Trump’s latest anti-immigration push echoes nativism of 1920s

Washington Post: Language such as that used by the president and those around him harks back more than a century ago to the passage of a series of laws, capped by one in 1924, known as the Johnson-Reed Act. The statute put in place a quota system in which visas would be allocated by nationality, according to the proportion that each country’s immigrants and their descendants had in the 1890 census.

Its explicit goal was to turn back the calendar to a time when America’s racial and ethnic mix was dominated by people from Northern and Western Europe. The law sharply limited the number allowed in from southern and eastern parts of the continent and almost entirely excluded people from Asia and Africa. One intended effect was to effectively close the door to Catholics and Jews…