The widespread support for restricting immigration to the United States in the 1920s can be seen by the ease with which the Immigration Act of 1924 passed through Congress, with only nine dissenting Senators and 71 (out of 394) votes against in the House of Representatives.
Such strong support was made possible by a curious coalition of groups who opposed immigration for a variety of reasons. Such organizations as the Immigration Restriction League and the Ku Klux Klan were obviously always going to be enthusiastic supporters. However, Samuel Gompers, the founder and president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) also threw his weight behind the Act, even though he was Jewish and the Act promised greatly to reduce the number of Jewish immigrants to the United States.
Gompers and his fellow union organizers were concerned that their members would be threatened by the availability of cheap immigrant labor, no matter what the race or nationality of the immigrants. The first two decades of the twentieth century had seen unprecedented levels of immigration and the unions complained that this had depressed wage levels for their members.
The concerns of many other Representatives were primarily racial. Albert Johnson, the Act's leading advocate in the House, was advised by Madison Grant, whose 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, was a bestseller. Many West Coast Representatives were concerned at the increasing Asian populations, particularly in California. They looked back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and argued for similar provisions against the Japanese, Korean and Filipino immigrants of the early 1900s. The Act accommodated them by banning immigration from Asia entirely.
To get at the why part of this question, it is important to note the circumstances of immigration prior to the limitations imposed in the 1920s. Between 1900 and 1920, over 14.5 million immigrants were admitted into the United States. Prior to this wave of mass immigration, Americans had a historically open attitude toward newcomers. In the context of urbanization, as a variety of cultures, ethnic groups, and racial groups populated growing cities, nativist sentiment increased among Americans. Nativism supported belief in the superiority of white Americans with genealogy tracing farther back than more recent immigrants.
Nativism also exacerbated fear of foreign threats; for instance, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (1917) stoked fear over communism spreading to America. In 1921, nativist sentiment grew during the trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of robbery and murder in Massachusetts in 1920. Though there was no direct evidence linking them to crime, they were labelled anarchists for their anti-capitalist views and support for the dismantlement of this system through violence. The two men were executed in 1927, further dividing Americans on the subject of immigration.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigrants began to arrive from eastern and southern Europe, including Poles, Russians, Italians, Jews, Greeks, and other groups. New immigrants also began arriving from China, Japan, and other Asian countries. These immigrants were different from earlier groups, who, with the exception of the Irish, tended to be Protestant. Many of the new immigrants seemed different from native-born Americans, and the backlash against immigration arose from nativist groups. Other groups that were opposed to immigration included the Ku Klux Klan, or KKK, which experienced a revival around this time, and labor unions, which feared that immigrants would take jobs away from native-born Americans.
In 1924, the Immigration Act (or Johnson-Reed Act) set up quotas for immigrants. These quotas were pegged at 2% of the numbers of that group in the 1890 census. Asian immigration was entirely stopped. The result was to severely limit the number of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe and to halt immigration from Asia. Immigration was slowed until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, attempted to limit the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe through a quota system. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia, despite a previous deal with the Japanese government that would allow a certain number of Japanese immigrants into the United States.
The exclusion of Asians was due to the "yellow peril," or the notion that Asians were dangerous to the Western world, a notion which developed in the mid to late nineteenth century when Asians first immigrated to the United States, particularly Chinese immigrants who helped to build the Union Pacific Railroad.
A number of different people and groups supported limiting immigration, including the Ku Klux Klan, which saw a revival in the late 1910s and 1920s after the popularity of the film The Birth of a Nation, as well as Republican legislators such as Vermont Senator William P. Dillingham, an "immigration expert," who set up a quota system that allowed immigrants in at a rate of "three percent of the total population of the foreign-born of each nationality in the United States as recorded in the 1910 census." This quota system "included large numbers of people of British descent." Many of them were descendants of original settlers. Thus, the system was designed to increase the proportion of western Europeans, particularly those of the Protestant faith.
The 1920s, despite its modernity in the arts and increased mechanization in industry, was a rather backward-looking era, fearful of advances made by women—the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920—and by black Americans. Fears of change and fears that the dominant group would lose social prestige, economic power, and cultural influence were major reasons for resistance to immigration in the 1920s, just as these fears motivate nativist sentiments today.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act
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