Italian Quota In The 1920s

Register to read the introduction… The main fear was in foreign people. This was due to the war and the amount of dead bodies, but mainly the fear that foreigners would take American jobs because of their willingness to accept lower wages. Also, many feared their new political ideas especially communism. In order to prevent the inevitable immigration, the United States passed laws that were specifically designed to reduce immigration numbers from foreign countries. The Immigration Quota Act of 1921 was one of the first passed to reduce immigration and it was probably the most effective. This system allowed only 150,000 immigrants a year to enter the country. Congress also developed the quota system. Each National quota was based on the supposed origins of the entire white population of the United States, not merely on the foreign born. So, for example, to calculate the Italian quota of 1920, all that was needed was a simple math problem that went like this. The Italian-origin population in 1920 was 3,800,000. Multiply that number by the number of immigrants allowed in to the country (150,000), and then divide that number by the White population (95,500,000) and the Italian quota would come out to be about 6,000 for 1920 (Garraty, 660) . As a result, immigration from Europe was reduced to only 2 percent. For those that were part of the quota and were allowed in to the country, they had to pass a difficult literacy test that consisted of an English passage that had to be read and understood. Those who failed the test were not allowed into the country. If you somehow managed to pass the test, the very dominant of the time, Ku Klux Klan, would make sure then went out of their way to make your life as miserable as possible. The KKK organized mass demonstrations to intimidate people they disliked. They persecuted Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and for the most part, anyone who was of …show more content…
In order to prevent wars and make the world a safer place, the country wanted to establish an international organization that would help achieve this goal, similar to the Wilson’s proposed League of Nations, except this time, the organization had full support and funding of the United States. The organization was formed in 1945, and it was called the United Nations. Not only did the United Nations sought out create world peace, it also was very concerned with human rights. The United Nations Charter obliges all member nations to promote "universal respect for, and observance of, human rights" and to take "joint and separate action" to that end (Stoddard, 177). In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration arose directly from the experience of the Second World War and represents the first global expression of rights to which all human beings are entitled. The United Nations really wanted to improve the World in general and it helped tremendously. In 1948, the NATO was formed. This organization is similar to the United Nations. The NATO is a collective security force to resist the further spread of communism in Europe. NATO was founded under the concept of collective security or "collective self-defense" as it is termed in the NATO charter. This concept calls for any attack on a NATO member nation to be perceived as an attack upon all NATO member nations (Stoddard, 140). This idea of collective security is important to NATO's success; the threat of a collective response kept the spread of communism in Europe in check and helped maintain peace and stability in Europe for the past 50 plus years. It is easy to see that just with these two organizations and the Truman Doctrine, that the foreign policy after The Second World War was much different than that after the