Obama

President Obama made a major speech on the need for immigration reform a couple of days before the 4th of July that got a pretty good review from called Immigration Returns from Paul Walman in the Pospect because it put us in the way back machine to 1921.

The American public was fed up with hordes of aliens pouring into the country, speaking foreign tongues and threatening to take jobs from native-born citizens. So Congress took decisive action, and passed the Emergency Quota Act.

It was 1921, and the new law, designed to solve the country's immigration problem, limited immigration from any one country to 3 percent of the population from that country counted in the 1910 census -- so if there were 100,000 immigrants from a particular nation already here, then only 3,000 more could be admitted per year.

But countries in the Western Hemisphere were exempt -- as many Canadians as wanted could immigrate, and the doors were wide open to Mexicans, Salvadorans, Brazilians, and everyone else from Latin America. At the time, the invaders that threatened to dilute the American character were thought to come from our east (especially southern Europe) and west (China) but not our north and south.