What the politics of 1920 Census results tell us about today’s immigration policy debate.
The Census Bureau is always busy in the years right before the decennial Census, but 2018 is proving even busier than usual. The Commerce Secretary approved a new question on citizenship in March causing numerous states to file suit against the Bureau. Additionally, Alabama has filed suit to change how seats in the House of Representatives are allocated. The Census Bureau has been the focus of such conflicts before however.
Margo Anderson, in her book The American Census: A Social History, describes the real precedent-setting that was the 1920s. Partisan political concerns and powerful anti-immigrant sentiment resulted in the only time in U.S. history when Congress failed to reapportion seats in a timely manner as required by the Constitution and, in tandem, ended open immigration from Europe.
Growth leading into the 1920s
Growth through the 19th Century followed fairly set patterns: population growth stayed between 33–36%, it moved westward, and birth rates were highest at the frontiers. Population growth in settled areas came increasingly from European immigrants.
Industrialization drove more and more people into cities. The 1920 Census was the first to report more Americans in cities than rural areas. Meanwhile, 72% of the immigrant population lived in urban areas while only 41% of native-born people did. There was also a shift in European countries from which people were immigrating. Over the last half of the 19th Century, immigrants had increasingly arrived from Southern and Eastern Europe rather than the then-preferred “Nordic” nations of Northern and Western Europe.
Alongside population changes were concerns about left-wing revolutionaries (this was just after the Russian Revolution), questions about the political independence of wage-earners, and, of course, plain old racism and xenophobia. What put the Census uniquely in the middle of this was its role in determining political power through Congressional apportionment.
Reapportionment in the 1920s
The Constitution gives each state a number of seats in the House of Representatives based on that state’s population, as determined by the most recent decennial Census. As the country’s population shifts, the House’s 435 seats are redistributed to the states every ten years in a process called reapportionment.
The results of the 1920 Census showed unequivocally that reapportionment would shift power from rural areas to cities. The Republican Party of the day controlled Congress and could see that the areas where they were strongest were rapidly going to become less politically powerful. Anderson wrote that
By 1920, though, the rising power of the urban areas was beginning to threaten this Republican ascendancy. It was clear from Wilson’s presidency that urban areas were beginning to vote more decisively Democratic party.
The first try at quotas, the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, still allowed more immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe than Congress wanted. Congress then implemented much stricter limits in the United States’s immigration law of 1924. Meanwhile they put off reapportionment until June of 1929. Why did it take so long?
As Anderson noted in her book, reapportionment was politically unpalatable, so Congress managed to find issues to be concerned about for the whole of the decade. There was debate about whether to keep the House at 435 members, which mathematical formula for reapportionment should be used, and questions about the accuracy of the Census results. A related point of contention concerned the appropriate population for determining the number of seats each state would receive: The 14th Amendment to the Constitution contains a never enforced clause that requires states with disenfranchised African-Americans to lose seats in Congress. If it were enforced Southern states would not be apportioned seats on their total population. Southern states threatened to retaliate against enforcement of the 14th Amendment by demanding the exclusion of immigrants from the apportionment calculations.
In the end, the 1920 Census results were accepted, the number of House seats remained at 435, the mathematical formula for apportionment favored rural areas, and neither Southern states nor Northern ones lost seats.
Then what happened?
Congress has reapportioned in a more timely manner every decade since the 1920s.
The 1930 Census showed that the shift to urban areas was not exclusively a function of immigration and has continued unabated ever since. As of 2010, 95.3% of the U.S. population lived in urban areas. Immigration quotas by national origin were ended in 1965. Instead, quotas applied to the Eastern and Western hemispheres and created preferences for people with desired skills, refugees and asylum-seekers, and family members of U.S. citizens.
And Now?
As yet, there’s no reason to think reapportionment based on the 2020 data will be delayed.
However the Trump Administration opposes the presence of the majority of immigrants the United States receives and has instituted several policies for removing those immigrants. This ranges from ending Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and others, to stepping up deportations of undocumented immigrants living in the United States as well as making the asylum-seeking process as discouraging as possible. Recently released internal government documents show that hostility to undocumented immigrants played a role in the last-minute decision to include a citizenship question in the 2020 Census. The President himself has indicated his preference for immigrants from Nordic countries.
Meanwhile, the state of Alabama is suing the federal government to exclude immigrants when apportioning seats. Alabama claims states with large immigrant populations will benefit unfairly in reapportionment because representation should only reflect the citizen population.
Could Congress again refuse to reapportion following the 2020 Census? History won’t repeat itself in identical form, but many of the same elements present in the 1920s are still with us now:
- immigrants concentrated in urban areas,
- urban and rural areas tending to prefer different parties,
- increasingly expansive government efforts to decrease both illegal and legal immigration and
- the ever present battle for partisan political power.
The current stalemate among far-right House Republicans who want much greater limits on all immigration and the Republican moderates who do not; an unpredictable President; and a generally more moderate Senate suggests that current immigration issues may still be unresolved after the 2020 Census.
Note: Otherwise uncited data and descriptions come from “The Tribal Twenties National Origins, Malapportionment, and Cheating by the Numbers”. Anderson, Margo J.. The American Census: A Social History, Second Edition (p. 133–155). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
This article was written by GovTrack staff member Amy West.
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