In 1920 same pressure to keep US wages down as in 2017. In 1920 US congressman said US needs more cheap foreign labor to do jobs second generation Americans just won't do

Dec. 10, 1920, "Congressional Debate on Immigration Restriction (1921) Excerpts"...history.hanover.edu (Hanover College, Indiana) 

"The result of the debate excerpted below was to limit new immigrants to 3 percent of the nationalities represented in the census of 1910. In 1924 immigration was limited even further. -smv"

"{17} MR. [FREDERICK W.] ROWE [R.-N.Y.]. Mr. Chairman... 

{18} The fact is that in this country we need laboring men and women of certain-classes. We are paying now in the city of New York for ordinary shovelers to dig trenches in which to lay a sewer or a water pipe from $4.50 to $6 a day. We are paying from $6 to $9 a-day for hod carriers. It is not because we have not plenty of men in this country. The fact is that our people of the second generation in this country will not carry a hod or dig a trench. We need the men on the farms. We have a great need in this country of competent women to do housework, and there are in Europe men who are willing to do this hard work in America and women who are capable and willing to do the housework."...

"Congress imposed a literacy test and other restrictions on immigration during World War I. By 1921 many were arguing for even more stringent restrictions as a way of maintaining the purity of American culture as they understood it."...

"The US Immigration Act of 1921 established a "quota system that would last, virtually unchanged, until 1965"...

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Added: "The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy,"  Univ. of Chicago Press, Jan. 1994, National Bureau of Economic Research 

Chapter 7, "The political economy of immigration in the United States, 1890 to 1921," Claudia Goldin 

Introduction, 7.1: "With the passage of the Emergency Quota Act in May 1921 the era of open immigration to the United States came to an abrupt end.' The American policy of virtually unrestricted European immigration was transformed, almost overnight, to a quota system that would last, virtually unchanged, until 1965"...







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