S1 E10: William Howard Taft
The Past, the Promise, the Presidency
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Is the 1890 Date the Right Race Profile?
The 1890 date was chosen because it was before this great influx came from places we didn't want an influx to come from. There were already many ethnic groups in America that probably these people would have liked to have seen kept out, but it was too late. In the years immediately leading up to the 1924 act, not including the war years when obviously immigration was down, there was an average of 220,000 people coming from Italy every year,. That number was reduced to fewer than 5,000 after the 1924 act. And a similar ratios applied to European Jews and most extremely and interestingly to the Greeks.
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