Crossing into a New Life

Hans was not able to leave Germany until early 1925, when he received his visa to the United States. His option to emigrate was shaped by new legal developments in the United States. In 1921, anti-immigration activists had successfully passed the Emergency Quota Act, the first United States law to place numerical restrictions on immigration from Europe on the basis of “national origin.”

A second restrictive immigration law, the Johnson-Reed Act, was passed in May 1924, implementing a temporary revision of the 1921 quota laws pending the establishment of an even tighter immigration system, which occurred in 1928. The new laws shifted control over immigration from border entry points like Ellis Island to consular offices that now gained the power and discretion to decide which applicants would be issued visas permitting them to enter the United States legally.

Hans made his preparations to travel to the United States under the shadow of this newly-established regime. Its numerical quotas were based on the European immigrant population as recorded in the 1890 Census, which tended to favor immigrants from northwestern Europe, including Germany, over immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. German-Americans had not been strong advocates for nativism, but in the wake of anti-German wartime sentiment the community largely acquiesced to the creation of the national quota system. Germany was in a privileged position relative to most other European countries, and the quota for white European immigrants was far higher than for other regions of the world.

Nonetheless, the number of Germans who wished to immigrate to the United States still greatly exceeded the allotted number of visas—just over 51,000 for the fiscal year that began in July 1924. “The ban on German immigration to the USA,” as Hans described it in a June 1924 letter, “is being canceled as of July 1. The US Consulate in Munich started to process visa applications on June 1.” Would-be emigrants like Hans, in Germany and in other countries, had to keep a close eye on the American bureaucracy in order to secure a visa from a consular office and then rush to embark for the United States as early in the fiscal year as possible before their nations’ quotas were exhausted.