Preserving a White Nation: Anti-immigrant and Birthrate Anxiety in the Early 20th Century

Since the turn of the twentieth century, Americans’ use of anti-immigrant rhetoric has been intrinsically linked to their fear of losing the status of a white nation. In fact, infamous eugenicist Madison Grant proposed stronger immigration restriction as a means of saving the white race from “extermination” eight years before the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act was passed. Throughout the twentieth century, terminology such as “immigrant invasion” and “border crisis” have framed immigration as a threat to white racial and ethnic homogeneity, and thus the durability of white privilege in the United States. This paper examines U.S. immigration restriction as a response to fear of losing status as a “white nation,” with particular emphasis on how anxieties over birthrates came to form the core of this fear in the early twentieth century.

Behind the fear of losing white nation status were various anxieties over stereotypes, counterfactual beliefs, and conspiracy theories about immigrants. Recently, much historical attention has been paid to how white Americans viewed immigrants as people who refused to assimilate to American cultural standards and learn the English language, or as welfare abusers. However, considerably less scholarship has been focused on an increasingly relevant, adjacent anxiety intrinsic to the narrative of white decline: that of immigrant birthrates versus white birthrates. This paper seeks to understand both the history behind birthrate anxiety and its implications as they pertain to immigrant populations. Attention will be paid to the history of rhetoric used to describe white women’s bodies, health, and fertility, in comparison to the rhetoric used to describe Black and brown women, who were often seen as hyper-fertile, sexually deviant, and able to withstand greater pain than white women. This history provides insight into ongoing white supremacist and anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, including the “Great Replacement.”