A Letter from One Senator to Another, May 1924
— Chief_Engineer (@ChiefEngineerCE) October 2, 2026
Just after they shut down immigration.
Dear colleague,
They will call us cruel by Sunday. Let them.
The bill is done. Quotas are in and they are a fraction of what we had prior. The door that stood open through the war is closing,…
Dear colleague,
They will call us cruel by Sunday. Let them.
The bill is done. Quotas are in and they are a fraction of what we had prior. The door that stood open through the war is closing, and the newspapers are already writing the obituary.
We hate the stranger. We forgot our own grandparents. We panicked.
I did not panic. I watched.
1918 took the streets empty and stacked the dead. We argued about masks and orders and who was allowed to work. Then the soldiers came home and found the plants already staffed.
Wages that had jumped in wartime sagged the minute the ships unloaded with foreign replacement willing to do anything for a nickel.
Workers saw it coming and saw wages dropping.
Steel struck.
Coal struck.
Meatpacking struck.
Bosses brought in foreign replacements that couldn't even speak English and called it capitalism, called it liberty, said Americans are not willing to work as hard for pay as a foreigner. The man who grew up on the same block s the company lost the shift either way.
1919 gave us riots and raids and ships of deportees. People who had been told the country was open discovered it could also close. History will never properly record what happened as the papers and government played it down while controlling the history but its far worse than reported.
Towns filled faster than the pay. Tenements filled faster than the schools. Every speech about the best and brightest ran into a foreman who could not get a local hired at the old rate. No idea where that term best and brightest came from but it was all of the news in 1920 to refer to the immigration surge.
We tried the open talk for ten years. It did not raise the wage. It did not keep the flu ward from overflowing. It did not stop a company from shopping the dock for a cheaper crew. It only taught the public that Congress would talk forever and count the donations in between.
The quota is not subjective. It is the receipt for a decade that failed the people who already lived here.
If your paper calls you cruel, send them the strike list and the wage table. If they still call you cruel, you represented the wrong room.
The door was not slammed out of hate. It was slammed because leaving it open had already cost the men who built the place.
Yours,
A senator who expects to be hated for a week and thanked for a generation for closing down our immigration system for decades to come.
Replies