President. I do. If we have determined to limit the immigration into this country by numerical limitations. the next nuestion is. What method of allotment of those numbers are we going to adopt? In the temporary law of 1921 we took the last census that we knew anything aboutthat was the census of 1910and we said: "The number of immigrants shall be 3 per cent each .year of the number of foreignborn of each nationality." That is to say. if there were in America a hundred thousand persons born in Sweden. the Swedish quota would be 3.000 per year. That method obviously wholly ignored all Americanborn persons. The only persons who were reflected in the quotas then were the foreign born. and every one of us who was born in America was utterly ignored in the calculation of the quota. It was realizedit had to be realizedthat that gave a result that was quite out of harmony with the racial makeup of the American Nation as it then stood. So. when we came to the permanent law of 1924. It was suggested that In order to get more at the average American we should base our quotas on the census of 1790. basing them on the number of foreign horn shown by that census. because the theory was that the foreign born at that time in America ] were more like all the rest of us than were the foreign born of years later. That gave us a result of 51.000 persons in the German quota out of a total of 163.000. I do not believe anybody would contend that fivesixteenths of the United States is German.
Keywords matched
immigration immigrants foreign born