On this day in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Johnson-Reed Act, which established a permanent race-based quota system for immigration to America. The law excluded those ineligible for citizenship (that is, Asians and Africans), and moved immigration inspection from American ports to foreign ones. A coalition of restrictionists had lobbied intensely for the Johnson-Reed Act. Their primary objective was to restore the ethnic makeup of the country’s white population to that of the early nineteenth-century. They planned to erase the demographic changes of the “new” immigration of the late nineteenth century from southern and eastern Europe.

The Johnson-Reed Act was a project of racial engineering, but it was also an expression of foreign relations. In addition to severely restricting immigration, the Johnson-Reed Act redefined American foreign policy. In the past, immigration had been brokered through international treaties and negotiations. With the Johnson-Reed Act, America alone would control immigration, and it would do so according to a nationalist vision. The worldview laid out in the Johnson-Reed Act is still the foundational principle of immigration law today.

Upon signing the bill into law, President Coolidge issued a statement asserting that the bill “expresses the determination of the Congress to exercise its prerogative in defining by legislation the control of immigration, instead of leaving it to international arrangements.” This remark signaled the importance the Johnson-Reed Act would have on American foreign affairs. Before the 1920s, the United States was party to treaties and other agreements that placed American immigration policy within a larger context of cooperative migration control. But with the Johnson-Reed Act, the United States largely disengaged from multilateral efforts, ushering in a new era where American laws and regulations, irrespective of diplomacy, decided who could cross American borders. To be sure, since the late nineteenth century, the federal government claimed the sovereign prerogative to regulate its borders, but with the Johnson-Reed Act, the mechanics of exercising the prerogative changed. An intentionally rigid border regime built on unilateral acts of control thus supplanted a multilateral one built on cooperation and reciprocity.

In the course of developing the new immigration regime that resulted in the Johnson-Reed Act, some policymakers argued that foreign governments could no longer be trusted partners in regulating migration. Policymakers instead wanted a new system where American officials could turn away would-be immigrants on foreign soil before even reaching an American port.

After taking office in 1921, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis, a Welsh immigrant and Republican from Pennsylvania, soon began devising new ways to restrict immigration on a more permanent basis. Almost all of them included cutting out foreign governments from the equation.

In particular, Davis wanted to change the documentary system that regulated the movement of peoples across borders: the passport. Davis’s issue with the passport system was that the U.S. had to admit a person carrying a valid passport from another country, leaving no way to prevent at least an initial landing of a passport carrier in the U.S. Davis believed that foreign governments were exploiting this system by issuing passports only to people he regarded as physically, mentally, or morally weak. Making plain his contempt for how foreign governments handled emigration, Davis wrote, “The kings and potentates should build their own penitentiaries to take care of their own birds on the other side and not send them to this country.”

In place of the existing process, Davis promoted an entirely new documentary regime that would bypass the perceived weakness of the current passport system. He wanted U.S. consular officers abroad to examine anyone who wanted to emigrate for America, accepting or denying them at the point of embarkation. Instead of the passport and visa guaranteeing a spot on a steamship headed for the United States, the consular officers would issue special immigration certificates that would be the new documentary standard. Foreign governments protested these changes, but the Johnson-Reed Act contained them, severely restricting the ability of other governments to regulate emigration from their own ports.

One of the most contentious episodes caused by the Johnson-Reed Act’s new unilateralism was its exclusion of Japanese immigration in violation of two agreements with the Japanese government. Worried about an influx of cheap Japanese labor, the San Francisco Board of Education segregated students of Japanese ancestry in 1906. The board’s action insulted the Japanese government, which had gained increased clout since decisively winning the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Unlike Chinese leaders, whom the U.S. government forced to accept the exclusion of Chinese laborers in the 1880s, the Japanese insisted that Japan be treated as a member among equal states. In part because of American expansionist goals in the Pacific, the U.S. and Japanese governments subsequently arranged the Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1907, wherein Japan agreed to deny passports to laborers wishing to migrate to the United States, and the United States agreed not to take formal action restricting Japanese migration. The Japanese again committed to this arrangement in a 1911 treaty.

Despite these agreements, the Johnson-Reed Act officially excluded all Japanese immigration along with other Asians. Over the opposition of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and even President Coolidge, restrictionists wanted Japanese to be excluded in the Johnson-Reed Act, contending that Japanese were unable and unwilling to assimilate based on their racial characteristics alone. With the enactment of the law, the U.S. openly violated the Gentlemen’s Agreement and allowed the 1911 treaty to expire. Humiliated, the Japanese government placed a 100 percent tariff on all American goods and unsuccessfully attempted to rectify the matter in international forums.

Although Congress eventually replaced the most restrictive aspects of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1965, the United States still firmly asserts its right to regulate immigration unilaterally. The Trump administration refused to take part in the U.N.’s talks on migration in 2017, just as American delegations refused to contribute substantively to international conferences on migration in 1924 and 1928. Today’s American immigration regime is characterized by the strict legal classification of individuals, the goal of an impermeable border, a vague but unwavering sense of who “belongs,” and a vast law enforcement apparatus to achieve these ends. All of these characteristics point to an immigration policy built solely on American laws, a worldview expressed in law for the first time in the Johnson-Reed Act.

When Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley says that American immigration policy “must always be made by Americans and Americans alone,” she is simply echoing the words of Secretary of Labor James Davis, a key architect of the Johnson-Reed Act, who insisted that foreign governments must “let us say who are acceptable to us.”