Vance said America will thrive with less immigration. History backs him up.

Coinciding with Vice President Vance’s call for “way, way lower” immigration, NumbersUSA published our newly updated history of the 1924 immigration reductions that helped build America’s middle class.

Read all about it!

Vance rooted his argument for lower immigration in history – specifically, the reductions passed by Congress in the 1920s and the four decades of progress that followed. We document that story in our free publication, Emancipation Reclamation.

Historical benefits of low immigration

Our publication is titled Emancipation Reclamation because the decades of low immigration reclaimed the promise of economic emancipation for former slaves, freedmen, and their descendants. But as Vance explained – and we document – the slow down in immigration produced broad benefits for Americans workers of every background.

Between Congress reducing immigration in 1924 and resuming mass immigration in 1965, economists and historians agree:

• The United States became a middle-class nation.
  
• Tight labor markets drove the fastest income growth for workers in U.S. history.
  
• Inequality among classes and races shrank as workers shared in the nation’s prosperity.
  
• Rising incomes helped fuel a new class of Black professionals who opened the political gates for the passage of the civil rights acts of the 1960s.

By nearly every measure, the low-immigration era in the mid-20th century was one of great economic progress for the nation. After Congress restarted mass immigration (by mistake!) in the 1960s, federal commission after blue ribbon federal commission recommended scaling the numbers back down.

Vance’s argument isn’t just rhetoric – it’s backed by decades of decades of federal findings and by history itself.

We have the receipts.