prehaps there is a flood of refugees in early 1920's escaping from war devastation, i see loads of germans, italians,poles and prehaps white russians and armenians.
does this lack of immigration rules only apply to europe or is asia included.
i read somewhere that after WW1 american business leaders no longer believed they had to have a constant flood of immigrant workers coming in.
when great depression comes, i can't see how they'd be able to cope if a million+ per year kept coming.
Yup it applies to Asia too. Though I doubt a lot of people will be happy about it. Perhaps maybe if the immigrants have more freedom of movement and be able to open new lands, i guess the Great Depression wont be too bad.
I've just looked at wikipedia to see how the great depression started, for some reason it doesnt say. the thing is it says the price of farm and other goods dropped and this is what caused all the unemployment and suffering.
maybe the extra immigrants and their american born children might increase demand for said goods, however even if the depression is less severe i still reckon there would be a move to severly curtail immigration from 1930 onwards.
No communist revolutions in Europe after WWI would do the trick. We only stopped letting in the Europeans because they got uppity.
We restricted immigration in 1921 after WWI disrupted immigration and raised wages for the lower class. They got used to having more money and voted for immigration restrictions.
After 1965 we allowed illegal immigration to discriminate against middle class immigrants who didn't want to work as soda jerks and janitors. Without immigration restrictions we would have more higher paid immigrants and less discrimination. So higher comparitive wages for janitors and soda jerks.
potential immigrants could include armenian refugees (not sure how many came to US in OTL and white russians. america would probably see the same amounts of jews poles and Italians (untill mussolini bans immigration) as had come before 1914.
i was reading a book a while back which included this. i think at the end of WW1 the state department or whatever belived that up to 9 million germans whished to escape their devasted country. thats a lot of germans.
prehaps during the 20's the nature of certain cities or regions in america changes demograpically (aplogise for the spelling)
also would'nt these people have to compete with afro americans from south.
Don't forget more modern days immigration patterns, like latinos (think Cubans, among others..), Haitians, the 'boat peoples', the asians repelled by anti-chineses and cie law,, middle-easterners and cie...
when thinking about this timeline i have thought about large numbers of european immigrants post WW1. but since there are no restrictions at all. there might be tons more chinese in the country especially on the west coast. with such a large and poor population, i wonder how many chinese would have settled in the US. maybe they would be a larger share of population.