The Guarded Gate: Examining How Bigotry and Eugenics Led to the Exclusion of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants from America

John Brennan: I was well aware of the immigration quotas set down by the Congress in the 1920's but had always assumed, because of lack of historical background, that the quotas were set to control immigration generally, not, as this book clearly identifies, for eugenic reasons. What is all the more revealing is the famous names who believed in such control, e.g. Benjamin Franklin and Oliver Wendell Holmes among others, and the effect that the research had on the Nazi regime, with the attendant atrocities carried out.

United Kingdom on Jun 07, 2019

Simeon Stylites: In The Guarded Gate, Daniel Okrent offers us a readable and engaging narrative about the role the eugenics movement played in the immigration debates of the 1900-1920 period, culminating with the passage of the 1924 National Origins Quota Act, which effectively ended immigration from 1925 and 1965. While many popular history texts touch upon this period, none offer a thorough examination of the eugenics movement and the ways in which it informed the debate and ultimately influenced the public and elected officials.

And, it is a timely book, given the similarities between that period and the one we are in now. Frankly, for a country that proclaims itself a "nation of immigrants," it is remarkable how few Americans know anything about immigration history, least of all our elected officials! It's all the more troubling to think that here we are, a full century later, and our debates about immigrants, while not influenced by the pseudo-science of eugenics, are nevertheless filled with the same fears: immigrants from non-Northern European countries (and non-Protestant backgrounds) can't be assimilated, immigrants are more fecund than native born whites and will ultimately...

United States on May 20, 2019

Karl: Okrent has provided us with an exhaustive – and some might say exhausting – study of how science was enlisted by American politicians, academics and public figures to serve bigotry and racism in the early twentieth century. It is a revealing look at American politics and society from even colonial times. The venerated Benjamin Franklin thought immigrants were the most stupid of their birth society, and he feared being outnumbered by them (they were mostly German).
From the mid-nineteenth century to 1890, immigration from Europe increased many-fold, and much of it was of the “undesirable” groups – Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe. The aristocratic grandees of Boston and New York felt threatened by being outnumbered by them, and eventually (in 1916) firmly joined forces with the growing junk science of eugenics in order to justify keeping lesser “races” out of America. Books justifying national origins-based immigration restriction written by scholars and academics flooded the market and were enormously popular. Three population groups of Europe, Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, were identified, and the last two were deemed deficient in culture....

United States on May 15, 2019