The Immigration Restriction League was an American nativist and anti-immigration organization founded by Charles Warren, Robert DeCourcy Ward, and Prescott F. Hall in 1894. According to Erika Lee, in 1894 the old stock Yankee upper-class founders of the League were, "convinced that Anglo-Saxon traditions, peoples, and culture were being drowned in a flood of racially inferior foreigners from Southern and Eastern Europe."[1] Established during a period of increasing anti-immigration sentiment in the United States, the League was founded by Boston Brahmins such as Henry Cabot Lodge with the purpose of preventing immigrants from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe from immigrating to the US due to a belief that they were racially inferior to Northern Europeans and Western Europeans. The League argued that the American way of life was threatened by immigration from these regions, and lobbied Washington to pass anti-immigration legislation restricting the entry of what they perceived as "undesirable" immigrants in order to uphold Old Stock Americans hegemony.
The league was founded in Boston, and soon had branches in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.[2] It attracted hundreds of prominent scholars and philanthropists and other establishment figures, 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 until his death in 1921.
The League used books, pamphlets, meetings, and numerous newspaper and journal articles to promote their campaign of anti-immigration and eugenics. As the first American anti-immigrant think tank, the League also started to employ lobbyists in Washington after 1900 and built a broad anti-immigrant coalition consisting of patriotic societies, farmers' associations, Southern and New England legislators, and eugenicists who supported the League's goals.
Active in lobbying for the passage of what became the Immigration Act of 1917, the League disbanded after Hall's death in 1921.
- ^ Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (2019) p. 113.
- ^ Harvard University Library: Constitution of the Immigration Restriction League, accessed Jan. 3, 2010