total immigration from all countries will be limited to 150,000, with allocations by country based upon national origins of inhabitants according to the census of 1920. The quota system applied only to non-Asian immigrants. It aimed to reduce the overall number of unskilled immigrants, to allow families to re-unite, and to prevent immigration from changing the ethnic distribution of the population. The 1924 Act also included the Asian Exclusion Act, which limited immigration to persons eligible for naturalization.
As a result, East Asians and South Asians were effectively banned from immigrating. Africans were also subjected to severe restrictions. Immigration from North and South America was not restricted.
National origins computation
Under the Immigration Act of 1924, the Bureau of the Census and Department of Commerce were tasked with estimating the National Origins of the White Population of the United States in 1920 in numbers, then calculating the percentage share each nationality made up as a fraction of the total. The National Origins Formula derived quotas by calculating the equivalent proportion of each nationality out of a total pool of 150,000 annual quota immigrants. This formula was used until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 adopted a simplified formula limiting each country to a quota of one-sixth of one percent of that nationality's 1920 population count, with a minimum quota of 100.The formula required classification of the national origins by birth or ancestry of all white Americans, except those having origins in the nonquota countries of the Western Hemisphere. The total white American population in 1920 was estimated at 94,820,915. White Americans with origins in the Western Hemisphere were estimated at 5,314,357—approximately 4,085,000 from Canada and Newfoundland; 1,126,000 from Mexico; 66,000 from the West Indies; and 37,000 from Central and South America. This left the total relevant population for the quota calculation formula at 89,506,558.
To compute the proportions of blood each national origin had contributed to the American population as of 1920, demographers divided the population into four more easily classifiable groups by generation. The process was complicated due to the more limited set of data recorded in the country's earlier decades compared to the increasingly detailed information published in later versions of the United States census. 49,182,158 were deemed to be of immigrant stock, accounting for 55% of the total, subdivided into three categories. The easiest to classify were the two most recently-arrived generations of immigrants, accounting for 1/3 of the 1920 total:
- 13.5% of the total: 12,071,282 immigrants classified by land of foreign-birth recorded in the 1920 Census
- 19.7% of the total: 17,620,676 children of immigrants classified by land of foreign-birth, foreign parentage, or foreign mother tongue in the 1920 or 1910 Census
- 21.8% of the total: 19,490,200 grandchildren and later generations of immigrants classified based on past records of immigration and naturalization: persons of foreign-birth, parentage, or mother tongue in the Census counts of 1920 and 1910; foreign-birth or parentage in 1900 and 1890; foreign-born in the Census counts of 1850–1880; and records of immigrants admitted 1820–1840.
- 45.0% of the total: 40,324,400 descendants of colonial stock, apportioned into the same ethnic proportional makeup as the population enumerated in the 1790 Census
Colonial stock estimation
The national origins of the colonial stock had to be estimated by careful analysis of the limited information recorded in the first U.S. Census: scholarly classification of the approximately 30,000 unique names of white heads of families recorded in the 1790 Census into their respective national stocks.
In 1924, the only Census Bureau estimate of colonial stock makeup had been published more than a decade prior in 1909 report A Century of Population Growth, which put the 1790 population at 82.1% English, 7.0% Scotch, 1.9% Irish, 2.5% Dutch, 0.6% French and 5.6% German. When CPG was produced in 1909, the concept of independent Ireland did not even exist. CPG made no attempt to further classify its estimated 1.9% Irish population to distinguish Celtic Irish Catholics of Gaelic Ireland, who in 1922 formed the independent Irish Free State, from the Scotch-Irish descendants of Ulster Scots and Anglo-Irish of the Plantation of Ulster, which became Northern Ireland and remained part of the United Kingdom. Unlike in 1909, the undercount of other colonial stock populations like German Americans and Irish Americans would now have real contemporary policy consequences. In 1927, proposed immigration quotas based on CPG figures were rejected by the President's Committee chaired by the Secretaries of State, Commerce, and Labor, with the President reporting to Congress "the statistical and historical information available raises grave doubts as to the whole value of these computations as the basis for the purposes intended."
Among further criticisms of A Century of Population Growth figures:
- CPG failed to account for Anglicisation of names, assuming any surname that could be English was actually English
- CPG failed to consider first names even when obviously foreign, assuming anyone with a surname that could be English was actually English
- CPG failed to consider regional variation in ethnic settlement e.g. surname Root could be assumed English in Vermont, but more commonly a variant of German Roth in states with large German American populations like populous Pennsylvania
- CPG started by classifying all names as Scotch, Irish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, or other. All remaining names which could not be classed with one of the 6 other listed nationalities, nor identified by the Census clerk as too exotic to be English, were assumed to be English
- CPG classification was an unscientific process by Census clerks with no training in history, genealogy, or linguistics, nor were scholars in those fields consulted
- CPG estimates were produced by a linear process with no checks on potential errors nor opportunity for peer review or scholarly revision once an individual clerk had assigned a name to a nationality