Immigration Restriction League

The Immigration Restriction League, was founded in 1894 by lawyer Charles Warren, climatologist Robert DeCourcy Ward, and attorney Prescott F. Hall, three Harvard alumni who believed that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were racially inferior to Anglo-Saxons, threatening what they saw as the American way of life and the high wage scale. They worried about immigrants bringing in poverty and organized crime at a time of high unemployment.

The League was founded in Boston, and had branches in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. It attracted prominent scholars and philanthropists, mostly from the New England social and academic elite. An umbrella group, the National Association of Immigration Restriction Leagues was created in 1896, and one of the founders of the original League, Prescott F. Hall, served as its general secretary from 1896 to 1921.

The League used books, pamphlets, meetings, and numerous newspaper and journal articles to disseminate information and sound the alarm about the dangers of the new immigration. The League also started to employ lobbyists in Washington after the turn of the century and build a broad anti-immigrant coalition consisting of patriotic societies, farmers' associations, Southern and New England legislators, and eugenicists who supported the League’s goals.

The league disbanded after Hall's 1921 death.

On April 8, 1918 the League introduced a bill into the Congress to increase the restriction of immigration by means of numerical limitation. The goal of this bill, called "An Act to regulate the immigration of aliens to, and the residence in, the United States," was to reduce as much as possible the number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe while increasing the number of immigrants from Northern and Western Europe who the League thought were people with kindred values.

The bill provided for these reductions:

The bill asked for an increase of the duty paid by alien passengers to enter the United States from two to five dollars. It excluded the citizens of the United States, Canada, Mexico and Cuba. The League demanded an increase in duty in order to properly support and maintain the inspection and deportation of immigrants. Among other things, the funds obtained from the increase in duty would be used for:

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