ABSTRACT
Congress had mandated the board to allocate the quotas under the Immigration Act of 1924. The analysis of the Immigration Act of 1924 suggests that immigration law and policy were deeply implicated in a broader racial and ethnic remapping of the nation during the 1920s, a remapping that took place in mutually constituting realms of demography, economics, and law. The chapter argues that the Immigration Act of 1924 comprised a constellation of reconstructed racial categories, in which race and nationality—concepts that had been loosely conflated since the nineteenth century—disaggregated and realigned in new and uneven ways. Thus the invention of national origins and unassimilable races was as much a project of state building as it was one of ideology. Sollors's view of ethnicity as a "pseudo-historical" concept triggered by "the specificity of power relations at a given historical moment" fits well the notion of immigration quotas based on national origin.
