From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

Starting with the Muslim ban in the early days of the Trump presidency, this administration has

announced new policies designed to keep immigrants out on a nearly weekly basis.

This feels like an unprecedented wave of restrictions, but anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies

have deep roots in our country.

Here to discuss another period in American history, when the nation's

gates were slammed shut is Daniel O'Krent, an award-winning writer and editor. His most recent book is

The Guarded Gate, Bigotry, Eugenics, and the law that kept two generations of Jews, Italians,

and other European immigrants out of America. The book details the political dynamics that created

anti-immigrant zeal in the early 20th century and the junk science that was used to justify it.

Daniel O'Kron, thanks very much for joining us. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much, Amherst,

and happy to be here. Your book tells an interesting story from the early part of our 20th century, and in many ways you track

a debate that culminates in the Immigration Act of 1924. Can you start by telling us about that

law and what restrictions it imposed? The 1924 Act was by far the most severe immigration restriction

law in American history. First, it reduced the number of immigrants

allowed into the country to 160,000, as recently as 10, 12 years before that, there were over a million

coming in every year. And then, most importantly, it established national quotas based on the

percentage of people from each nation that were already in the U.S.

So that, for instance, 10% of Americans could trace their origins to country A, then 10% of

the immigrants would be from country A.

And the worst part of it is they didn't use the 1920 census to determine this, or the

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