# Emergency Quota Act of 1921 The **Emergency Quota Act of 1921** was the first U.S. law to impose numerical quotas on immigration, and it introduced the [[National Origins Quota System]] that would define American policy for the next four decades. It capped annual immigration from each country at **3 percent** of the number of that nationality's foreign-born residents recorded in the **1910 census**, and limited total immigration to roughly 357,000 per year. Passed as a stopgap "emergency" measure and signed by President Warren G. Harding, it was explicitly designed to curb the immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans — Italians, Poles, Jews, and others — whose arrival in the preceding decades nativists regarded as a threat to the existing ethnic and cultural order. ## Context and consequence The Act crystallized the post–World War I climate of [[Nativism]], wartime xenophobia, the first Red Scare, and the influence of the [[Eugenics]] movement, which lent the restrictionist project a veneer of scientific authority. Its temporary, "emergency" character was quickly made permanent and far more restrictive: just three years later, the [[Immigration Act of 1924]] (Johnson-Reed) replaced the 3-percent/1910 formula with a harsher 2-percent/1890 formula deliberately calibrated to favor Northern and Western Europeans even more strongly, and added near-total Asian exclusion. The 1921 Act is thus the hinge between the open-immigration era of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the closed, quota-bound regime that lasted until 1965. ## Significance for the knowledge base As the origin point of the quota system, the Emergency Quota Act is the first instance of the United States using numerical, nationality-based caps to engineer the demographic composition of the country — the policy mechanism the modern [[Immigration Restrictionism]] movement looks back to as a successful model. It belongs to the same lineage the KB tracks from the [[Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882]] through the 1924 Act and forward to present-day restrictionist politics. ## See Also - [[Immigration Act of 1924]] — the permanent, harsher successor - [[Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882]] — the earlier exclusion precedent - [[National Origins Quota System]] — the regime it launched - [[Nativism]] / [[Eugenics]] — the animating currents - [[Immigration Restrictionism]] — the movement that invokes it - [[US Immigration Timeline]] — chronological context